The Game of Life

I love games!!! If you have ever played a game with me, you'd know how much I love them. I guess I just get entertained super easily. For example, I played a game tonight with my sister-in-law, Sarah. I played a game of Scrabble. Now I have never been terribly good at Scrabble, but tonight, for some reason, I was the one picking decent letters, and Sarah was picking horrible letters. I absolutely crushed!
Even if I hadn't won, it is always fun playing games with the members of my family and with my friends. Another game I absolutely love playing is Mau. Now if you haven't played the game Mau with me, and you don't mind hating me for a night or two, ask me to play it. It is one of my favorite games ever, and I love playing it. Actually, I'll give every game a chance :D. More games I absolutely love, but aren't limited to these, are:

Settlers of Catan
Risk
Monopoly
Dungeons and Dragons (don't hate)
House on Haunted Hill
Pandemic
Video Games (in General, but not during 2011)
Mad Gab
Golf (and all other card games)
Skipbo (and all other of those kind of card games)
Life

The reason I write about this subject isn't to make you all long to play games with me (I know you all want to, and if you do just call me up! Or just go on not living :D). No, it's to talk about something else that happened today. Today I learned something about

The Game of Life


Not the board game but life. LIFE. Was is it about life that is so amazing? Is it the tests and trials we go through during our duration on earth? Or is it the love and happiness we find during mortality? I'd like to submit that the answer to that is, both! Trials are so hard in life! They push us to where we are uncomfortable and where we don't want to be. They make us think, do things we're not accustomed to do. Throw off our basic, routine lives. The end result, though, is always the same. We grow!! (Man I talk about that a lot... weird)
The love and happiness we find in this life is what is going to be carried with us throughout all the eternities. It is impossible to comprehend how happy we will be, but I know that through Christ we will become happy, both in this life and through all eternity. I want to be happy. Love, in my opinion, is one of the things God gives us to make us happiest.

Trials stink! Let me tell you a story about a family I met today. I heard about them through a text from my sister-in-law. I came to visit my two brand new nephews (Matthew and Michael Wagstaff), and then I came by my sister-in-law's house to visit, and I found out I was needed to help a neighbor move all their stuff out of their home. I go to the house and I see the garage with scorch marks on the side. I walk in the house and everything has so much smoke marks or whatever on it.
Last night, for the 4th of July (though it was the 2nd of July) they were providing the little settlement of Day Break with a firework show. All of a sudden, a firework decided to stray off and go into their garage and go off inside. The garage was full of other fireworks, causing a chain reaction and lots of exploding. It wasn't long before the garage was in flames and filling the rest of the house with smoke, ruining all of their stuff. The firefighters were there soon thereafter, but the fire had already done so much damage.
So the ward and some other random people, like me, helped move all their things out of their house, and we tried to salvage anything that was salvageable. Most of the couches will have a smoke smell to them, if the family were to keep them, and some other things won't be performing their same duties, mostly because they're going to the dump, but there were some things that were saved.
The family has already been offered a place to stay by a woman who lives in a house by herself, for free, and she said they could stay there as long as they needed, even if it was three months. WOW! What an amazing thing. Something so tragic happens to this nice, sweet, little family, and the community is right there to provide those things they lost.
Their lives will be changed forever! Their game pretty much was reset, but they will keep continuing on. They will probably win their game of life.

The beginning of this life (Matthew and Michael are just starting it) is amazing. Matthew and Michael are a day an a half old and they were so amazing to behold. It made me think about something I learned earlier today. I was thinking to myself, I kind of want to go back in my life. I want to go back to maybe one certain time period in my life and totally change my actions. I wanted to see what my life would be like now if I were to change that era of my life. The more I thought about it, the more something kept coming to my mind. If I really want to change that part of my life that badly, I should change myself now to live in correspondence to the way I wanted to go back and change. The past is in the past, and I can't change that. What I can change is my future and changing to how I wish I used to be now, will make me become who I wish I were now later. Hope that made sense. You may have to read it a couple of times.

Alma 34:32-For behold, this life is the time for men to prepare to meet God; yea, behold the day of this life is the day for men to perform their labors.

My game of life is still at the beginning. I haven't even received my college degree, and I haven't chosen a career... I haven't even made it to the first stop sign!! I feel I have a long way to go until I'll feel prepared enough to meet God, but when I finally meet Him (though I know I'll never be fully ready) I'll hopefully be able to say, "I have performed those labors that thou has asked of me, and Jesus Christ will be my advocate for all those times I did fall short." And hopefully I'll hear the words, "Well done, thou good and faithful sevant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord."-Matthew 25:13 Or in other words, you win :D. I love winning! And so will be my outcome of my Game of Life, me winning with the Savior's help!