love everybody

so many things have pointed me towards the subject of love lately. I am currently taking a prepartation for an eternal marriage course at the institute. I love it, no doubt about it. so far I have learned so much just about making a foundation of marriage. I certainly have a long way to go. I am also taking a book of mormon class and the last class which would be yesterday we talked about the power of love and of how we should love everybody. this is so true no matter how difficult it may be. the scriptures don't say the we have to like everybody but just love them. this is not the kind of love that comes with marriage but a sort of caring kind of love. everybody needs to know that they are important and are acknowledged.

I have wanted to be able to do this for some time but always finding it hard. I figured that jealousy played a major part in it. I mean I grew up in a family with my sister melanie being a wonderful student and the clarinet player of every music teachers dreams. she has also been much better at making friends than I am. and my younger sister sarah who is a 4.0 student and also an exceptional violin player. it seems to me that she has her moments of making feel dumb and "under" her. and the youngest sister Emma who is turning out to be the same as both of them together. and here I am and barely made it through elementry with a B, C average then moving on and eventually make it to the point of a B average with acuasional A or C's. then I get to Nursing and it seems I always get in the 70's of the tests and everybody else are getting 80's and even 90's. I have been blaming it on my hearing disability about how I am a slow learner and everything and I am not even street smart either.

but yesterday a kid in my class stood up and gave a thought of his own. he was having the same problem I am going through and he told us about how he figured out that it is hard to love others because we compare ourselves to others. I realized that is what I was doing, even though I knew I was comparing before, it was different when he got up and said it. it gave me a real reason to change my thoughts about not comparing myself to others (the reason of being able to love others). I found that when I changed those thoughts for so much as a few minutes I was happier. and was able to love more and also make a difference in someone else's life. I am slowly working on it but I hope to get to the point where I can except myself to how I am meant to be and be able to build up my confidence in myself.