Makeshift fireplaces

Hello friends. It's been a while.

Well, in the spirit of an upcoming Thanksgiving, our apartment decorated for Christmas. Actually, we started decorating on Halloween. I'm so grateful to be in an apartment of girls who like to celebrate Christmas as early as I do. (: I boiled cloves and cinnamon so that the house would smell like the holidays. We colored pictures printed off of a coloring pages website of Mrs. Claus and Rudolph, and we've been playing Sufjan's Christmas Album ever since.

This last weekend we talked of having a fireplace. We don't actually have a real one, but I printed one off from Google images and we surrounded it with bricks made out of lunch sacks. Strange as it is, the two-dimensional flame seems to keep me warm.



All of these makeshift holiday decorations have paralleled the makeshift decisions I've had to decide concerning big changes in my life right now. It hasn't hit me yet that life will be different this time next year. Hopefully I'll be out in New York attending a school that's paying me to learn how to write novels. Or in California taking out a fatty federal loan to pay a school that will teach me how to write television shows. Either way, if things turn out, I might not be here in front of my paper fireplace.

I say "might" because I've learned by now that things never turn out the way you think they will. I've been flying by the seat of my pants these last four years, not knowing where I was going and not able to steer one way or another. You'd think I'd be used to all of the uncertainty by now, but it still scares the crap out of me.

Still, I feel good. I've been especially touched by Henry B. Eyring's talk this General Conference titled, "Trust in God, Then Go and Do." That really is all we can do, isn't it? We have to stop trying to pretend that we know more than God. He knows what will make us happiest. He knows what will make us reach our potential. It might be good to simply do what's right and let Him do the rest. Easier said than done. I know, I know. But we can make the best of what we do not know and what we do not have.

I hadn't planned past graduation when I first came to BYU. But I feel good about where I'm going. I'm content with this erratic life of mine. It's no traditional fireplace, but I've built a makeshift one with the only tools I have. And if God's okay with my printer ink and lunch sacks, so am I.