Positive Thinking Goes a Long Way...

So I thought I would take a minute to post some of the little sayings that I like reading everyday. There's more than just these, but here are a few...

"Faith (overcomes) fear. Hope (overcomes) despair... (Hope) is believing and expecting that our prayers will be answered. It is manifest in confidence, optimism, enthusiasm, and patient perseverance." Pres. Uchtdorf

"Everything is okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end." the Chaplain at Primary's said this to us.

Finally there is a story that the social worker from the Heart Transplant Team gave to us. It was written by Emily Perl Kingsley who is the mom of a baby that has down-syndrome...
"I am often aked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability--to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this...
When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.
After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack you bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The flight attendant comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."
"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland??? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."
But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.
The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.
So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.
It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around...and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills...Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.
But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy...and they're all saying what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say, "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."
But...if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things...about Holland."

I love that, because even though Ben's illness wasn't necessarily what we'd hoped for, we are blessed through it, just like all things in life. We are blessed to have him in our family.

P.S. So we finished all on our end to list Ben for a Heart Transplant and yeah he qualifies as a candidate. Now we are just waiting for approval from our insurance (crazy that that holds you up isn't it) then we can place him on the waiting list. He had a cath to his heart on Thursday and they made an emergency ballooning of his aortic valve which was found to be much worse than we'd thought. It was super high risky, but we didn't have a choice because it appeared that he was getting so much worse so quickly, the doc's felt we had to do something. He will have another echo tomorrow so we should know if it has helped his heart function at all.