An explanation of jubilee

this is kendra. she is practically perfect.


"You look happy," Bishop said to me yesterday, after we talked about the temple and he signed a new recommend for me. I love this man.

"I am." My response was automatic, but real.

"It's a good feeling." We smile kind of knowingly at each other, and all I can do is nod.

The best feeling, my constant glee.
So I need you to know that it is possible. It isn't too much to handle. I still feel everything else. Just in this frame of incessant joy that does not go away, because it is in direct proportion to how close I let myself get to the author of all happiness.
He is as real as these feelings. Nothing will make me stop knowing that; I will not apologize for that.
I will not try to paint a picture of my life as perfection--I think you already know about the non-perfection too much to gloss it over enough, anyway.
This joy of mine is not based on ignorance, but instead on new understanding.

Happiness does not arrive, but evolves and changes with us; it is not dependent on our circumstance, but on the state of our insides.

And we read these ideas and skim these how-to books and don't believe any of it, because that's not real life; it's a scam. Those fairytale feel-good movies just suck our money and our time, because we know how it really is. We live our lives in it. In the muck and the grime and the grit and the logistics of the world that is a couple parts good but overwhelmingly more parts awful. To be dealt with and hid from and endured.

No. We choose. We chose to be here. We choose how we become while we're here. We choose where we're going.

"They themselves are makers of themselves, by virtue of the thoughts they choose and encourage; that mind is the master-weaver, both of the inner garment of character and the outer garment of circumstance, and that, as they may have hitherto woven in ignorance and pain they may now weave in enlightenment and happiness."

-James Allen, As A Man Thinketh ((MACY! I am ADORING this book!!))

No, no no: read that quote again.
Think about it again.

This is what makes reality. I choose to be close to the God I love, who loves me when I am undeserving; I choose to be close to the God who "knows all the thoughts and intents of the heart; for by his hand [was I] created from the beginning." (Alma 18: 32)
In turn, I choose to be happy.

Because I know Him, I know my life isn't some pointless array of random acts that have no lasting effect, that I will be together forever with those I love and that my life will mean something, even after it is over.
Knowing this, I can wake up smiling.

This is who I am. This is who I am discovering I can be. And this is how my life course will run.
I will not apologize for that.