Continue in Patience

"Patience—the ability to put our desires on hold for a time—is a precious and rare virtue...Nevertheless, without 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...Our Heavenly Father knows what good parents come to understand over time: if children are ever going to mature and reach their potential, they must learn to wait."

Lately I've felt like Heavenly Father is putting me through this purifying process he calls patience. There seems to be something He wants me to learn. I can't think of another time in my life that I've had to wait like I have the past two months. A month of waiting for responses from grad schools only to find that I had another month or two of waiting. I'm on the waiting list at all three of the grad schools I applied to.

At first I felt so confused. I have been working for this for the past three years. Everything has always felt so right. I know I have been far from perfect, but I've been trying the best I can. Why is everything going wrong for something that feels so right? Never before has President Uchtdorf's message seemed so applicable: "Every one of us is called to wait in our own way. We wait for answers to prayers. We wait for things which at the time may appear so right and so good to us that we can’t possibly imagine why Heavenly Father would delay the answer....But eventually I learned that God’s promises are not always fulfilled as quickly as or in the way we might hope; they come according to His timing and in His ways."

I don't know how all of this will work out. And to be honest, I'm scared out of my mind. I feel like I'm standing next to a door, trying to open it, but no matter what I do, I don't have the tools to get it open. On the other side is something great. I don't know what it is and I don't know when I'll be able to open that door. But I do know that the day will come. God has something great planned for me. And meanwhile I need to keep pushing forward, exercising my faith in Him, and as President Uchtdorf says, "working, hoping, and exercising faith."