It's My Blessing and I Want it Now!

A little over a year ago my younger brother proposed to his now wife.  This took place on the eve of my 22nd birthday month and 8th semester of college.  I was an unhealthy mixture of irate, depressed, confused, and bitter.  I often hid my desire to be married through the early years of college because I didn't want to be pegged as a girl who went to BYU to find a spouse and not to attain higher education, but I was starting to get nervous that my anti-marriage facade was the reason I had never found anyone.  The combination of my college career quickly ending and my younger brother popping the question before I had even ever seriously dated someone lead to a quarter-life crisis.  I was the oldest.  I was the only daughter.  I was the kid who was almost done with college.  I was the child that went to BYU.  I was the teenager who abstained from everything and strictly adhered to curfew.  I was the good example.  I was the Poppe child who deserved to be planning a wedding and a future.  I. I. I. My life quickly became a J.G. Wentworth commercial where instead of "It's my money and I want it now," the thought, "It's my blessing and I want it now!" often circulated through my inner-dialogue.  My attitude about my brother's upcoming nuptials was so sour that I couldn't even find a small space in my heart to be happy for him.  One day I was studying trials and read Jeffrey R. Holland's talk, The Laborers in the Vineyard, and was immediately chastised when I read, "We are not diminished when someone else is added upon."

My brother was getting married to a wonderful young woman and I had spent months being bitter because he found happiness before I did.  I knew the trials he had gone through in life and the struggles he had and saw those as making him unworthy of the one blessing I wanted but wasn't receiving.  I failed to notice that getting married was a blessing, but more importantly it was the motivation my brother needed to come back into the fold.  While a spouse was something that sounded nice to me, it was much more to my brother.  It was a symbol of repentance and the mercy of God.  He found someone to grow with.  We don't always know why things happen in life.  I don't know why I'm almost 23, single, and on a mission while my brother never served one and was married shortly after he turned 20.  I do know that he being blessed with a beautiful wife doesn't diminish me in any way because "the worth of souls is great in the sight of God (D&C 18:10)".  Marriage didn't make my brother any better than me because we are both equal children of the same Heavenly Father (well, and the same earthly father).

How often do we compare our blessings with others and dwell on how Heavenly Father put one more shiny toy in someone else's basket than our own?  Haven't we all received the most important blessing in the form of Jesus Christ?  All the other blessings we receive are just trifles compared to the salvation offered to us through the faithful sacrifice of God's Only Begotten.  All the other gifts we receive are just stocking stuffers compared to the real present, the Atonement of Christ, under the tree. 

June 8, 2013.  My brother, Bryce, and I with Brandon and my beautiful sister-in-law, Brianna.