At BYU I hesitantly signed up to take a speech class. I didn't need it to graduate, but I wanted to become a better public speaker and sort of come out of my shell. At first it was one of those "what was I thinking" moments, but in the end it was one of the best decisions I ever made.
Besides my soccer class (holy awesome, I was one of like four girls in the whole class!), it was one of my favorite classes at BYU. Ok maybe Sis. Fronk's New Testament class was up there. Wait! Sis. Black's church history classes made me love church history! And of course there were all the journalism classes I basically worshiped... except media law. I hated media law. (Remember that class Hillary?) And statistics. I cried over statistics. Blllek.
Holy cow, I'm really veering off course here. Sorry guys.
Anyway, I really loved my BYU speech class! The professor had us prepare and give a speech once a week, which meant we had a heck of a lot of practice being in front of a crowd. At first I sweated and was scared... as in scared to death. But after a while, it became quite enjoyable. It wasn't that that public speaking became fun; rather it was the crowd--our class of about 30 students--that I really enjoyed. Through the help of our professor, our class had become quite close.
At a college of 30,000 students, this doesn't always happen (I fell asleep in many a 500-chair lecture hall feeling quite like a little fish in a big pond). But this.. this was different. People from all different majors and backgrounds and even a BYU football player walked into this class. While we were all different on the outside of class, on the inside of class we were one.
My teacher taught us to be overly supportive, to over-listen and glue our eyes on target, and when the speech was over, to clap and cheer like no tomorrow. At first it seemed unnatural, but eventually we got to know each others' struggles, insecurities, and triumphs. Each of us were in a different place in our lives, and each of us were in a different place in our public speaking. And so when we clapped furiously, we really meant it. We were proud of each other.
I remember one day in class, the professor went around the room and asked each of us what our ultimate dream job would be.
I thought. And I thought. Hmmm. Well I would be a writer. But I would also want to travel. My answer was on the tip of my tongue for a minute or two, and then it was my turn.
At the last second, I reconsidered. I loved those things. But really, that's not what I wanted to do. That wasn't my ultimate dream.
"Honestly? What I really want to be is a mother."
As cliche as that sounded, it was completely true. In this class, I couldn't get away with saying something that wasn't true. So I felt very compelled to say it. In all honestly, I had wanted to be a mother my whole life. I had wanted to settle down, get married, and have children. I was patiently (at times) waiting for my opportunity.
If that didn't come along, I suppose traveling writer/reporter would be a good second option.
And so here I was, several years later, finally with Jon. I loved him, and he loved me. Pretty soon, it became painfully obvious that we were on the road to marriage. I had wanted to find someone my whole life, to settle down and get married and have kids... and here he was. {Wow.}
We had just said "I love you" to each other and solidified our relationship. The following week, we emailed each other conference talks about finding "the one" or lists of questions to ask a potential spouse or we just emailed "I love you" about a billion times throughout the work day.
By the end of the week, we were headed to the Columbia River Temple. While we were mutually mentioning "what if we had kids?" and "maybe I might wanna sorta marry you and stuff" and we really did want to get married... we wanted to have a chance to spend time at the temple contemplating this eternal choice. Getting married in the temple, something we both had wanted our whole lives, was a big choice. A very eternal choice.
And so we went-- I did baptisms while Jon spent time at an endowment session. Individually we contemplated what we wanted out of the rest of our lives, and if it was ok with Heavenly Father. We both felt good. We felt peaceful.
And now, it was time to drive to Oregon and make sure it was ok with my parents. >>Continue to part 21
No comments:
Post a Comment