Mountain Top Experience

I am so blessed to have my wonderful wife and the support that she gives me. Today I had the wonderful opportunity of supporting her in something that she loves to do. She competed in a triathlon today and while I kinda wanted to compete as well I think that I had a much more enjoyable time cheering for her and giving her the support that she needed. I feel so happy for her and it's amazing how when she succeeds at something I feel like I do to. I guess that is the blessing of eternal marriage. When one of us succeeds the other is equally blessed and we can share those experiences together.

I just thought I better make a better habit of posting here so here goes with one of my most recent wonderful blessings.

We are so blessed to be living near Rebecca's family. It is amazing how much they help us with our girls. I feel especially blessed because Melissa was willing to live with the girls for a week while Rebecca and I enjoyed our cruise to the Bahamas. That was truly a great blessing and no doubt a big sacrifice for her to set aside so much time to help us.

Thanks again Mel, we needed that vacation as you may well know after a week with those two rascals!

I am so thankful for my parents today. They are visiting and it is always so much fun. I just love to have them here and to be able to spend time with them and have my girls get to play with them. My sweet little girls just love Grandma and Grandpa Stephens so much. Dad reminded me of how blessed we are when he mentioned how well Lauren seemed to be doing. I guess I forget sometimes as she is just such a sweet normal little girl. Like dad said you'd never know that there was anything wrong with her if you hadn't seen her before. She has such a beautiful and perfect smile and she just lights up every room she goes in. We all love her and we are blessed and thankful for her health.

It has been such a long week at work and I have been a little sick and a lot tired. I can say I'm very blesses to have my wife who cares enough to take extra care of our girls so that I can rest and recover a bit. She is always my biggest blessing but I guess you realize that more when someone puts extra effort into making your life a bit easier. (Thanks Honey, I love you!!!)

Saturday I was privledged to go with the missionaries to teach a gospel discussion to an investigator and his family. I feel so blessed that I had that opportunity. There is such a wonderful feeling when you really get a chance to share the gospel with someone and I haven't had that feeling in a long time. I was so happy afterwards and I can only attribute that to the spirit witnessing to me the same as it did for two years on my mission, and the feeling is the feeling that you know someone is so proud of you at that moment. I guess I felt like the spirit was telling me that Heavenly Father was proud of me for helping out the missionaries and for expressing my testimony to someone that needed to hear it. It was a truly great blessing for me to have the missionaries trust me and want me to come with them and to have my wife and family understand why I would leave them for a few hours on a saturday night. I know that they will also be blessed for the small sacrifice.

I have been having a bit of a tough time lately feeling very forgetful, unorganized, and tired, etc. I recently came to the conclusion that this is quite possibly Satan's way of trying to make my new calling harder on me. Anyway its been really tough because I have had to try and find new ways to organize myself as my old methods simply aren't working at all. So I finally sat down and got some good work done for the quorum and today I was so blessed for doing so. (It often amazes me how quickly the Lord blesses us when we fulfill things that He asks us to do.) Anyway on the way to work today I started thinking about a mission companion of mine that lives in Finland. He wrote me a few times like two years ago and I never found time to send a reply. So this morning I thought "I am going to find his address or email or something because I really need to get in touch with him." Well Satan played the same trick on me and before I even got to a computer I forgot that I had this plan to get his email today. Then came the blessing. I found a way to work past the forgetfulness with the stuff pertaining to my calling and now the Lord helped get me around this one. When I opened up my email tonight I had a message from Elder Hotari who I had hoped to get in touch with. It was so great to hear from him and I promptly replied so as to fulfill my part of this blessed transaction.

Such a simple blessing but so obviously the Lord fulfilling His promises to us to bless us as we put Him first in our lives.

First of all: I can't claim to be the creative genius behind the blessing blog. Rebecca had the wonderful idea and it is amazing to see the blessings that without her Blog she and I could simply overlook. There is something wonderful about sitting down to recognize the Lord's hand in our lives.
Second: I can not promise to be as diligent at this as some of the others who have also began Blessing Blogs of their own.
Third: I will not assume that anything written here will be of any specific value to anyone who reads it, I only hope that it will have some value for me and help someone who reads it to begin a Blessing Blog of their own and try to recognize what good the Lord has truly done in our lives.