The Misses Watts: One thing at a time

I don't usually swerve into the spiritual on my blog, mostly because I know that the people who read it are of all different faiths. But there's something I want to share that is dear to me, so I hope you won't mind if I share it. It's not so much about my religion as it is about my relationship with God, so you can decide if you want to read or not. If you don't, skip down until you see this font again. That's where the weekly synopsis begins.

A little over a year ago, I started keeping a "scripture journal." I try to read out of the scriptures every day. And that's been a habit, for the most part, since high school. But what I'd been doing, generally, is reading the books of scripture from cover to cover, one chapter a day. It was a good habit. And I'm glad I did it, but in the Book of Mormon, it talks about "feasting" upon the words of Christ, and I wanted to learn to do that. I wanted to learn to truly feed my spirit through the word of God. But I wasn't sure how to go about it.

Then, a little over a year ago, someone gave a lesson at church and mentioned that they'd read a blog where someone talked about not only reading the scriptures, but then writing down any thoughts that came to them while they read. When they looked back over the thoughts that came to them during scripture study, they could see the general direction God was guiding them to go. That struck me as logical, and since I'm all about logic (Steve would totally disagree with that statement), I decided to try it out.

This last year of doing this has profoundly changed my life.

Sometimes I wrote down thoughts about the scriptures. Sometimes I wrote down random thoughts about my family or friends or life. Sometimes I wrote down the scriptures themselves, or quotes from conference talks. As I wrote, I learned. As I went about my day, I learned because the scripture I wrote about in the morning would be on my mind at another time during the day. There were times that the scripture I read in the morning didn't spark anything profound at the time, but would help me help someone else during the day.

Throughout the year, Heavenly Father taught me about myself, life, charity, obedience, courage, self-confidence, the Atonement, and so much more. I feel closer to Him than I have ever felt before. Before, I spoke to Him through my prayers, but by taking the time to write down the impressions that came to me, I opened a line of communication for God to speak to me.

I don't feel like this is an experience exclusive to me, which is why I share it. If you want to feel God's love for you more strongly, if you want to be guided more in the important questions of life, if you want to be a more steadfast disciple of Jesus Christ, this will help you. Open the door by keeping a scripture journal. God will speak to you through it. I know he will.

Thanks for letting me share. :) Now back to the regularly scheduled program.

I had a great week! It started out with me feeling overwhelmed, but on Wednesday, I threw my list out the window (not literally), and did the thing that had been nagging me all week--I wrote! Over 1700 words in one day. I know that's writer-speak, but my goal is 500 words/day and I'd been getting behind more and more, so it brought so much peace to get caught up. I tried to do that the rest of the week--pick the thing that was most bothering me and focus on that during the day. If other things got done, great! But mostly I just cared if that one big thing got done. I felt so much more relaxed and so much less harried. I'm going to have to keep that in mind again this week.

The girls have been playing so well together lately. Mira taught Cecily how to do thumbs up and then they all wanted pictures of it and Cecily decided she didn't want to do thumbs up when it came to her turn for a picture. She's still pretty awesome anyway. :)

All of my pictures are pretty random this week, so I'll just give a quick run-down here. I planted more of my garden this week, which required digging up the volunteer plants that were in the way. There were a TON of them and I didn't want to kill them, so I asked my neighbor if she wanted them. She did, so I brought them to her and helped her plant her garden that day, too.

Steve had LOTR game night one night and went to the temple another night, so those days I mostly just tried to still be kind to my kids by the end of the day.

We had another fun date night on Friday night. We went to the BYU Museum of Art, which is free. Then we went to Pop N Sweets and tried a new flavor of soda: Sipp brand Ginger Blossom. It was super gingery, but once I got used to that, it was pretty good. We also got a Swamp Pop Praline Cream soda, which is what we got last time, because it was SO so so good. Then we came home and watched the Martian, which I thought was very well done.

On Saturday, Nick and Wilda wanted to take Cecily shopping for her birthday and the other two were feeling left out, so I took the older two to the Bean Museum. For those of you who don't know what that is, its a free museum that has a bunch of taxidermied animals to go look at. While we were there, they had a life animal show, though, (which only included a snake, a turtle, and a frog) so that was fun. The girls both got picked as a volunteer to open a "clue box."