Joy

I am so happy!!!
My big news is that I received a message today from a family that I taught on my mission that they were sealed in the temple! A mom, dad, two little girls and a baby boy. I can't even express everything that I feel about that. I am just so happy that they received ALL of the blessings of the gospel. They did it! Of course, they have a whole life left, but I know that the impact it will have on their children is immeasurable.
The best part is that I know I had almost nothing to do with it. God blessed me to be there to witness the miracle of the father's change of heart and commitment, but He had been working with him all the time. This family was prepared. The spirit touched hearts. He was baptized. And now they are sealed for eternity.
Life is hard and full of so many difficulties, but really God wants us to be happy and have the fullness of blessings. He wants us to have joy. And that is what I am feeling right now. :)

Christmas in June

I know that this is my third post of the day, but I just had to share this with you.
Today I went and saw Monster's University with my roommates (which I loved), and on the way home, my roommate played for me this song.

The worst Christmas song just got even better.


 Be patient. It gets even better.

Listen to This

So I discovered this today and had to share it. It is SO well phrased.
"The Inconvenient Messiah" by Jeffrey R. Holland, BYU Devotional February 15, 1982.
I recommend listening to it rather than reading it because the transcription isn't perfect.

Growth

I think life is amazing. The longer I live, the more I see that God's plan to help us learn--life--is really well designed. It is so real, so hard, but possible. Every experience has built in learning experiences, difficulties, and chances to use our agency. He set everything up so that we could maximize our learning time here.
This week I have been thinking about growth. I only understand it on the level I'm at, but I'm starting to get a picture. When I was a little kid, I never wanted to grow up. Being grown up looked so much more complicated and boring. Growing just looked painful and unrewarding. What I didn't understand is that at that stage in my life, I couldn't even comprehend the joys of memories built up, being able to help people outside of myself, and of work well done.
I'm sure you know this, but little kids brains are still developing. Actually, experts agree that a person's brain is still growing and developing until they are around 25. So I'm not even there yet! (and I'm sure that I will continue learning more perspective with my fully developed brain after that.)
When a kid is still a kid, it is physically impossible for them to truly understand abstract ideas (they don't have deductive reasoning skills, and logical stuff is beyond them). They don't have that part of their brain yet. But the thing is, they don't know that they can't think as well as an adult. They feel like their brain is all there and that there isn't any part of a situation or conflict that they can't understand. They know that there is stuff they don't know, but they feel like they are capable of understanding everything. They aren't.
I feel like that is very similar to our relationship with God. Sometimes I feel like I am able to understand the big picture, that I am able to understand the purpose of life and why things happen. But then I am reminded that "For my thoughts are not your thoughts and your ways not my ways, saith the Lord" (Isaiah 55:8). If it all made sense, I would know it wasn't from God because I am not able to think the way He does. It is physically impossible for me to understand everything. My brain is not fully developed--even if I was older than 25, my brain still wouldn't be fully developed. Even if God sat down and explained everything to me in words I understand, I still don't think I would understand it all. I have to wait for resurrection day for a perfect brain, and even then I'm sure there will be a learning curve.
I'm not saying we shouldn't try to understand everything, because we certainly try to teach our children everything that they can grasp. But we shouldn't get frustrated with God when He doesn't make sense in our logic. The "God logic" part of our brains hasn't developed yet. It does make me look forward to learning more and more and someday, in a long time, my understanding will grow to a perfect day.
What I do understand now is that growth is necessary for progression. Growth by definition is change. Therefore, change is required for progression. I just have to be soft enough for God to change me and my perspective and my thinking in the right direction. I also have to be hard enough so that Satan or the World can't change me in the opposite direction.
(I'm not sure that this will make sense to anyone but me, but there you go.)

And the Award Goes To....

Winner of the "I'm seriously using this pick-up line to seriously ask you out" award:
Young man in my physics lab:
"Are you accepting applications for boyfriends?"
In case you are wondering, the answer is yes. Literally. But you will have to print out the application yourself, because I don't want to have to spend money paying for the 10 pages per applicant...
(haha. This is where you laugh. Because I really am not that prideful...)

Written later:
I retract the above statement. The award might actually go to the student who wrote this on his paper as part of his discussion of the lab that he knew I would be grading (I don't even know who he is):
"Also, April, if you can read this or even get this far we should out sometime! You're super cute! Text me! (*insert phone # here*) But anyways, back to physics. If you and me were in a boat together, I would have to jump out and swim because I'd be too heavy, but you hardly displace any water."
You gotta give the guy some points for bravery. Well, both guys. They seem to be nice people, if a bit forward. I don't understand men.

Dating and Vacationing

Hey all!
The subject of today's post: Dating.
Yeah, yeah. I know you are sick of it.
But I have not been allowed to forget about it, so neither will you.
See, since I returned from my mission, there seems to be an invisible-to-me, shiny sticker that says "RM" on my forehead. Guys that don't really even know me are asking me out in droves.
I am not complaining, because on an individual basis, they have been very nice guys and have treated me very well, but it has been a little overwhelming as a freshly (I guess now, not-so-freshly -- three months!) returned missionary. Sometimes I get burned out.
Yesterday, I decided the reason for it is that dating is like going on vacation.
Vacations are nice and exciting, and you get to try new foods and do new things. They are something out of the ordinary, an adventure, something to look forward to.
But what happens when you are going on vacation once a week or maybe twice or three times? Then suddenly, because you are seeing so many places, it is hard to see the good qualities of any of them. It becomes less adventurous and exciting. It becomes ordinary.
I normally don't like analogies, but let's take it to the next step.
See, what is actually going on, is our imaginary vacationer is looking for a place to live. And when she goes vacationing places to see if it is the place she wants to live, then they "wine and dine" her so to say. The town shows her the nice restaurants and art and museums and leaves the factories for another day. Sounds like dating, right?
So if she is going to so many vacation sites so often, she will never know anything but the dancing, and the music, and the fireworks. She will never find out what it would be really like to live there. And pretty soon, all of the restaurants and shopping and beautiful vistas all start looking the same. And she is tired and just wants to eat breakfast in the same place for two days in a row. But now she is stuck and could never pick, because she can't decide between so many options (but not really options, because she didn't really see any of them through her tired eyes), and she doesn't want to decide on a place to live just because she is tired of looking. But really, they are the ones scouting her out, so the options continue to increase. She isn't even house hunting. Houses are hunting her! Okay. Now this is getting confusing and creepy.
So our imaginary vacationer is stuck. Too many options. No options that have actually been explored. And tired eyes and feet and back.
I guess maybe she is just hoping that someday she will accidentally find herself in a place that is home. A place that is sweet and simple and the food is good, but also filling. A place that has a nice folding chair under a tree where she can put up her feet and take a nap and never want to leave. The local business isn't flashy, but it supports families that are really nice and open, and hang their laundry outside. They aren't begging for her attention, but when she is ready to ask them about their lives in this place, they tell her stories that are funny and serious and real. They politely offer her a place and show her how she could fit into this community and tell her that they would love to have her because she smiles easy, tries her hardest, and can get dirt under her fingernails sometimes.
And suddenly she finds it--the perfect house. Not too big, not too small.
With happiness painted all over the walls and growing in the flower boxes.

Substituting

When I came home from my mission I badly needed something to be my time-filler, my purpose, my substitution for the lifestyle of hard work I was so used to.
So I became a substitute teacher.
This was probably one of the best things I could have done, considering that it can be a temp job (I only needed a job for a month or so until I could work on campus at BYU), I choose when I want to work, and it is a great experience for what I plan to do with the rest of my life: be a teacher.
It wasn't what I expected it to be, but it has been wonderful. I thought I would share some of my experiences with you.
First of all, I was expecting to hopefully be mostly subbing in a high school setting because that is where I will teach someday. That turned out to be a false hope because most sub jobs are in elementary schools. For some reason, all of the jobs I can get are in 1st and 2nd grades. The opposite end of the spectrum from high school.
My first day on the job was in a first grade class. When I arrived at the front office to check in, the secaretary expressed her condolences for the class I was about to be in charge of for the day. "They are a handful,"she said. "If you need help, just call. You can send kids to neighboring teachers, too."
Oh, great. Just throw me in the deep in and let's see if I can swim.
The teacher was there to greet me, because she actually would be in the school all day doing individual testing for other students. She told me that this was was the worst class she had ever had. Nothing she had left for me to do was essential. "Your job is just to survive today," she told me. Wow. Very reassuring.
The day actually was that bad. It was real mutiny. I lost kids to the hallway, they were hurting themselves and others, they couldn't listen to directions, and I had some serious liars in the class. It was crazy.
I wondered for a bit if I was really just bad at subbing, but as the days went on, I think I've gotten the hang of it. One of the biggest things I have learned is that the Teaching Skills chapter in Preach My Gospel is true. But really. One of the things that it says is that you need to be bold but loving. That is so true in the classroom.
One day I went to a class that the teacher originally thought she only needed a sub for the second half of the day. Last minute she decided she needed a sub for the whole day, so there was a different sub for the morning, and then I came in half way through. The first sub was having a hard time of it. She told me that the kids had been horrible for her, and that she had taken away their recess they would have later in the day with me. She informed me that these second graders were to write a letter to their teacher about how they should behave for a sub and how they were behaving. I saw right away that that was not going to happen. The principal had been involved already that day, and the kids were wound up. They really needed something positive to wind them down, not something negative to make it worse.
She told me that she had been subbing for a year and that she had worked for two years previously at a bad boys' school--nothing could compare to that, she said. She was confident in her classroom management skills.
But then I watched her for her last five minutes while I read the lesson plan. She definitely had the bold confidence down, but the kids weren't responding to it. What it lacked was love. There wasn't a smile on her face. It was so clear that the kids didn't care what she thought because she didn't care what they thought. hm.
The other cool thing about subbing in elementary school is that the kids don't have boundaries in between things in their brain. Everything is all part of the same reality.
Let me clarify. I read a book with a small group of kids aside to read with me in a first grade class one day. We read a book about a dog who decides that he would rather have his friend than be famous. A big part of reading with kids is helping them build connections to the book, so we talked about the moral of the story, which is that we need to stick by our friends and that that is worth more than a lot of things. I was talking about friendship when one boys spoke up and said, "Well, you don't even need friends, really. All you need is Jesus and your family." He said it so confidently and unhesitatingly. I wanted to meet his parents.
But since it was a public school setting, all I could say was, "Well, your family can be your friends, too" and silently think, "And Jesus can be your friend, too."
Along the same line of thought, I have realized that filters of all kinds develop at later ages. I feel so pretty when I sub, because I will have four or five girls crowd around and tell me that I am beautiful and that they love my shirt and necklace and hair. I also feel very old, because every first grader wants to know how old the sub is.
In one of the second grade classes I was in, there was a student who had the same last name as me. I had five or six of the students ask me if I was his mom--do I look that old? When the answer was no, I found out that there was a teacher with the same last name as me--"are you married to him?" Nope again. Oh, dear. I hope he didn't hear about it, too.
I have also discovered what motivates that age group (which I think will be very useful later on in life). All I had to do was threaten to write their name on the board, and they would settle right down. Oh the embarrassment of seeing your name written on the board in front of all of your friends!!
Then there were the disruptive students that that didn't work for. For some of them, the trick was to help them feel useful. If they felt like they were doing me a favor, they would do anything. They just wanted to be my special helper. " (*insert name here*) could you help me by being a good example and showing the other students how to be quiet and work hard? It will really help me out. Thank you!" It worked almost every time.
So, if you are planning on being a teacher and have time for it, become a substitute. No faster way to learn how to swim than getting in the water. :)