On Admonitions

There's two verbs that dominate my patriarchal blessing, "bless" and "admonish." Now that's an interesting word that you don't hear often.

While the word comes up throughout the blessing, it's most notable in the (fairly short) section about marriage. There's no "bless" there. No real information. Just a warning that I better do certain things.

When I received this blessing, it was mostly just weird. At that point in time, dating wasn't really a thing I did (jokes on you, it's still not 😅) and I wasn't really considering dating outside the church. Sure my testimony may not have been strong (and so some of the admonishments made sense) but a specific warning to marry in the temple? Seemed a bit egregious. Fast forward a year. I'm dating her and was in a situation where those admonishments made sense. I was prompted (I think? it's been almost 10 years at this point) to reread my patriarchal blessing and those admonishments really stuck out. I told her, in a very teary skype call the night before I left for college, that this was why we wouldn't work out. She disagreed. Well she won.

I thought that maybe I could still get things to work out. But you can't change people and shouldn't, not like that. Instead I slipped away, little by little, from my already precarious point. But that wasn't her fault.

So what is this blogpost? Like all "On [topic]" posts its only somewhat about that topic. I'm not really here to talk about being warned or my feelings on warnings. No, it's about how when I look back (as I have many times before) I'm reminded that my religious journey back (back up at the very least) really started here. Both with my rejection of the admonishment but also the fact that I looked in the first place. Or that something which at the time seemed so weird ended up mattering. Coincidence? Sure could be, but maybe, just this once, I'll interpret it as something else, something that matters for me.