My family and I are picking my older brother up from the airport in 12 days, and it feels like just yesterday that we were saying goodbye to him for two years.
My husband and I have been married for almost four months, and I swear that he just asked me out on our first date.
My little brother is a junior in high school, and I can still remember holding him in my arms as a baby.
My baby brother no longer thinks girls have cooties.
Where has the time gone?
Think back to where you were two years ago.
How much has changed?
How much hasn't?
Where was I two years ago? I was just beginning my senior year of high school. I was captain of the color guard, I played viola in the chamber orchestra, I was the laurel president in my young women's group, and I was getting ready to say the hardest goodbye I would ever have to say.
Two years ago, my older brother left on his mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which he would serve faithfully in Tokyo Japan. Two years ago, I was trying to figure out how to breathe, after half of me left the country.
I am, again, trying to figure out how to breathe thinking of how to introduce him to my husband in 12 days, who he has never met.
In two years, I have graduated high school, been to college, gotten married, moved to Cedar City, and started a new job doing something I never thought I would be doing. (I'm a phlebotomist at a plasma donation center. Fun fact, when I was 8 and getting my shots for school, I had to have 3 nurses and my dad hold me down. Now I'm the one with the needle. Anyone else see the irony in this?)
A lot happens in two years. Zach is coming home to a completely different life. How is he going to handle it? How am I going to handle it? I guess we will find out.
Some of my favorite life advice comes from Sister Hinckley. She says: "I don't want to drive up to the pearly gates in a shiny sports car, wearing beautifully tailored clothes, my hair expertly coiffed, and with long, perfectly manicured fingernails. I want to drive up in a station wagon that has mud on the wheels from taking kids to scout camp. I want to be there with a smudge of peanut butter on my shirt from making sandwiches for a sick neighbors children. I want to be there with a little bit of dirt under my fingernails from helping to weed someone's garden. I want to be there with children's sticky kisses on my cheeks and the tears of a friend on my shoulder. I want the Lord to know that I was really here, and that I really lived."
As I am now realizing, time goes by so quickly. Live your life to the complete fullest.
"Sometimes in life we become so focused on the finish line that we fail to find joy in the journey." -President Uchtdorf
Enjoy today. Life is flying by. Don't blink, or you'll miss it.
