Today I mourn the loss of my child. I was awoken this morning by a text I’d been restlessly waiting for since the previous night. It was my brother-in-law, Peter, the computer nerd. His text to me read, “Yeah, bad news Jake. The drive is dead. I’ll get the BYU data recovery number for you.”
That is not what I needed to start my Sunday morning, especially since I’d already been contemplating whether I wanted to even go to church. I lay in bed this morning (actually on the floor because my bed is now my school desk) frustrated and stubbornly determined to not get up and get ready for church when I received another text. It read, “Quick reminder- today’s the fourth Sunday so we have our missionary meeting at 12 noon in the bishop’s office =)” I sighed and my mind was caught away in what I had been deeply contemplating the night before. Though I am eternally blessed with the knowledge that I am a child of Heavenly Parents I am also at the same time often confounded as to who it is that I truly am. A reason I am confused as to this topic is because my feelings toward nearly everything are so back and forth and scattered. Often times I think that the only thing I really know is, is that the church is true, and everything else is just so inconsistent and ever changing depending on the worldly schemes and thoughts of man.
I think that the majority of the things people do are based upon how they feel, so when I am tossed to and fro with my own feelings so terribly how am I supposed to know what it is that I am to do in any given situation? Thus, this problem leads me to wonder about who it is that I am when I’ve no consistency in how I feel. I feel lost and weary because of this fluctuation in thought and emotion, so I wonder, who really am I? I didn’t want to go to church, which makes me sad because I love the church. As I lay there pondering over my true identity and character, that stupid smiley face from my ward mission leader at the end of the last text entered my mind, and it was as if something profound fell upon me, as if words clearly entered my head. It was a text message from heaven if you will. Those words said, “It’s not how you feel that determines your identity, it’s what you do with your knowledge despite how you feel.” I mulled those words over and over again in my head for about a half hour and I finally concluded that I simply could not, not get up and go to church. I did and later after my missionary meeting I spontaneously asked Bishop if I could give a talk in sacrament meeting soon. Don’t ask me why, maybe I felt like I needed to honor the death of my hard-drive, the physical death of so many of my words that I’ve gratefully labored over for the past few years. I have to say that as of a few months ago I have my hard drive backed up but everything I’ve written that isn’t on my blog within the last several months is gone. There is still hope though, my other brother-in-law, Frank is an even bigger computer nerd who says he can recover data from dead hard-drives. So here’s hoping.
I want to clarify that when I say I don’t have any consistency in the way I feel, I mean by that that I am so unsure of how to handle shooting feelings of life in general. I do know that I love people greatly and those feelings never change. I am grateful for my acquaintances, especially those who’ve truly impacted my life and have been there for me.
Well, that’s that, and even though it is not a person I still pray for my hard-drive because what is on that drive means quite a lot to me. I hope I’ll get all that data back but either way I shall continue to write. I will always write because that’s just what I do, wait a second, maybe that’s a consistent thread of who I am throughout all of my inconsistent feelings of everything else. Who am I? I suppose I am a writer, I suppose that is true regardless of anything else. I am a writer who loves greatly, that is who I am, at least in part.
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