Faith, Hope, Happiness & Love: Starting Out

I have been waiting to have children to start a blog, because then I'll have some cool little people to write about and update family, but here I am starting early. I'm starting this blog now for a few reasons:

• In the July 2008 Ensign (a Magazine distributed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) there was a focus on Sharing the Gospel Using the Internet, including a particular talk by M.Russell Ballard. I can sometimes be pretty shy to open my mouth and tell people the things I know because I don't want to 'force' them to hear it - but I'm not going to be worried about that on my blog because nobody will be forced to read it at all :) If anybody wanders on here who has questions about spiritual things, or who would like to know more about our Saviour Jesus Christ, hopefully they'll follow one of the links I plan on making to http://www.mormon.org/ or http://www.lds.org/ so they can learn more. Or maybe one of the spiritual experiences I'll share will help someone to know that Heavenly Father loves us and cares for us.
• I have recently been reading (while working as a receptionist and having not much else to do!) the blog of a friend of my sister at her recommendation, called Divergent Pathways. What a wonderful sweet sister who writes this! She really has uplifted me, and what usually turns into about half a day of reading depressing news stories and random other things online (while I sit at my computer in this big lonely foyer waiting for the phone to ring!) turned into a wonderful, uplifting day. This sister has other blogs - one about her children, but this is just her blog, and as far as I can tell she uses it to write uplifting and wonderful stories and remind herself and everyone else of gratitude and love. Reading this blog has been the final push to me to start this blog now. It is just mine, and I will try to do something similar :)
• As I read the Divergent Pathways blog I thought how special this must be for her and her family to read back on and remember wonderful experiences they've had. In that way, it's sort of like a journal! I am not a very good journal writer, am a much faster typist and have had a few flings with Word document journals, but they didn't last forever. This is bad because it's a commandment to keep a record or journal, so I am going to use this as a journal. Hopefully I won't read back on this 'journal' and be bored, because just in case anyone else reads it, I'm going to try to fill it only with the interesting and wonderful things that happen in our lives.

So wish me luck! :) I hope to share many wonderful stories and experiences that inspire or share faith, hope, happiness and love. And most things make me happy, so we should never run out of things to talk about :)

xo