Living with being different

I was thinking a great deal of my experience in this life being different. Ever since I was a child, I always knew that I was very different. I have experienced that feeling of being an outsider. When I was admitted into deaf school, I thought that the feeling of being different is resolved when I am among my peers. I found myself to be wrong once again . . . I found the difference as soon as when I entered pre-teens. I found my friends doing things that I wasn't allowed to do like watching R-rated movies or wearing immodest clothes. It was when I realize what it means to be a Latter-day Saint.

I talked about that sense of normalcy with my husband . . . A word used frequently in psychology studies. When they try to make the sense with people who weren't getting along well in their life. I also have seen how our perception of reality becomes distorted when our brains aren't working too well. It was very unsteady field, the psychological studies . . . Just like Alice in the Wonderland. Things always look pretty crazy and logic becomes a bit skewered. We also noted that people with similar issues tend to feel more comfortable with others that share those with them. Like mothers enjoying time with other mothers or computer programmer appreciating a long conversation time with another computer programmers.

Today in Relief Society, we talked about the Living Water . . . The story of clean water project was mentioned. Church frequently goes to third world country to build wells for the villages. Before Church built wells . . . women frequently had to set aside a large part of day to walk nine miles to get clean water for her family. After the new well being established, she just has to walk a mile to get it. I thought it was very important to clarify and make a point. I talked about in many parts of the country, they weren't lacking in water but rather lacking in CLEAN WATER. They have a quite bit of water but much of it is infested with parasites and typhus. You will become sick if you drank them. I thought a great deal of the importance of having clean water and how it contributes to our well being. While dirty water makes us sick. What we put into ourselves really make what we are. Sick or healthy. Also, we discussed about how gospel, living water, made our lives very different from the others . . . Gospel really sets us aside!

While we are capable of identifying what is wrong with our physical body, we are not able to identify our spiritual needs outright. As we were born, we came down with veil clouding our spiritual eyes. We are unable to see the other side and we forgot everything as in whole sense. So we are left with what we could experience with our human senses. So it really leaves us with too little to grapple on. We then develop that sense of normalcy within our perception of what is real and what is not.

We want to feel like we belong to something. We crave for love. We once lived in the light of love that belongs to our Heavenly Father. We miss it dreadfully so we work so hard to belong to something. Within our current existence, we seek for what is normal and what is not then we work so hard to belong so we can get what we crave for which is love and acceptance.

I suppose that Heavenly Father knew that so well and gave us that difficult challenge . . He said, "Be my peculiar people". He is asking us to be different. He is asking us to become HIS people and be similar to Him.

As I was growing up, I had to make many difficult choices that would set me apart from the others and give myself a lonelier life. It is even lonelier because I am deaf . . . Not too many of those are both deaf and Latter-day Saint. It did give me a will and strength to make better choice when I became an adult.