Adventures of An Intern - Weeks 1-3

I thought was nervous packing up my car and driving to Arizona, but I confess it was nothing CLOSE to the anxiety I felt about coming to Texas. I very carefully planned to arrive in Houston the day before work started, because I couldn't handle the thought of hanging around staring at the walls. Going through huge changes in my life essentially makes me question every decision I've ever made, and long for normalcy. Luckily, my first weekend of work was also our family reunion in Nauvoo.

Keep in mind that any kind of intense emotion, good or bad, makes me cry. I've been looking forward to this family reunion since we started planning it a year and a half ago, and especially with all the changes lately, I couldn't wait to be with my favorite people. In spite of a very rough start, including a canceled flight (and the guy in front of me was missing his own wedding because of it so . . . I really didn't have a good story), flying into a completely different city and paying $800 for a rental car, it was a perfect weekend. I've included a bunch of my favorite pictures, but it's a safe bet that at any given time during the weekend, I was crying. These people that make up my family . . . I could never say enough good about them.

I cried embarrassingly as I drove away to another week of work. I'm really enjoying my project so far - it's the perfect combination of analytics and process improvement, although it's still taking some time to get my feet underneath me. My team is fantastic and really kind. It's been an interesting experience working in a company as big as Chevron, and with an intern program that's really well defined. Lots of fun lunch and learns and great networking.

Catherine got my name for Christmas, so a week ago I got my gift - a weekend in San Antonio!! It was absolutely amazing. She had written out an itinerary for every day, with a few options on how we could change things. We ate amazing food (including one meal VERY high up in the air), walked through beautiful areas of the city and parks, and even knocked another item off my 30 Before 30 list. It was so much fun to spend the weekend with Catherine - she is such an incredible woman, and such a great example to me.

Overall, my first few weeks here have been very challenging, both emotionally and intellectually. This internship is going to be very challenging, but I'm grateful for another growth opportunity to learn and be a big girl. :) More to come on future adventures!

If You Can't Say Something Nice, Don't Say Nothing At All

My mother was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. One day my oldest sister came home and told her how the kids at school had teased her and said mean things. She expected my mom to tell her how sorry she was, and talk about how mean and wicked those children had been. Instead, my mom responded, “Oh sweetie, now you know what that feels like. I hope you never treat anyone that way.”

I have a general rule in my life that I’m not allowed to read the comments on any article or blog post online, because inevitably I end up feeling ill at how angry and mean people can be. While I tell myself over and over again NOT to click on things, I sometimes don’t listen to my inner warnings and end up regretting it. A popular singer recently released a music video that desecrated several things that I consider sacred. I should not have read the interview he gave after it came out, because it made me angry, and then incredibly sad. Sad mostly because I felt his logic was flawed: he said he did it to try and protest some things he doesn’t agree with, but history has shown over and over again that hatred never solves anything. It never brings about change. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." While I don’t deny his right to disagree, to be angry, and to make his opinion known, hatred only breeds more hatred.

I have an overly simplistic view on life, but I believe that aside from making the best choices I possibly can in my own life, the only thing I have to do is love people. We don’t make it easy. We are difficult creatures. (To the person who was going 60 mph and then sped up to 95 when we finally made it to a passing lane . . . grr.) However, it is always worth it! We will never regret being too kind. Henry James said, “Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”

The fact of the matter is, we will never have the full story on someone’s life, and therefore we should never pass judgment on the way they are acting. It is so much easier to respond with anger, with irritation, with sarcasm. It takes an incredible amount of discipline and character to respond with kindness, but I believe so many of the problems we are currently facing as a society would be solved if we would do as JM Barrie counseled, and, “Always be a little kinder than necessary.”

We Read To Know We're Not Alone

Every once in a while, I get the crazy notion that I want to write a book. Then, of course, I get an assignment to write a 20-page paper and I come to my senses rather quickly. This passing fancy stems not from a love of writing, but because I love reading so much.

I recently started reading a book around midnight in the hopes that it would exhaust my mind enough to sleep. I finished the book around 5 am, and while I was exhausted the next day, I can’t necessarily say that I regret it. It’s not the first time I’ve pulled an all-nighter reading a book, nor is it the first time that I’ve made poor choices regarding books. As a child, I remember hiding in closets and under stairs with a book and a flashlight for hours when I should have been cleaning the garage or helping in the yard.

People often say to me that they have no time for reading, and while I probably wouldn’t recommend my overnight read-a-thon approach to other people, I would take a good book over any other form of entertainment. W. Somerset Maugham said that, “The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.” I have so many books that are truly a part of my life and have shaped me as I’ve grown. They have been my companions, my friends, my escape when life seems to be too much. At any given time, I’ll be listening to an audiobook, reading a book on my Kindle app, and have at least two physical books lying around the house that I’ll pick up when I have a moment.

This is my favorite Norman Rockwell drawing – it depicts how I feel when I read a book. Inside a book is a world that I’ve never explored, and suddenly anything is possible. It’s almost like stepping inside someone else’s head for a few hours and broadening my understand to a point of view that I could never have, because I see everything through the lens of my own experience.

The book Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian novel that depicts a society where books are illegal. While this concept is clearly horrific in and of itself for me, what was more disturbing was the process of how this society got there. When someone reads a book, they suddenly know something that someone who hasn’t read it doesn’t know. In an effort to make things “fair,” they slowly go shortening books and concepts, reducing them to soundbites on a television so that there is total knowledge equality. In our world where everyone is more concerned about being politically correct than being kind and intelligent, I feel this has frightening implications for our future.

A favorite gift.

I love learning. I love reading. I love changing and growing and becoming something more than what I was yesterday. I felt the great need to write this, partly because I’ve been reading like a mad person lately, and partly to remind myself that I love this process. School occasionally tries to convince me otherwise, but the books I’ve read are as much a part of me as my friends and family.

That’s all for tonight. Got to finish that crazy-long paper early tomorrow morning. And there’s still 15 pages before my chapter ends. 

Wise Men Still Seek Him

Wise men seek Him still.

While anyone who knows me can attest that I have a flare for the dramatic, I've never really been a fan of theatrics when it comes to sacred things. Certain aspects of things like pioneer trek reenactments can make me feel uncomfortable, simply because that's not how I feel the spirit. So when Relief Society on Sunday started off with a Christmas tree with presents on it, and the lesson was for different sisters to go up and unwrap the gifts of Christ, I confess that I rolled my eyes a bit and started reading a talk on my phone. The Relief Society president in the ward I was attending had just been released, and one of the sisters in the ward told me that it was because she's been incredibly sick for the past several years without any relief in sight. As the women started opening the "gifts" on the tree, they would call up the next sister to open the next one. When the newly-released Relief Society president went up and opened her "gift," she read, "this that the word might be fulfilled which saith he will take upon him the pains and the sicknesses of his people… and he will take upon him their infirmities, that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities.”

Needless to say, quite a few people were crying by the end. Some might call that a coincidence, that a woman suffering deeply from physical illness pulls a wrapped quote off a Christmas tree that talks about the power of Christ to heal, and to succor those with illness. But I don’t buy that. I felt chagrined that I was skeptical of this teaching method, when clearly there were people getting the support they needed from it. As always, God is aware of what’s going on, and taking care of things.

I think for me, that is a true spirit of Christmas; all that is unfair about life WILL be made right through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. There are so many times when it seems that’s an impossible statement, when you look around at all the injustice in the world. But incredibly enough, I believe it with all that I am. It is precisely the difficulties of this life that make the light of Christ so beautiful to me. He is the light because it is through Him that we can see everything around us. “May the beautiful lights of every holiday season remind us of Him who is the source of all light.”

Looking back, it’s been a rough year. It’s been a wonderful year. A year full of miracles, loneliness, tender mercies, frustration, music, tears, long days followed by late nights, change and moments that made me laugh so hard it hurt. Throughout all of it, I feel great hope for what is to come. Because fortunately, I’m not the one in charge. Merry Christmas, all you wonderful, lovely people!

The Spirit of Halloween

I love Halloween. There’s enough theater running through my veins to appreciate dressing up, doing something unusual with my hair, and an excuse to wear false eyelashes and blue eye shadow.

I also love Halloween because it brings with it many happy memories of childhood. We rarely had candy around the house, so eating all of the sugar was so novel and magical. I have distinct memories of my friends at school talking about their strategic trick or treating, how they knew where all of the “good houses” that gave out full sized candy bars were, and how they made sure to hit the right streets in order to maximize the candy-to-distance-covered ratio. I remember thinking how cool it would be to trick or treat like that, but knowing for certain that it was not going to be a possibility. Because trick or treating at the Sawaya house was strategic too.

I remember trick or treating at the trailer park, where old, lonely ladies would give us candy that may or may not pass the inspection of what was “recent enough” to eat. I remember walking quickly to specific houses in the neighborhood because someone had mentioned they looked forward to seeing us, or because dad was their home teacher. I remember driving an hour to trick or treat at grandma’s house. And I remember standing impatiently for what seemed like hours while mom and dad took the time to talk to everyone we visited.

I miss mom. She was such an amazing person, and she was such an incredible example of how to live a selfless life. She lived for others every single day of her life, in addition to being very grounded and intelligent. She personified the sentiment that “…there is power in self-sacrifice.”

To be honest, I miss her every day. I think I miss her more as I get older, because there are so many things I wish I could ask her. I wanted to talk to her about the decision to go to grad school. I wanted to talk to her about why heartbreak seems to get harder each time it happens. Living in Arizona now, a place that I always associated with her, I think about how she loved the sun. I want to talk to her about those few and far between, but very real, moments when I walk past baby clothes in Target and an overwhelming sense of longing that almost feels like bitterness creeps into my chest.

Aside from a certain knowledge of her love, the thing I remember most about mom was her testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It’s ironic that the thing she taught me most is the thing that prepared me to deal with her death – a peace in knowing that this life is not the end. It gives me the strength to face the things that are less than ideal. “As we make Christ the center of our lives, our fears will be replaced by the courage of our convictions.”

Watch The Unfolding

My niece recently learned to drive working towards her driver’s license. After going for a ride with her at the wheel, my dad described the experience as, “She drives the way Amy lives her life: in sudden starts and stops.”

Truly, it’s just how I am – it’s how I choose to be. I want to get there quickly. Progress is movement, everything is an action verb, words are empty without actions behind them. I’m an extremely rational person completely driven by emotion, and once I’ve reached a conclusion or decided on a destination, my goal is to get there as quickly and efficiently as possible. (Surprisingly, no one who knows me has ever asked why I find supply chain – a discipline focused on doing things better, faster, cheaper and more efficiently – intriguing.)

This gets me into trouble with situations that can’t be solved with a checklist, or by working harder at them. I become frustrated with myself when I can’t solve it all immediately or the first time I attempt it. Surely any failure on my part is a result of not working at it hard enough and long enough.

There is a well-known experiment with children and marshmallows where the children are told that if they can refrain from eating a marshmallow for 15 minutes, they will get another one. Only about 30% were able to wait, but the interesting part of the experiment came from the fact that the children who were able to wait actually had more success in life. They struggled less to interact and socialize with others. “What started as a simple experiment with children and marshmallows became a landmark study suggesting that the ability to wait—to be patient—was a key character trait that might predict later success in life.

Grad school is a really lovely opportunity for me to feel completely inadequate and overwhelmed on a regular basis. A heavy work load, combined with some health issues that I haven’t been able to resolve, led to an emotional breakdown this weekend where I called a good friend and fell apart. I expressed that I didn’t feel like I had the capacity to deal with my current load because I don’t know how to solve or answer my health problems, I have too much to do, and I can’t quickly solve my problems. He responded with something that has changed my perspective completely: the Lord isn’t preoccupied with efficiency. In fact, the lack of efficiency is part of the plan. Maybe the most important part of the plan.  The Lord could accomplish His work quickly through the most capable people the earth has to offer; if He wanted to, He could just show himself and everyone would believe. Instead, he sends out 18 year old kids to preach His word. He has men with 7 children and full time jobs watch over the congregation. He has young adults with no education teach Sunday School classes. He’s much less concerned with the end result we come up with and more concerned about the process we take to get there. “…in your patience you win mastery of your souls.”

The most dangerous ship in a hurricane is an empty one. The cargo of experience is what weighs it down and keeps it steady. It doesn’t mean that the storms won’t come, but rather that we will be prepared and capable to face them, to face storms much greater than what we thought we could. The process of arriving will not be easy or pleasant. The story of the stripling warriors teaches us that in following the Lord, we may suffer injuries and fatigue and uncertainty, but we will not perish. “…[W]ithout patience, we cannot please God; we cannot become perfect. Indeed, patience is a purifying process that refines understanding, deepens happiness, focuses action, and offers hope for peace.” 

Perhaps the very things that are causing me pain and feelings of inadequacy are the things that are anchoring me in my life, preparing me for the future, and transforming me into something of greater substance. And the trials in my life are not things I am meant to solve immediately. My friend pointed out that God is probably not overly concerned with what decisions I make during this time, as there is no right answer to the mountains I am facing. But He cares what process I use to approach them. Just maybe, He sees more in me than I see in myself.

Gorgeous At The End

Learning a new language is hard. Trying to express the deepest, most sacred thoughts in one’s heart is hard. Trying to express the deepest, most sacred thoughts in one’s heart in a new language is … hard. Which essentially describes my LDS mission. Hard.

I had been in Uruguay for 6 weeks when I had a change of companion and I was suddenly facing someone that didn’t speak English, and who was dependent on me to explain who everyone was. My buffer was gone; it was one of the most terrifying moments of my life. I sat on the roof of our small apartment clutching my scriptures and crying. Yes, it was as pathetic as you imagine.

In this particular city, there was a man in the leadership of the church who wasn’t overly happy about having female missionaries. We had several run ins with him that escalated to the point where the bishop had to intervene. He was the first counselor in the bishopric, so it made things pretty awkward. My first Sunday after my English-speaking companion left, they made a change in the bishopric. What I understood was that the man who had been complaining about having sister missionaries had just been made the bishop. I was scared to death of him from our previous encounters, but I wanted to start things off on a good foot and see if I could repair the damage, so I walked straight up to him after the meeting and said, “Congratulations, brother!”

It wasn’t until several weeks later that I realized what had ACTUALLY happened was that he was released from his calling in the bishopric because of his altercations with the missionaries. Yeah, big oops. This story still fills me with complete chagrin and embarrassment. I really wish I could explain to him, apologize profusely, and then potentially sink into a hole in the ground at his feet. I recounted this story to a friend the other day, and through her laughter, she replied, “You were part of his refining process!”

It was a casual comment, but it stopped me in my tracks. At first, I was horrified – I know those “refining” moments and they are terribly painful and hard. I never wanted to be part of someone’s refining process! I was sincerely trying to do what I thought was right – that’s not fair to him that he had to deal with my incompetency in Spanish.

Another story.

You’ve seen Frozen, right? When Anna’s in trouble, she turns to the man she trusts for an act of true love. He tells her that he never loved her and locks her in a room for her heart to freeze over. (I find an unsettlingly large number of parallels from my life to hers, but we won’t delve too deeply into that.) She finds the act of love herself by looking OUTSIDE of herself to the needs of others. Love will thaw.

In Anna’s case, Hans was part of her refining process. She walked away a little older, a little wiser, perhaps a little more cautious in her choices, and most likely with some pain she’d never experienced before.

In the end, we are all a part of each other’s refining processes. Intentional or not, we will all cause pain in someone else’s life. We’re beautifully imperfect people, trying to find happiness and meaning in what we do, and along the way, we say things and do things that hurt, injure, insult and demean each other. Rather than allow this to create rifts between us, it should make us more understanding and patient with the imperfections we each have. Bryant McGill said, “As your consciousness, refinement and pureness of heart expands you will become less judgmental, less corrective, less reactive, less black-and-white, less critical, less apt to blame and less tormented by others and their faults and views.”

To refine means to, “remove impurities or unwanted elements.” In an industrial setting, this refining process almost always means being put through heat and pressure – it’s incredibly uncomfortable. It is also completely necessary to become more than ourselves. To become the best we can be. “I have come to believe that our innate purpose is nothing more than to be the greatest version of ourselves. It is a process of refinement, improvement, and enhancement. When you are aligned with this process and living your purpose, you have the potential of creating something amazing.” (Steve Maraboli)