My Testimony, Part 2

Once I moved back to Pennsylvania, about nine months passed before I really took any action of any kind. That's when I began blogging and took up a part-time job as a sales associate at American Eagle Outfitters. Around March of 2010, I discovered a purpose I desired and that was to go back to school. I had been going to physical therapy for my fibromyalgia for a few months and thought it would be really awesome to go to school to be a physical therapist assistant; to help others in ways I'd been helped myself. So, I began looking into schooling, and discovered I wanted something other than PTA school but wasn't quite sure what yet, so I began taking gen ed classes in the summer of 2010 (best decision I had made in a long time). It got me back into the classroom, around people again, got my brain active, especially because doing nothing for those 9 months since being home from NTBI really took a toll on me mentally and caused some dark depression. School was a great decision, one that still makes me proud and excited to have done to this day. Once fall of 2010 came around, I signed up for more classes, this time declaring my major to be English - I am a huge grammar, spelling, editing, and literature nut - and couldn't have been happier. I finished fall semester, and then spring semester, then met a guy in February of 2011.

This guy happened to be friends with a really good friend of mine, Meg, whom I had gone to church with and somewhat grown up with, someone I had looked up to, but had fallen away from since she had moved to California for school. This guy was hard on my heart, didn't protect it, played with it as if it were a toy, so much so that I had a horrible panic attack... this led me to open back up to Meg once again, reach out to her, and she invited me to come visit her out in California that March of 2011. So, I went. While I was there, I fell in love with it. I had been out to visit one other time and loved it, but never thought twice about perhaps I could move out here. Well, this time around was different. This time I truly thought about it, because I felt something. So, I began praying while I was on this trip. Nobody knew what was going on inside my heart besides Heavenly Father and myself, and my last night in California, a gentleman whom I had never met prayed over me; he prophesied into my life, praying a Bible verse from the book of Revelation, where God is speaking and he spoke directly to me, saying "I have opened a door, and I am asking you to walk through it." That was the clearest sign I could've asked for, so I decided then and there that I would be moving to California, and that whatever hardships would come my way, God would turn those mountains into flat land. And He did!

And there was this guy I met during my visit, Dan, whom I thought to be very handsome, but I didn't know yet that I was to move out to California when I met him, so I thought nothing of it. Well, when I went back to PA and now knew I would be moving to CA, I went onto Facebook and added Dan as a friend and we began talking - so much so that we began long-distance dating. I then moved to California 2 months later on May 31st, 2011 and about a month and a half later on July 6th, Dan proposed and we were engaged. 6 months later on December 31st, we were married. As you can tell, things moved rather quickly, but I believe that amongst a thousand other lessons and reasons during my marriage, a huge one was to get me out to California to soften my heart toward the LDS church. Fast forward two and a half years and a heck of a lot of pain on both ends, Dan and I began discussing divorce. Because of this divorce talk, I prayed what I now call my Joseph Smith prayer, or my Nephi prayer. I prayed because I knew I was missing out on something: the gift of the Holy Ghost talked about in the New Testament was something I had never experienced, and something I was confused about why I had never experienced it before, and it left me asking questions, many many questions, hard questions. The main question I asked Heavenly Father was, what was my religion missing? I wanted the full truth, the entire truth, all of it, and nothing besides the truth, and I would do whatever it took to get there, no matter what, even if it had been a religion I had made fun of in the past, or mocked, I would have the truth. That was my prayer.

A couple months later, I met Michael, and everything changed.

Part 3 coming soon!