The importance of Church and Family

(Does anyone else ever have the problem of having so many thoughts running through your head that you just don't know where to begin?  Yeah, that's what happening to me right now)

Today hasn't been a very normal Sunday for me.  To start it off, Ann's been cutting her molars and therefore her sleeping has been off...and we all ended up sleeping in until 10am this morning.  So we pretty much got up, ate breakfast, showered, dressed and headed out the door to church (our ward meets at 1pm, but I have to get there early because I am the one that creates and prints off the program for Sacrament Meeting). I ended up sneaking back home with Ann during Sunday School to give her lunch (we don't live too far away) and then went back for Relief Society.

The other thing that wasn't very normal for me today was the fact that I left church feeling a very strong desire to increase my testimony and to appreciate my role as a mother more.  I realize that almost sounds bad saying that my feeling that way isn't typical when I attend church.  I do always feel the Spirit when I'm at church, and do usually leave with a desire to do better, but when you have an almost 15 month old and are spending a good chunk of your time either wandering the halls (or the back of the Relief Society room) or trying to help her take a nap (since church is right in the middle of nap time), it can be hard to get much from the lessons being taught, and to be really honest, I've been feeling somewhat spiritually depleted as a result.  But what actually made me feel this strongly today wasn't from anything anyone said in a lesson, but it was from taking to an old friend after church was over.

A girl I knew growing up had recently moved back home to Rochester and today was the first time I finally got to see her at church.  I went to say hi to her afterwards and expected to just quickly chat for a second before we each went home.  However, she was much more open about what's been going on in her life that I was expecting and I was really grateful for her thoughts.  I had heard her bear her testimony today in Sacrament Meeting, and both then and when talking to me she was very open about the fact that she had left the church when she was a teenager and was now in the process of coming back to church.  She expressed the sentiment of how, even when she wasn't actively attending church, she still found herself defending the church to others and realized that being at church was where she needed to be (and she feels so happy in being back at church now).  In her testimony, she mentioned how once you know something, you can't ever "un-know" it - that knowledge always stays with you.  That struck me because I have a tendency to doubt or forget those experiences I have that confirm my testimony to me.  This girl also has a young son  from a failed marriage, and she was telling me how much she wants to be a good mother to her son (because, as she put it, there's not enough good mothers in the world).  And she is doing her best to be the best mother to her son, while navigating the difficulties of being a single mom.  Listening to her talk made me both want to do more to strengthen my testimony of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to make my faith be a more active part of my life.  I also want to not take my testimony, as well as the amazing blessing it is to be a mother, for granted anymore (I know the Church is true, but I don't always actively feel that way).  I feel so blessed to be able to stay home with Ann, but I can just get so caught up in the mundane/"drudgery"/frustrating parts of being a mother that I forget to see it for the blessing and gift that it is. I don't want to look back years from now and regret that I didn't enjoy this time more.  I know that if I invite Christ to be a more active part of my life, I'll be able to see even more the beauty of the opportunity I've been blessed with - raising the sweetest daughter with my husband at my side.