My story is one of being broken.
I was a kid who grew up and had every opportunity I could.
I had leadership experiences within every sports team
that I played, and honestly, not a lot for me went wrong.
I'd had every desire as a young child to serve a mission
and to teach people about Jesus Christ.
I got called to serve as a missionary in Argentina.
Upon arriving there, I started to have
really bad medical problems.
I had migraines, and these migraines were so terrible
that I stopped sleeping.
And I remember, every day it was really just a miserable
experience.
I would sleep maybe two to three hours a night.
When I woke up, we would wander the streets,
and my head hurt so bad.
And I started to experience severe anxiety and depression,
but not realizing that that's what it was.
It got to the point that it was so bad
of rapid weight loss, weight gain, random dry
heaving on the side of the road, and just praying every day,
spending hours at night on my knees,
just hoping that I could go to sleep
and hoping that I could get out of this state.
We had a leader that was over all
of the missionaries of our area, and I
had been discussing with him my struggles that I was having and
how I could overcome them.
And one day he called me and he said, "Do you trust me?"
And I said, "Well, yeah, I trust you."
And he goes, "Would you do anything I asked you to do?"
And I said, "Yes."
And he said, "We're sending you home tomorrow."
I automatically felt this lifted burden.
It was humbling because they said, "You
need to go to a psychologist."
And I went to the first psychologist,
and he said, "I don't know what's wrong with you.
I can't figure any of this out."
So I got referred to another psychologist.
That is where my life changed.
And I sat down with the psychologist, and he said,
"What if you're never a missionary again?
Are you OK with that?"
And I said, "No."
And he said, "Well, what if you have to be OK with it?"
Over a series of months, he helped
me realize that sometimes it's OK to accept what God gives you
and to be humble enough to learn what He's trying to teach you.
I had played sports my entire life,
and if a coach told me that I was
going to play a different position, I'd say, "No.
I'll play the position I want to."
Meeting with this psychologist--he told me
sometimes you need to learn to play a different position
in your life and be OK with it.
And I became OK with that.
He said, "There's this group of missionaries
that had similar experiences to yourself, that still struggle
with it years after the fact.
And we study meditation."
And my initial response was, "No, that's strange."
I remember walking in and still feeling pretty broken
and looking for peace in my life.
Walking out that day, I felt a new person within me.
I felt this sense of calmness that I had never
experienced before.
And I learned that sometimes the feeling of God or Jesus Christ
in your life is just calm.
And the second that we can let all of our worries
and our distractions just vanish--just let them go away
and let our mind settle down for a couple of minutes--it's that
type of calmness that can help us see the reality
of God's hand in our life.
I had never felt His love or the emotions
of a relationship with Christ on a day-to-day basis as much
as I do now, because meditation has
allowed me to be so open to the feelings that He can give me.
I look back now and I realize that that
was the most positive thing for me,
because it gave me a chance to realize
that it's OK to be broken.
And I think God's grace lies in the fact
that sometimes He'll break you down
to build you up into a person that you've never been before.
And I think for me that maybe I was too prideful
in my whole life to realize that there was changes
that I needed to make.
And the grace for me was in the fact that it was OK to change
and it was OK to be broken enough to realize
that I needed a change.
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