Wait. They don't love you like I love you.

I've come to the conclusion that sometimes there are phases in our lives that feel like a waiting room. There's nothing anyone can do about it. Most of the time change happens slowly, one day at a time. You have to be patient with small steps in the right direction. That's what life is. Small, long, hard steps that you take every single day so that when you look back you see how far you've truly come, it adds up, the distance you've covered. You have to smile and press forward enjoying the journey, the now, realizing the wait will be worth it.

Waiting doesn't mean you're just standing still watching your life pass by... waiting means to keep going  and never let go or falter even when it seems impossible. What you're waiting for could be further along the path and you can't see it. You want to give up, but you CAN'T stop because it's there. Once you reach it, and you will, you'll discover it was worth the wait, that you'd actually repeat the tedious, tearstained, treacherous, heartbreaking, seemingly unending trip and time it took to get there. Not only would you'd repeat it, you'd do it again countless times because it's that worth it.

Waiting means something's coming.

You're waiting for something, some goal, someone...

The longer you wait, the harder you work, the more you anticipate, then the stronger you will be, and the better and sweeter it will be when you find it. 

Waiting is worth it.

That was then. Here we are now.

Moving forward slowly but surely.

My faith gets me through all of this.

This trail of the past year doesn't have to define me.

I will be soft. I refuse to let the world make me hard. I do not let the pain make me hate. I don't let the bitterness steal my sweetness. I take pride that even though you or the rest of the world may disagree, I still believe the world is a beautiful place.

Lovelies, I'm falling in love again...

with life.

Decide right now to love life. To love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you've held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, blown away by the storms of adversity, you throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weighs you like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think how can anyone stand this? Go look in the mirror and hold life like a face between your palms and say, "Yes I will take you. I will love you again." And run with it. 

Only you can make your dreams come true. 

What's stopping you?

There are some things in life you have to wait for.

There are other things you can't wait for. You have to make them happen. Nothing will ever be perfect so use the time you have. 

I know I'm jumping around here.

I love this quote by Stephen King:

"Remember, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies."

Hold onto hope, cling to it for dear life in the moments when all you feel is lost and alone. 

When you feel happy, really happy, it somehow seems that you've always been happy and that you'll always be happy. The same is often true when you feel sad, or lonely, or depressed, or broke, or sick, or scared. Remember that.

"I can just be me."

"She is not a failure because she tried some things that didn't work out. She only fails when she stops trying."

"Where we are today is where we are meant to be. It's where we are meant to be to get to where we are going tomorrow. And that place we're going tomorrow will be better than any we've been before."

Start now. Start where you are. Start with fear. Start with pain. Start with doubt. Start with hands shaking. Start with voice trembling but start. Start and don't stop. Start where you are, with what you have. Just start.

Choose people who choose you.

Choose you.

Choose life.

"We can't predict all the struggles and storms in life, not even the ones just around the next corner, but as persons of faith and hope, we know beyond the shadow of any doubt that the gospel of Jesus Christ is true and the best is yet to come."

-Elder L. Tom Perry

I love you, lovelies.

Love yourself.

<W/L3 

Charley Brooke