The Diary of Anne Frank

The whole reason that I began posting every day was because I thought, probably mistakenly, that it may improve my writing. I read a short children's book on writing and there was a section about journals. It highlighted Anne Frank, among others, as a great author who told their story through journal. Now, I am certainly not Anne Frank. Nor do I have nearly the story to tell that she did. But I do wonder if she ever felt that her days weren't really worth chronicling. I am sure that life in hiding, while a little exciting, was mostly horribly boring.

I remember when I went on my mission, it was my last day in the MTC. Our usual teacher couldn't be there for some reason, and we had a substitute. I remember his lesson almost more than the others I had in the 3 weeks I was there. He asked us what we planned to do everyday. We all gave various answers that mostly involved teaching fabulous lessons to those that were just trembling to be baptized. He looked at us and said, okay, so you teach a lesson for an hour (looking back, that is extremely generous for the time it takes to teach a lesson), what else do you do? We looked at each other and said call media referrals. He said okay, that takes 15 minutes, what else do you do? It was at this point that I realized that there is a ton of time in a day that I had to somehow make productive. He then went on to teach us about tracting, which did in fact make up a large majority of what I did on my mission.

The point of all this rambling is that our lives are punctuated by exciting moments when we get to do exciting and wonderful and fun things. The rest of it is made up of everything else that we do. The less glamorous, but very necessary part of life. We have to do the dishes and plan the meals and do the laundry and go to work and go the gym. These things are what make up most of our lives. So if it occasionally seems that I only talk about these things, it is because that is the majority of what I do.

I will say though, that some of my best and most personally defining moments came when I was tracting on my mission. I think that the same thing happens during the regular course of life.

"The final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands" ~ Anne Frank