God is love.

Life has turned out pretty good so far. I am excited for school next month, because I still have post-mission weirdness clinging to me, and I see a Utah singles ward as something like immersion therapy. Every time I talk to a girl I feel like apologizing--something like, "I know I'm being weird and awkward, I swear I'm really a very normal, well-adjusted person"--but of course saying that would be even more weird and awkward, and I end up in this angsty teenage feedback loop inside my head until I feel like breathing into a bag or something.

But who am I kidding? It's so very convenient to blame it all on the mission, as if I was once a man of effortless confidence, and it was somehow stolen from me when I spent two years talking to strangers all day. And the trouble certainly isn't rooted in any stubborn vestigial qualms about flirting or contact with the opposite sex, I promise.

Which leads me to wonder how much this talk of "post-mission struggles" hasn't been concocted by guys like me who were pretty awkward to begin with, wanting desperately to believe that their social ineptitude is a recent and temporary phenomenon, whose conclusion is just around the next corner.

I had a kind of epiphany in this vein earlier in the week--that maybe it isn't my mission, maybe it isn't any one or two circumstances, maybe it isn't going to get any better, maybe it's just me--and the thought was so oppressive and incessant that I felt like going back to bed. I hope you've never had this kind of nagging anxiety; it's like having a neurotic, inbred Pomeranian in your head, just yapping itself breathless all morning; and unlike a real Pomeranian, you can't punt it out a window.

But it was mercifully Stake Temple Day, and a few hours in, I had a very different sort of epiphany: I realized that even if I am an incurably neurotic mess, I am still God's incurably neurotic mess, and he intends me to be happy regardless. It occurred to me that my happiness might be contingent on mental and social normalcy in a "natural" world; but Jesus took care of all that in Gethsemane, so I don't have to worry about anything but obedience and repentance. Every problem in life, no matter how trivial, I can take to the Lord and He will either heal it, or help me to endure it.

As I consider the depth of the Spirit's answer to my problem, it's almost funny; it was a fairly trivial problem in retrospect, and as you can tell, I obviously took it unbelievably seriously, to merit this kind of response from the Lord. You have to marvel at a Being who can succor the beggars and widows and lepers--who has seen and felt the sum of human suffering--and who can still talk to me about my little anxieties without even a hint of sarcasm.

--Kevin