One Monday evening several years ago, my FHE group was going to play soccer. I was really excited about this, and I was jumping all over the place, literally. Just as we were dividing into teams, I came down on my ankle the wrong way. For those of you who don’t know, breaking my ankle is probably one of my biggest fears. I became instantly terrified by the shooting pains coming from the general direction of my ankle. I knew I hadn’t broken it, because that would have probably killed me right then and there. But I thought I might have sprained it. I spent the entire activity courageously walking/limping around the field in an effort to loosen it up and convince myself that it wasn’t serious. The activity ended, and my roommates helped me get home. We then proceeded to watch a movie while alternately applying hot and cold packs to my ankle, thinking that it would magically fix whatever was wrong. Eventually, I decided to go to bed, hoping that everything would be fine in the morning. Unfortunately, as soon as I found myself alone in a darkened room with nothing to think about but the throbbing pain in my ankle, it suddenly seemed to get much worse. After about half an hour, my roommate came in to find me crying and generally being inconsolable.
She determined that I should get a priesthood blessing, and so she called up a couple of boys from the ward, who scurried over to the apartment. I didn’t think I needed the blessing. My ankle wasn’t really sprained or in any way permanently damaged, but that didn’t keep me from being afraid. I knew that most of my worries were just irrational fears that wouldn’t have any effect on the recovery of my ankle. I didn’t want people to think I was just being silly and making something out of nothing. But my roommate had already made the call, and I figured it couldn’t really hurt.
They came and gave me the blessing. I went to sleep. In the morning I was fine and I was able to get to all of my classes without any trouble at all. I took this as a sign that I didn’t really need the blessing anyway, and that my ankle would have been okay regardless.
Looking back, I realize that the situation was a little bit different than I had interpreted it at that time. The blessing wasn’t really for my ankle, as I had thought, but for my fear for my ankle. It was my fear that was causing me the most difficultly, not the pain in my ankle. The blessing served as a comfort to me to reassure me that things would go according to God’s plan, and that I shouldn’t let my terror overshadow my faith in the Lord.
You’d think from this example, I would have learned to ask for blessings when I need that reassurance, but I haven’t. I don’t want people to think that there is something wrong with me, when it’s really just my fear of something being wrong with me. Asking for blessings tells people that there is something not quite right in my life, and I don’t ever feel like explaining what that is.
