"Men are, that they might have joy"

“Men are, that they might have joy”2 Nephi 2:25


Aside from posting for a humanities class my freshman year of college, I have never written a blog post, and I'm a bit nervous... Hello world, I guess... Frankly, after writing a dozen papers a semester for four years, I truly believed I would never want to write again. It’s not so much that I dislike writing, but I am a procrastinator and I certainly dislike writing at 5:00am, wondering if I am going to have time to finish my last two arguments and slap a conclusion on my rough, unedited, goobery, piece of a paper before I turn it in at 8:00am. This is just one example of how choices can make life harder than it has to be. To illustrate this idea more fully, I would like to tell you about Christmas Day 2015.

It was a dark and stormy night. It was 2:15am, so the dark was expected. The storm was also expected. I’d spent Christmas Eve alternating between crying pitifully and grousing that life simply wasn’t fair. The haunting melody of Padme and Anakin’s love song “Across the Stars” woke me (I say haunting, because it still haunts me whenever I hear it. Should’ve picked a song I didn’t like for my ringtone that day.) I slogged out of bed and got ready to head over to shovel snow. I work as a ¾ time employee at the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah, and according to all of the weather apps it was expected to snow most of Christmas Day. All of the other employees were out of town because it was Christmas Break at school. It was just my brother, my boss and I.

We got there, grabbed our tools and started out. My brother took the snow-blower and I the old-school shovel. We went around campus removing the first layer of snow, about 6 (billlion) inches (I’m probably going to get exaggerate-y here. I can’t help it, partly because it’s in my nature, and partly because it really was the worst…) By the time we had completed our first round, there were another 4 inches where we had begun, so there was nothing to be done but start all over. At this point my brother hopped on the ice-melt spreader so that he could follow our boss around and try to hold off the next snow assault.

Now it was just me trudging around to keep the snow from collecting around the doorways and on the stairs. I knew that we were the only grounds crew on the whole of Brigham Young University campus that had been called in that day. In fact, I just knew we were the only people in the whole world shoveling snow. As the weight of this fact and the realization that the snow wasn’t stopping anytime soon hit me, I went through all five stages of grief, denial (we’ll be going home soon. it’ll stop snowing even though the meteorologists predicted snow showers throughout the day. that’s a quack science anyway) anger (this is stupid. no one is going to break a hip. mutter, mutter. walk carefully you big weirdos. are you seriously kicking that tree on purpose so that snow will fall right where we just shoveled?! sputter, sputter. I’ll get you. And your little dog too) bargaining (if you make it stop snowing, I’ll be the best kid. I’ll even keep all of my new year’s resolutions this year) depression (we are never going home. it will never stop snowing. probably this year I’ll just have to eat worms for breakfast instead of eggs benedict. Christmas and family tradition are r-u-i-n-e-d. sniffle, sniffle) and acceptance (we did sign up for this. at least this’ll pay for the Christmas presents I bought this year). Unfortunately, the acceptance stage seemed to last for a relatively short time before I began the process all over again. This was our first Christmas together as a family since 2011. All of our coworkers were spending Christmas with their families. Life just wasn’t fair!!!

We did eventually go home that day. Around 3:30 the snow let up and we were allowed to go. A lot of our traditions really were messed up. The family was not very happy when we got home, and for a little while it looked like we were going to skip everything Christmas-y and just go to bed, because everybody was having a “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.” Grinchyyy. We pulled ourselves together eventually, were able to eat Christmas breakfast at 7:00pm and finished opening presents around midnight.

Okay, so where is the silver lining one might ask…? Sorry I took so much space to vent. Obviously I’m still not really in the acceptance stage yet, as I’m writing this two months later and I’m just as acerbic about the whole situation as ever. I still have flashbacks when I see the snow-blower at work… I promise there is a bright spot to this all. The week leading up to Christmas day I watched several “based on real events/true story” films. Among these were Heart of the Sea, Unbroken, and The Impossible. As I walked around the MTC I kept thinking about the characters in these films. There are tons of people who have way, way worse days than I did. The Impossible even follows a family who had a way worse Christmas time than I. A tsunami hits Thailand on the 26th of December 2004 and they, along with the rest of the population spend the next few weeks trying to survive. I don’t want to spoil the movie for anyone, so I will just leave it at that. Needless to say, shoveling snow is not the worst thing anyone has ever had to endure.

As I thought about all of the people who have way worse lives than I do, I felt pretty ashamed of myself. (I still do.) I thought about a bunch of quotes about positivity and endurance. One quote specifically came to mind “No misfortune is so bad that whining about it won’t make it worse,” (This quote comes specifically from Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, but I’ve heard that similar sentiments have been expressed by others over the years). The last couple of months I have been extremely ungrateful for the things that I have. I keep pretty focused on the negative. I work a couple of jobs that I don’t love and I feel like life seems to be filled with a bunch of pretty blah, though not terrible, days. I know that part of the purpose of life is to experience joy, but I sometimes get so caught up in monotony (or in the trial and tribulation of early morning snow removal…) that I forget to seek for, and choose to feel that joy every day. I do believe that happiness is a choice and am embarrassed that I am sometimes too weak to make it.

Thinking back on Christmas, though it wasn’t the experience I wanted for that day, it began a process of thought that I am still trying to turn into life application. I won’t say that I was happy, as such terrible falsehood would certainly require repentance, but I can say that I thought more about the child whose birth the day celebrated, and what His coming means for me. The Savior, Jesus Christ loves us. I testify that not only is He the ultimate reason behind our joy, but He can even help us as we strive to overcome pessimistic weaknesses and choose to be happy.