{"id":48,"date":"2008-06-30T11:26:20","date_gmt":"2008-06-30T18:26:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elisabethboothe.com\/blog\/post48"},"modified":"2009-05-19T12:57:00","modified_gmt":"2009-05-19T19:57:00","slug":"a-new-start","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elisabethboothe.com\/blog\/post48","title":{"rendered":"A new start."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>First of all, I just want to thank all of you for all the nice comments you always make on my projects and musings. It means a lot to me, and I love hearing from all of you. I am excited to finish my chairs soon- hopefully this week!<\/p>\n<p>This weekend was a really big turn around point for me, in a couple aspects of my life. I know that I am not &#8220;fat&#8221; or anything like that, but I haven&#8217;t been feeling well with my headaches, and I haven&#8217;t been feeling happy about myself. I am the heaviest I have been in several years, but I didn&#8217;t want to do anything about it. So I am starting a new diet regime. Not as much to lose weight as it is to help me try and eat healthier. I did the South Beach diet 2 years ago and I felt really great, physically and mentally. I had more energy. I slowly let myself slip more and more (like, there&#8217;s nothing wrong with ice cream, but it&#8217;s not good if you have a big bowlful every night). I also had a strong impression that this was a good thing for me to do last night when I was able to see Elder Bednar talk (more on that in a minute!). So I start today!<\/p>\n<p>I also really feel more in tune with the gospel. I&#8217;ve been struggling with a few things lately. However, two situations have really helped me focus on the big picture. The first one was working on my talk.  I went through a lot of church materials and read my scriptures a lot to prepare for the talk, more deeply than I have done in a long time. Doing this brought back a lot of memories I had forgotten. I also prayed so I would be receptive to what might need to be said for those in my audience. In the end, I felt so confident and prepared when I went up to give my talk (it was long&#8230; 15-18 minutes&#8230; hehe) and I have never felt like that before. I know that because I spent more than a couple of hours on my talk, I was blessed. Even if the general message wasn&#8217;t directly what I needed, getting back into deep scripture study and the discipline of writing was what I needed.<\/p>\n<p>I think this first part with the talks also really helped me with the second part of my weekend. Elder David Bednar came to the Austin stake last night and did a fairly informal Q&amp;A for two hours. I won&#8217;t go into the details of everything I heard last night, because I know that not everything I got from it was directly something Elder Bednar said, and a lot of it is very personal to me. However, I want to say that last night, I KNEW that Elder Bednar was truly an apostle of the Lord. He radiates of so much goodness and calmness&#8230; a calmness and surety that you don&#8217;t often get to see in the world today with all the bustle and confusion. I know he is truly a great man and loves God and has devoted his life to serve the world so they can also come to know and love the Lord. I also knew, without any doubt, that the church is undeniably true, and has more truth to it than any other source on earth. It was a truly amazing experience that I will not forget for a long time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>First of all, I just want to thank all of you for all the nice comments you always make on my projects and musings. It means a lot to me, and I love hearing from all of you. I am excited to finish my chairs soon- hopefully this week! This weekend was a really big [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elisabethboothe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elisabethboothe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elisabethboothe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elisabethboothe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elisabethboothe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elisabethboothe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elisabethboothe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elisabethboothe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elisabethboothe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}