I have been so excited to share some of my beautiful experiences from this past year! I looked back at my original post about my “beautify” theme and I had said I wanted to focus my beautifying efforts in three areas:

• Myself
• My home
• My yard

And it seems like that was definitely the correct order to list them in, because that is the order of priority I gave them.

What I continue to notice as I select these yearly themes is how much Heavenly Father takes my minuscule efforts and miraculously turns them into the things I was hoping for. And I certainly saw this in all the areas I made attempts to beautify.

For the yard, I made a small effort to provide a little bit more seating outside. But Heavenly Father gave us lots of snow and rain which gave us a green lawn that our whole family was able to go out and enjoy! And the fact that the lawn wasn’t constantly on the brink of death made it more encouraging to keep trying to get the sprinklers right. (And, of course, I didn’t work on sprinklers at all. That beauty all came from Josh! <3 )

For the house, my dream was to get rid of lots of stuff, NOT acquire new stuff, and organize everything so that the house is always clean and orderly. Obviously, with that being much too lofty a goal, we didn’t get to that point. But two major things this year did make a noticeable difference in the beauty of our home. The first is that we replaced our old couch. It was a wonderful couch for many years; but it looked like it had been around for many years. Our new couches are so beautiful and have transformed the whole family room for the better! I’m grateful for our new furniture. The other huge thing that has beautified our home came in the form of an amazing deal from DI. A carpet-cleaner-wet-vacuum for $12! I am amazed at how much cleaner and well maintained the house looks when I clean the carpets. And I love that I can use it whenever I simply can’t stand the dirt in a specific room, and that I don’t have to commit to getting the whole house cleaned at the same time. And I love that I don’t have to commit to many hundreds of dollars to get things looking truly clean! I genuinely feel like finding that vacuum for so cheap was a miracle. And I am so grateful for the beauty we have experienced in our home because of it!

But now, let’s talk about what really happened this beautiful year. The changes that I have seen in my own heart and mind this year are far more beautiful than anything I could ever do in my house or yard. And they are far more miraculous than anything I ever could have done on my own–the greatest evidence of the aforementioned Divine intervention. So much of the beauty I discovered this year was thanks to the fact that I miraculously (it’s own little saga) began therapy for OCD and anxiety at the end of January 2023. I worked very hard on my exposures and found lots of relief from things that have caused me lots of fear, and have gained countless tools for nipping potential OCD triggers in the bud. But therapy was also immensely beautiful because my therapist helped me to dig deep into my own heart and ask myself why I was doing things and if those things were serving me.

A beautiful principle I have learned is that my pride–any kind of pride, no matter how insignificant it seems–adds to my mental load and makes me more prone to lousy mental health. I started typing a big long paragraph explaining what I mean by that; but ultimately decided to leave it at the original statement.

But that discovery, about the relationship between pride and my mental health, led me to the most beautiful discovery of all! I have begun to recognize and utilize the beautiful, healing, transforming power of the gift of repentance. It’s not that I have never had experiences with repentance before; I’ve been trying to repent for my whole life. But the Savior was able to show me things in a new light this year as I addressed my sins and pride in connection with my efforts to invite peace into my mind. Repentance and its subsequent spiritual healing is how I have been able to lighten my mental load in order to make space for the Savior to heal me physically and mentally.

I’m grateful for this opportunity to reflect on the changes I have seen; because they remind me that the gift of repentance is still available to me, and I can be sure that I will continue to be blessed. It makes me want to really sit down and figure out which things I can remove from my life. I know I still have a lot of pride, resentment, judgemental thoughts, and every other vice one can imagine that I still hang on to. But I know that even letting one of them go will bring the Savior’s blessings into my life. And I want that!

I had a beautiful experience about that in the temple a month or two ago. I was pondering on how willing the Savior is to forgive sins, even my vilest of all sins. And I was feeling grateful for His loving willingness. But I also felt like a mere pardon wasn’t really what I was seeking. In my mind, I told the Savior, “Thanks for the forgiveness, really. But what I really want is to be different! To never make that mistake again! To not be proud in this way anymore ever. To never go back to the kind of mindset that leads to that sort of behavior. I want You to change me. I want you to make me like You.” I know that such longings of my heart are exactly what the Savior promises. In Ezekiel 36:26, He says ^“A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.” But I’m also learning (again) that His timetable is absolutely GINORMOUS compared with mine. I sometimes tire of “line upon line” learning and just want Him to lay His hands on my head and make me a completely new creature today. But He knows that becoming is a process not an event, and that these baby steps forward and the frustrating failures and shortcomings are actually what create anyone. Even Jesus Christ Himself did it that way. In D&C 93:12-13 it says “And I, John, saw that he received not of the fulness at first, but received grace for grace; And he received not of the fulness at first, but continued from grace to grace until he received a fulness.”

So, if even the Savior of all mankind had to learn and “become” one step at a time, I suppose I’ll do my best to tolerate it. 🙂

In 2023, I saw the Savior magnify my efforts so many times in so many ways! He taught me so many things and gave me so many miracles that it would take approximately forever to put them all in writing. But if you ever feel like having a very spirited discussion on beautiful lessons from the Savior, please hit me up, and we’ll have tons of fun and probably do quite a bit of joyful crying!

And now, we have a new beautiful year! I have my theme verb all picked out and begun, even, but in the spirit of blogging more than once every three months and keeping you in infuriating suspense, I’m going to make you wait for another post to hear all about it. (mwah ha ha!!) But I can already tell you that I am SUPER excited to see how the Savior takes this (of all words) and teaches me more about Himself and His love for me in 2024!