Prayers are with Mitchell. There was a beautiful comment on his facebook page that I shared here. Enjoy today. If you have trials and struggles, face them today. Don't worry about the future, live today. Today is all we have.
From one of the videos about Mitchell's journey - "Live life for the moment because everything else is uncertain - Louis Tomlinson"
"We may not control the events in our life, but we can choose how to respond to them. What meaning they have for us. And that's a powerful thing. The choice is ours."
And some words of counsel along these lines from an Apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, Elder D. Todd Christofferson: Work through Large Problems in Small, Daily Bites
Asking God for our daily bread, rather than our weekly, monthly, or
yearly bread, is also a way to focus us on the smaller, more manageable
bits of a problem. To deal with something very big, we may need to work
at it in small, daily bites. Sometimes all we can handle is one day (or
even just part of one day) at a time. Let me give you a nonscriptural
example.
A book I read recently, titled Lone Survivor, recounts the
tragic story of a four-man team of U.S. Navy SEALs on a covert mission
in a remote sector of Afghanistan five and one-half years ago. When they
were inadvertently discovered by shepherds—two men and a boy—these
specially trained Navy servicemen had a choice either to kill the two or
let them go, knowing that if they let them live they would disclose the
team’s location and they would be attacked immediately by al Qaeda and
Taliban forces. Nevertheless, they let the innocent shepherds go, and in
the firefight that followed, only the author, Marcus Luttrell, survived
against well over 100 attackers.
In his book, Luttrell recounts the extreme training and endurance
required for one to qualify as a SEAL in the U.S. Navy. In Luttrell’s
training group, for example, of the 164 men who began, only 32 managed
to complete the course. They endured weeks of near-constant physical
exertion, in and out of cold ocean water, swimming, paddling and
carrying inflatable boats, running in sand, doing hundreds of push-ups a
day, carrying logs through obstacle courses, and so forth. They were in
a near-perpetual state of exhaustion.
I was impressed by something a senior officer said to the group as
they began the final and most demanding phase of their training.
“First of all,” he said, “I do not want you to give in to the
pressure of the moment. Whenever you’re hurting bad, just hang in there.
Finish the day. Then, if you’re still feeling bad, think about it long
and hard before you decide to quit. Second, take it one day at a time.
One [phase] at a time.
“Don’t let your thoughts run away with you, don’t start planning to
bail out because you’re worried about the future and how much you can
take. Don’t look ahead to the pain. Just get through the day, and
there’s a wonderful career ahead of you.”1
Generally it is good to try to anticipate what is coming and prepare
to deal with it. At times, however, this captain’s counsel is wise:
“Take it one day at a time. … Don’t look ahead to the pain. Just get
through the day.” To worry about what is or may be coming can be
debilitating. It can paralyze us and make us quit.
In the 1950s my mother survived radical cancer surgery, but difficult
as that was, the surgery was followed with dozens of painful radiation
treatments in what would now be considered rather primitive medical
conditions. She recalls that her mother taught her something during that
time that has helped her ever since: “I was so sick and weak, and I
said to her one day, ‘Oh, Mother, I can’t stand having 16 more of those
treatments.’ She said, ‘Can you go today?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, honey, that’s
all you have to do today.’ It has helped me many times when I remember
to take one day or one thing at a time.”
The Spirit can guide us when to look ahead and when we should just
deal with this one day, with this one moment. If we ask, the Lord will
let us know through the Holy Ghost when it may be appropriate for us to
apply in our lives the commandment He gave His ancient Apostles: “Take
therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought
for the things of itself. Sufficient is the day unto the evil thereof” (3 Nephi 13:34; see also Matthew 6:34).
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