Light and Truth

Many years ago, while sitting in a health science class at Woods Cross High School, another student leaned over to me before class and casually asked, "So are you an optimist, perfectionist, or pessimist?". A couple days earlier, we'd been studying these three personality types during that class, talking about what characterizes them. My answer to this student was easy and straightforward: "I am a pessimist". While I wished I could say otherwise, it was nevertheless a fact that I was someone who always focused on what was not going well and the negatives surrounding me. And I was rarely in a state of happiness. With epilepsy influencing every aspect of life, having a scarcity of friends, and needing to deal with all of the homework that continually got piled on me, it seemed to me that my pessimism was completely justified and inescapable. A few years later, I found myself serving as a full-time missionary in Middletown, New York. My full-time teaching compani...

At the beginning of my full-time mission while at the MTC (Missionary Training Center), I nearly got sent home for medical reasons beyond my control. Fortunately, I was not sent home. But I was also not allowed to go out to New York as I had been called to, at least not immediately. This was obviously quite a trial for my faith and hope. (Further details can be found in the two prior blog posts:  1st  ,  2nd  .) Instead of getting sent home, a minor exception was made for me to stay at the MTC and work as an online missionary in the Referral Center. Here I would stay until I got doctoral permission to serve in New York. This was not exactly what I wanted to happen, but by this time I had accepted the fact that my plans of going to New York in January 2012 were not to be. But at least I didn't get sent home completely from serving a mission. While serving in the Referral Center, teaching people via skype and chatting with people who came on to  mormon.org ...