Pushing New Limits!

Is this not breath taking? God truly is our creator.  He is a artist! 

WOW!

James made me feel like a model here! :) He kept saying WOW you look so beautiful. This is one of my favorite pictures of you. You look great and on and on and on! I have a pretty awesome husband! 

SO GREEN!!!! I just love summer! Please summer don't end! My shoes feel out of place in this pic, but I was hiking!!! 

I am so glad I got to go hiking with my best friend. I am glad that he helped me get down and really actually got to be my knight in shining armor.  I love you James! 

Almost the same pic, but James like this one more so I had to post both! We went to the park and had some water and lunch. James so sweet. He kissed me and told me he loved me. We make a cute couple huh? 

I took this picture, and after I did I started to have a anxiety attack. I love to hikes, I hate heights... kind of interesting combo and story there. lol 

So My Friend Keira did this blog post about "I can do hard things" and her's is much more hard core then mine. She hiked timp. You know the one that takes several hours to do? Uh sha. Keira you are AWESOME! Maybe I'll do that sometime!  ha ha thats a big maybe. Anyways, My intial thought when I read her blog was "Oh ya baby, bring on the exercise" but she didn't talk about how hiking took a lot of endurance strength/or about burning calories or how sore she was after. She took on a more eternal perspective. She compared it to trials in life.  I didn't quite get it, until I went hiking today. I'd like to think I was am physically fit, and have some muscle tone and very good breathing technique due to running. (I even ran up part of it--and James hated me for it!) Physically I was up for the challenge. I knew I could do it. Going up was easy! I stepped carefully on each rock, and little by little I got to the top!  It was the coming down part that actually threw me for a loop. We were taking pictures of the waterfall and just talking and about 5 minutes into our conversation I realized I was on the top of the mountain and I literally could fall off the edge at any minute! My Grandma Shirley lost a child from them being to close to the edge and falling off a cliff, so I know for a fact those kind of things do happen! My Dad also fell down the stairs, and later passed away, so even though this may have not be a big deal to you I do have some validity in my fears.  I started to hyperventilate. This was  not good. James looked at me with his warm eyes and smiled. He took compassion on me and knew I was scared. He said "grab my hand", but it seemed out a reach. I froze for a few minutes not knowing what I should do. Finally he said "honey you can't stay up there forever". Then I realized how frightened  Keira must have been in her own hike. When I thought about Keira, instantly I thought of my own life. I mean she has my name for goodness sake-how could I not?? 

Sometimes in life we are on a very steep mountain. We don't know how to get down. We are lonely, depressed, exhausted, or in my case extremely scared! Sometimes we don't know what to do, but actually we do. We must be BRAVE, and take the steps to get down. Like James says, we can't stay there forever. We must reach out for others who can lend a hand, and also rely on our Heavenly Father and the Gospel of Jesus Christ to help us get down. We must have faith that we won't fall, and that we will make it down okay. Having faith is to act. I couldn't just sit on my bottom for the rest of my life! I had to lift my feet up and start moving. This is hard, but with each passing step you get closer to your destination, but finally you DO make it down.  

I read another blog the other day, who talked about abuse. How that is a trial, and how it harms the spirit. The perpetrator- and the one being abused. There are SO many trials out there..that are not at all what we had pictured. Even HARDER then what we had pictured. Much much harder. Sometimes even unbearable. Death, Divorce, Abuse, Transgression, Depression, Anxiety, Unemployment, Sickness, Low self esteem, mental issues, etc. These are all battles and mountains, we must climb and get over. I have some pretty hard ones going on right now, but I am thankful for all those people who wrote about there hard experiences, and how they had the courage to keep going and keep pressing forward, because thats what we ALL must do. We must overcome our fears, step up to the plate, and play the game of Life with all we got! Who knows? We just might win! ;)