Things Grow Better in Poop

As any dog owner can attest, life is full of poop. All kinds of poop. Some so unpleasant, it's uncomfortable to even mention them. However, as the book "Everybody Poops" so kindly points out, poop is something we all have to deal with. This is a fact that has frustrated me rather a lot in the last year or so of my life. I do not personally care for poop, but it seems that one simply cannot avoid it. As they say, poop happens.

Somewhere in the midst of dealing with infertility and my parents' divorce and the accompanying personal fall out, I finally accepted it: my life has some really poopy poop in it. I don't like it. I don't like not having control over some of the most important parts of my life. I don't like that I cannot change other people's choices, especially the ones that hurt me. But I feel the fire of my faith beginning to glow a little more consistently. I think I have always fallen into the hot but kind of inconsistent faith fire category. But as I am daily faced with the choice to throw in the towel or throw my hands up and simply withdraw from reality in whatever way seems most convenient (chocolate often seems most convenient), I am finding that what President Benson said is true, at some point we are all backed up to the wall of faith, and there we must take a stand. So, I either give up, or I find some faith in humanity, in myself, in my marriage, in my Savior. And I don't like the first option. Also, I am finding that I simply don't have time or energy to care as much about what people think of me as I always have. I am learning to like me, and shouldn't that be good enough? So the poop becomes the catalyst for my growing inner strength and, seemingly ironically, inner peace.

I guess farmers have always known it - throw some poop on something, and it grows faster. Disgusting, smelly, but true. And I guess in the end, if something beautiful, useful and nourishing grows, it was worth all the crap.