Be a little sheep learning who'll shear and who'll feed

There is so much I don't understand and where I once felt isolated and bewildered in my doubts, I have now heard many voices who echo them. I have found validation in that, but I don't want to live my life defined by what has hurt me and by what is wrong. I am marked with biases and scarred with selfishness just like any other human being and what I realized tonight when I sent up a short, desperate prayer is that I have found happiness when I have put others' needs before my own, when I have had compassion, when I have been humble. These times have been embarrassingly few and far between in my life. Nevertheless, I know in whom I should place my trust. The truth I've found is that when I do anything to help lift the weight of the suffering of humanity I am filled with gladness and with the kind of sorrow that moves me to good works. I need to live a Christlike life whether or not He is who the Mormon church says He is. I believe in Him, I want to believe in Him. I want to believe that the falling sparrow matters and that children who die alone, cold, lonely and in terrible pain are encircled at last in loving arms, met with a warm smile by a bright face. I want to believe there is joy over the horizon. Maybe it is just an opiate for the masses and a nice story we tell ourselves when the wind is cold outside, but it's a story that matters, that causes man to aspire for greater things than the baseness that we default to when we don't replace it with anything else. I want to believe that people have the power to change, that I do. When I focus on negativity, inconsistencies, wrongness and abuse I feel a sort of energy brewing in me, but it does not move me towards anything good. I want to be a person who is moving. I know I have a lot to change. When I think of my husband praying for two hours every night on his mission, I think of how wrong we were then, how young and naive, but also how earnest and right. We can both do better. I want to utilize my time with him and with my tiny one who is next to me right now. I can say for certain tonight, even if I knew absolutely that there is nothing After, I would not want to live any differently, wouldn't snuff out my life with selfishness. Whether or not we are "earning a great reward," I want to keep peeling back my weaker shell to my pure self who is good, who is made of love. Jonathan told me, if the universe was made with Love, what do you have to be afraid of? I keep thinking of this quote from The Silver Chair:

“One word, Ma’am,” he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. “One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things–trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”