i know i promised pictures...

... but I haven't had time yet. But I will! Totally forthcoming. In the meantime, here are my thoughts from today, copied from an email to a friend.

It's interesting... on the mission your sense of purpose is keen; you know clearly what you're supposed to be doing and there are very clear ways of identifying if you are completing your mission or not. It gives you a nice feeling of accomplishment at the end of the day to know that you did your best and obeyed all the rules and put all the little pieces in to make the perfect missionary day. Yet that time as a full-time missionary is just preparatory; as the mission progresses and when we return home, we have to start to learn to not live by checklists and instead to live by the Spirit. There is no longer anyone telling us what our mission is--we now have to discover it by revelation, and find out if we're fulfilling it by acts of faith and the later confirmation that what we've done is right. This was really hard for me when I got home. I wanted the checklist! I wanted someone to just tell me what to do, and boy howdy would I do it. I'd do it wholeheartedly, and especially if it involved teaching the gospel all day and serving people. The Lord now needed me to prepare for and find my new mission, however: He needed me to educate myself so that I could better serve Him. He needed me to be lonely a few hundred times so that I could better empathize with those whose hands hang down. He needed me to choose for myself a career path so that I could advise my children on how to do it for themselves later, so that I could find my passion on my own and feel the accomplishment of discovering it for myself and not the feeling of being forced into a career and resenting the Lord on the bad days for having "made" me do something I didn't like, and He needed me to learn to make important decisions on my own, because He's training me to be like Him, and He makes these kinds of decisions all the time. So gradually I'm starting to feel like my life's mission is as beautiful as my full-time mission was, even though it taxes me and tests me just as my mission constantly did, though in different ways. Once we've shown the Lord we want to be obedient to Him and to do His work, He trusts us to make of our lives a masterpiece, as Elder Wirthlin said, and to do many good things of our own free will. He knows we'll do good things, so He just lets us choose what we will, because He knows it will be awesome and that we won't forget to counsel with Him and listen to His gentle guidance.