Step by Step

This summer my husband and I had the wonderful opportunity to serve as a "Ma and Pa" with a group of youth as a "family" while we participated in a pioneer Trek experience in eastern Washington.  The Trek lasted 4 days and we pulled handcarts (miniature wagons pulled by hand instead of using horses or oxen) containing all our gear.  We trekked about 20 miles over the course of 3 days.  I appreciate the Trek leaders making a journal for us to keep on the trail in which to record the events of each day as well as lessons learned.  I want to share an experience recorded in that Trek journal that I think is applicable to life.

On Day 2, we had a long, hot, exhausting day of trekking.  We had just climbed the really hard hill pulling the Austin’s (another family's) handcart up before they were going to return down the hill to help us pull ours.  As we reached the top of the hill, we discovered that, instead of an easy downhill grade into base camp as we had been told, we actually had two more difficult, sandy hills to climb with cross-land trekking in between before we reached base camp and dinner.  At that point, my Trek family momentarily lost heart and began to fear and despair at what they still had to do.  They had just witnessed a scary bout of heat exhaustion hit a girl in the family behind us and watched as the medical staff worked for over 1/2 hour to bring her body temperature down before having to transport her off the mountain.  They had trekked over 10 miles already that day and just pushed a cart up a really steep hill, barely making the ascent, knowing they had to climb that hill again with their own cart.  And they saw more and more hills they would still have to climb before the end, in addition to feeling hot and tired and sick themselves.  Plus, our water supplies were low, most without any water at all in their water bottles with no idea when more water would be available.  They were overwhelmed and wanted to sit down and just give up... or cry... or both.

At that moment, the Holy Ghost sent a remembrance into my mind of a story Elder D. Todd Christofferson shared about his mother undergoing radiation treatments for cancer in the 1950s.  The treatments would leave her sick and weak for days.  One day as she prepared to go with her own mother to her treatment, thinking of the exhaustion and weakness and nausea she would have to face over the weeks and months ahead, she broke down in tears and told her mother she couldn’t do it anymore, she couldn’t go to 16 more treatments. 
Her mother wisely asked her, “Can you go today?”
Sister Christofferson replied, “Yes.”
“Well, honey,” her mother said, “that’s all you have to do today.”
I shared with the youth that sometimes we’re overwhelmed by looking too far into the future about what we will be required to do, when what we need to do is just focus on the task at hand and make it through that task.  Then we can move to the next task, one-by-one, step-by-step.  And that’s how we needed to approach those hills, one at a time, task by task, until we reached our destination.

Thank goodness they were receptive to the Spirit, gathered themselves, and proceeded down the difficult, steep, sandy hill to climb it again with our handcart.  We finished strong that evening by taking each task as it came and thereby not being emotionally and mentally and physically overwhelmed.  We made it to base camp.  Dinner never tasted so good!

These lessons learned I would need to use the very next day on the Women's Pull... but that is another story. :)

Throughout this experience and others of Trek, I learned to never give up.  Sometimes you need to take a rest before you can keep going, sometimes you need to move at a slower pace, sometimes you need help from others to move forward on your journey, sometimes you need to take it step by step.  But never, never give up!  I often had the words of Elder Jeffrey R. Holland running through my mind from his General Conference talk entitled An High Priest of Good Things to Come, “Don’t you give up… Don’t you quit. You keep walking.  You keep trying.  There is health and happiness ahead… It will be alright in the end.  Trust God and believe in good things to come.”
I know that God is good, that He loves us, that we need to just press forward in faith and that it definitely will be alright in the end.  If it’s not alright, it’s not the end.  Believe in good things to come! :)