Excellent Resources on Patience

This afternoon, I've had the wonderful opportunity to prepare a lesson for my Mia Maid class tomorrow in church. The lesson is How Can I Learn to be More Patient? and I'm super excited to teach it! There are so many wonderful thoughts on patience, it's been hard to narrow down what to teach tomorrow.

The good news is, I feel like I've learned a lot of patience in my life—more-so in the past seven years than ever before. I've probably had equal opportunities to learn patience throughout my life, but maybe I've become more capable over the past seven years? Whatever the reason, I'm grateful I've become a better at managing my naturally-impatient soul.

I'm not perfectly patient yet (far from it!), but I'm working on it every day! Yet I figure I must be better off now than I was when I started this mortal journey—at least I really hope I am! :)

I know most readers don't have the time to delve into the Young Women lesson I've linked above, so, below are the three typographic designs I created as handouts for my Mia Maid class. Their words are so excellent, I can't wait to share them with "my" darling young women tomorrow!

(I created two of them in simple black and white because I don't have a color printer. While I love creating my designs in color, they just don't work well for printing in black and white. That said, the second one I created, with the quote by Elder Maxwell, was just screaming for some color! It doesn't print off well in black and white at all, but I couldn't take it—I needed some blue! Ha ha. Thankfully, I really like how the other black and white typographic designs turned out.)

D&C 24:8 is one of my favorite scriptures! I love that it's not only filled with realism, but a lovely dose of compassion and hope.

The next quotes are from Elder Neal A. Maxwell, a former member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. They are both from his magnificent Ensign article, Patience, that was published in October, 1980. I highly recommend reading the entire article! In fact, I wanted to share so many additional paragraphs of his words here on my blog that I had to stop myself before I copied/pasted all of them! Ha ha. No, really, go read it! :)

*On a more serious note, I must admit that portions of Elder Maxwell's article had me in tears. They weren't sad tears or even happy tears, but spiritual tears. Yes, Elder Maxwell's words—and the spirit in which he presented those words—spoke directly to my spirit. As he was describing our longing for heaven, and our separation by the veil, well it was almost more than I could bear, for I have felt those longing feelings ever since I was a child. I won't go into details (we don't have all night!), but my spirit absolutely longs for our heavenly home and all of the heavenly beings there who love us unconditionally. Yes, I will be reading Elder Maxwell's article many times in the near future!

Wow, don't you love his wise words? I really could have used his entire Patience article while I was struggling in Texas! At least I like to think it would have helped me. Who knows, maybe I've already heard/read those genius words before today? Maybe I was too far into my pit of despair to really hear and implement his words? ;) At any rate, I'm so grateful I discovered his thoughts now!

My experience of preparing this lesson today has reiterated to me the great importance of continually studying of the gospel of Jesus Christ—as an individual and with others, i.e., going to church! :) There is no substitute for solid spirituality!

P.S. I know I get more excited about typography than most people do, but there is just something about arranging words artistically that gets my soul all happy and excited! What also does it for me is the combination of words—how the words sound together and what they mean. Oh, my goodness, how I love words!

Even before I started using PicMonkey, I've essentially been creating my own typographic designs for years! My typography designing originated when I began writing poetry on my family's old-school Macintosh II computer for my high school senior English class. Then, when I became my ward's Young Women President in Texas, I began creating my designs on Microsoft Word. Typography makes me happy!