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| From the Stig's perspective, cause you know, who doesn't love the Stig? |
Long story short - I had a doctor in the mission field that changed my life - helped me understand my health condition, gave me hope, helped me accept my situation, yada, yada, yada. There was one analogy he shared with me that I've thought about every day since and has been on my mind 24/7 lately so I thought I'd share:
This life is a giant racetrack and we're all little cars zooming round doing our own thing. But for some reason, some of us weren't built like the rest of the cars . Some of us were built with 2 gears, some of us with 3, some of us with 5 - why were we built like that? Who knows? We just were.
Those of us with only 2 look around, and see that we're not going as fast as the other cars, no matter how fast we're trying to go and no matter what we try to do. Engine's screaming, all cylinders are on fire, but we refuse to stop - we have to keep up with the Ferrari ahead even though we're doing all we can with our 2 cylinders.
What we refuse to understand is that we don't need to go racing speed, we don't have to keep up with the all-star elder Lamborghini that's getting 8 baptisms a month or the Relief Society President that's doing everything and still looks perfect doing it all, we only have two gears, we just can't keep up with that.
So here we are going around our little racetrack of life and as soon as the mission hits, we're thrown into this huge race. No one has ever experienced this high speed lifestyle before the mission, and that's the time when us 2 geared folk struggle the hardest - that's when we break. It's nothing we can prevent, it's nothing we did wrong, it's just the way it is. So we have the choice to accept it or not - you can keep going as hard as you can, but something's eventually going to break and you will explode.
So because of my little stubborn self, I was the one that completely wore myself out to the breaking point. Staying out in the mission field and working even harder than I could broke me down more than it should've. It's okay to slow down and take a breather, no matter how hard it is. I was talking to my Dad this morning about how my mission played out and through all my blabbering and complaining, his only response was, "I'm just glad you're home." I'm grateful I'm home. I'm grateful for the pain I had to go through to learn that it's okay to go a little slower than everyone else, it's okay to take a break. I'm grateful for the break I was forced to take before I broke down even more.
