Men and Women: Complementary Opposites

In class this week we've discussed the innate differences between men and women.  The different natures of men and women organically complement each other, and when together, the two have the opportunity to create a relationship fosters learning and personal growth from their experiences together.  Often times when we are in relationships we focus on loving ourselves and fixing others, when really we should ask ourselves, how can I fix myself and love others more?  If we can adopt this perspective we will be able to focus more on what we can learn from our partners action & behavior, and how we can be more patient and understanding of them, rather than focusing on how they have wronged us and what we need to do in order to educate them on the proper way of doing things.

Relationships between men and women aren't necessarily easy, but the greatest joys can come from these relationship, including learning opportunities through working together, sharing different perspectives, supporting each other and learning to selflessly love one another.

A Brain Feast of a Week

This week has been extreme to say the least.  I've been living in the library, and reading non-stop for all my classes and I am LOVING IT.   I feel so blessed to have all my classes be blending so well together and having each subject complementing the other.  This semester I'm enrolled in
SOC 462 Sociology of Health/Death & Dying
SOC 360 Sociology of Religion
SOC 340 Research Methods
SW 311 Family Interaction
FAML 160 Family Relations
FDREL D&C

Its a heavy load, but I am so grateful that I have found a major that I am passionate about that keeps me eager to to learn more.  This week, I have been looking at grad schools/master's programs that I'll possibly be applying to as early as this December!! whaaaaat?? so crazy.  I was having trouble finding a niche in a Sociology department that sounded interesting to me and I was getting a little discouraged.  I have always known that I want to  teach Sociology undergrads, but I was never sure what type of field work I wanted to do, or in what field specifically.  Until this week.  While reading about social support and social capital's influence on counteracting stress and illness for my SOC 462 class, and reading the core concepts of the Bowen Model identity tasks in my SW 311 class, it hit me.  My stomach felt like it was on fire, and in my mind felt like it was about to explode from mental stimulation overload.  I felt the witness of the spirit, and in that moment, I knew exactly what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

Now, I'm about to tell you about how I am going to have the world's coolest job, but I know its not going to sound nearly as monumental on a screen as would if I were able to physically tell you myself with voice inflections, hand motions and bulging eyes. But just be excited for me and pretend like you've never heard of a cooler career. I have decided that I want to work with families that have a member/members suffering with addiction.   There are many different types of rehab/treatment methods that incorporate outside individuals in a person's recovery, but the one I have been specifically looking at is called Network Therapy, or NT. Recovery programs that involve resources outside of the individual are awesome, because it makes treatment more affective, and lowers chances of recidivism.  What we are taught in Sociology is that an individual's behavior can never be completely independent of the society in which they belong. Society shapes individuals to behave and act a certain way, and as "Sociologists" it is our job to discover just how responsible society is for a certain aspect of an individual's behavior.  This is why I love the idea of Network Therapy. Because instead of treating the individual and sending them back into the world that assisted in shaping this person's addiction,  we work to alter the individual as well as those environmental conditions. We call upon family, friends, relatives, organizations to which the person may belong, any part of society this person may feel attached to, and we can create a support system around them to accomplish a more successful completion of addiction recovery.

I am so excited to have found exactly what I want to do.  I feel so blessed to be at this university.  I know that the Lord helped guide and direct me to this place in time where I could find this beautiful little thing that I am so passionate about.  It's funny, because now that I look at my life with this new knowledge, it makes a lot of sense.  The experiences I've had, the guidance I've received from a patriarchal blessing, and people placed in my life have all played a specific and necessary role to me realize exactly what it is that I want, can, and should do.  I am so grateful for a Father in Heaven, that knows and loves me.  I am grateful to have a knowledge that He has placed me here on Earth with specific purpose, that I may be able to live righteously and bring further glory to His name.  I love Him, and it is through Him in which all blessings flow.

 can these please be my children

Why We Have Children

This week in class we discussed population growth and birthrate decline. Our teacher posed the question, "Who is affected by not having children, and why?" This is what I was able to come up with, but first  I want to bear my testimony of the truth of eternal families.  The most important thing we will do on this Earth is marry in the temple for time and all eternity and create our own eternal families. This life is just the beginning of creation, I know that after this life we can be together with our families in Heaven for eternity. Thus, it is in this life that we learn Heaven, and what is to come:

1. Married couples:  Married couples that are physically able to have children but choose not to do so are missing out on the greatest opportunity we have in this life to experience joy.  As humans, we have a divine desire instilled within us to create something that did not exist before. The physical ability we have to create life is our most Godly attribute, and doing so is the most God-like act in which we will ever participate.

In the April 2012 General Conference, Elder Boyd K. Packer stated in his talk that "the creation of life is a great responsibility for a married couple. It is the challenge of mortality to be a worthy and responsible parent."  When we choose not to have children we miss out on creating the institution that will provide us with the most opportunity to become the most Christlike.  Children challenge and test their parents, they help  them to become the people God intended them to be.  But most importantly, children will teach their parents. Elder Packer continued by telling us that "one of the great discoveries of parenthood is that we learn far more about what really matters from our children than we ever did from our parents".  What a beautiful concept. That the more children that we choose to have, the more opportunities we are providing ourselves with as parents –and individuals  –to learn, grow, and develop mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

2. Heavenly Father: When we choose to not have children it does not inhibit God's will to come to pass, but it does affect the placement of His children, and perhaps the timeline of his plan.  I often wonder if Heavenly Father feels heartbroken when He would like to send His child to a home with a mother and father, but because a couple has chosen not to have children, Heavenly Father has to send them somewhere else that perhaps He would not prefer or consider ideal for His spirit.

3. The unborn spirits:  There are spirits up in Heaven that need to come to Earth in order to gain a physical body. When we choose not to welcome a child we are preventing them from a wonderful home in which we could provide.  I believe that every child has a right to a mother and a father that are married to each other and committed to the family, and it breaks my heart to see children being raised in less than ideal situations outside their control, and often times outside their parents control as well. I want to be careful about the spirit of this post.  I want to stress that the feelings I am expressing are in regards specifically and exclusively to couples that are physically able to have children, but choose not to do so.  I cannot begin to contemplate the heartbreak felt by those couples that desperately want to have children but experience difficulty doing so.  God knows the desires written on our hearts; He knows us, understands us, and He is aware of our circumstance.

The glory of God is intelligence, through which He created us.  We can show our gratitude for Him for creating us by also creating, and allowing His eternal plan to progress and be fulfilled. 

A New Semester

Hello fans and followers, i speak to all 3 of you when I write this and tell you that my blog is making a temporary transition for the next few months. I'm taking a class this semester called Family Relations and part of the class requires that I start blogging! I'm going to post once a week about experiences had, lessons learned, articles/books read that all have to do with families! I'm really excited and I hope this class gets me back in the habit of posting regularly on here. Please feel free to comment on my posts (my teacher is encouraging it). I would love to hear your thoughts and get your feedback!
God is love-
Michaela

Some Work I've Been Doing Lately

The past few days in my advanced writing and reasoning class I have had to write two different analyses of articles about Ralph Waldo Emerson. Out of context these pieces may be hard to follow or seem pointless for you to read altogether, but I am proud of hours of hard work I put into them, and the results of my efforts. so I am going to post them.

Paper #1

Michaela Huber
Monday June 13, 2011

FDENG 201

Ralph Waldo Emerson and a Call to the Self-Reliant

In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”, he explains the need in society for nonconformity, voicing of personal opinion, intellectual courage and confidence in one’s “self”. He explains that the self-reliant is confident and not afraid to defend his beliefs, even when he stands alone. The self-reliant is not concerned if he is proved to be wrong or contradicting himself. He accepts new truth openly, happy to leave previous deception. Emerson believes that there is nothing more sacred than “the integrity of your own mind” (3). I believe that we as self-reliant individuals, can never consider ourselves authentic or credible, unless we hold firmly to what we have concluded —to the best of our abilities —as truth. Furthermore, we must not only cleave to our own ideas, but proclaim them to others with confidence and in doing so, we will gain additional confidence, and greater self-trust.

Often times, when we are put in situations where our own opinions are the minority viewpoint, we sometimes half-express ourselves, or we stay quiet altogether. We assume that people will make fun of us, think we are stupid, or lose respect for us, when really it is quite the opposite. When someone is brave enough to express a different, or controversial opinion, people respect that person. They admire them for being brave and confident enough to speak. Emerson explains the importance of always expressing our full opinions in the moment. If we don’t, we are voluntarily giving up, and by default passing on an opportunity to be self-reliant and gain self-esteem. “A stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what he have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another” (2). We should not be afraid or embarrassed by our ideas, they are there for a reason and we should embrace them. By not expressing yourself, you are in a sense rejecting “that divine idea which each of us represents” (2). Those “divine ideas”, Emerson explains, are our God-given ideas. God created our minds to think a certain way, and we are responsible for expressing those thought processes. Therefore, by keeping our opinions to ourselves, we are blatantly suppressing deistic thoughts that God is depending on us to express.

When we come to that place of not only accepting who we are, but learning to love ourselves, we will then experience the most joy. “[ I ] do not need for my own assurance or assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony” (4). Emerson explains that when we need to live our lives for nobody but ourselves, and once we start doing so, we will then find the confidence we need to stand behind our ideas, and we will no longer need the “secondary testimony” we once sought (4).

If we hide our thoughts, ideas and opinions from the world, we are hiding something beautiful that God has created. If you look back in history at scholars and icons such as Plato, Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr., they were all unapproved of by society in their time, but they had confidence and they knew that the feelings within them were truths to be told. If we can find the courage to express ourselves, we will gain greater confidence and with that, overtime we will find that we no longer seek for the approval of others. We can depend on ourselves to find happiness from within with the personal testimony of the knowledge we have, and become true self-reliants.