I Love to See the Temple

"I love to see the temple, I'm going there someday." This is what came to my mind a lot this week. In both my Family Relations and Marriage Prep classes, this was the topic of discussion. Marriage and the wedding.  We talked about how stressful getting married can be and all the stuff we need to remember while we're going through the process. The biggest thing that stuck out to me was the emphasis on The Sealing. That should be your focus and what you care about the most. The wedding is just the party, The Sealing is what matters most.

What makes your clock tick?

Stress about stress = Anxiety. So that's my problem!! If I didn't stress about being stressed, then maybe I wouldn't be so stressed! Why does that sound so much easier than it really is?? Everyone has their own stressors, and each handles them differently. Something that stresses me out, might be nothing to someone else. It's our level of perception that measures what causes on person's stressor to turn into a crisis. In psychological terms stress is measured by how one responds to change. For me, personally, I don't handle change very well, so that's probably why I stress out so much, and then when I realize that I'm stressed, I stress even more, so it's this never ending cycle of extreme stress... Definitely something I need to work on.... hahaha :)

Good News!!!

Just a short little announcement that BYU-Idaho has a new major in Marriage and Family Relations!!! :) Yay!! So, I thought everyone would like to know that I'm am now changing my major to Marriage and Family Relations :) And to quote Rupunzel, from Tangled- "BEST DAY EVERRR!!!" :D

Power Struggles

In every aspect of life, someone holds power. In families, church organizations, and even college apartments :) But it may not be one person in charge of everything, sometimes that power is divided among individuals within the organization and they are each given power over certain things. Like the church for example; the ward Young Women President holds the power in the young women organization, but the Bishop is the over-arching leader over her and the other auxiliary presidents. The Stake President is over the stake's Bishops and then the line proceeds to follow the line of Area Seventy, the Quorum of the Twelve, and finally the Prophet, who we all know holds all the power over the whole church. In class we had an experiment to see what would happen if our power source (our professor) was removed from the classroom environment. As class started there was a simple note on the board that said to start class with a prayer, and have a discussion on power in the family. That was it. The teacher came in and took a seat in one of the desks, and it became clear to the rest of us that he wasn't planning on participating in today's lecture. One girl then stood up and said she would offer a prayer, and then after the prayer, she started off the discussion with asking what we thought of power's role in the family. We started to have a discussion, but only about five minutes in, it was made known who was going to talk and comment and direct the conversation the whole time. And as the discussion drew on, the more those same individuals took control and the more the rest of us tuned out.  Our teacher finally got up and began to illustrate to us what happened in this experiment and how this happens in all aspects of daily life. We can't function without power. Even when power is removed, another source is found, and it reemerges. Power isn't a bad thing, it's just important to establish who has power and control of certain things in certain aspects, and evenly distribute it so that we don't end up in a sort of dictated marriage.

Faulty Expectations

This week was a short week because of the holiday and today we had a midterm, so we only got one lecture in. But one thing that I read in the assigned chapter reading that I thought was interesting was what the book called a "private contract." It said that when a couple enters marriage they bring in individual, or "private," unspoken contracts that are basically expectations they have of their spouse and the marriage. It could be something like they agree to have a family, but the wife expects to start a family right away, and the husband expects to wait a few years. So they both agreed and talked about having children, but they both had different expectations on when that was going to happen. When I was reading that section, I just thought it was kind of interesting, and that it is so true, not only with marriage, but with other relationships as well.