I think it all began when I was called to be the secretary of the Young Women's organization in the church. I was not excited about this calling. I never wanted to be a secretary. In fact I had said all my life that I never wanted to be a secretary of ANYTHING. I didn't like to do the work a secretary is required to do nor did I have the skills to do it. And that was before the days of computers. That made it even worse as computers and I do not have a very good relationship. To top it all off, I hadn't worked in Mutual (that is what it used to be called) for fifty years, and was only vaguely familiar with the new program. I had worked in Relief Society most of my life with a few breaks to work with the Primary children. I was very comfortable there even when it required a fair amount of work. But I accepted the calling mostly because the new Young Women's president was one of my favorite people, we have been counseled by our leaders to never turn down a calling. Just to let you know, I have not always followed that counsel. I have turned down a few callings.
Then came the flood of forms, reports, documents, rolls, budgets, birthdays, e-mails, records of all kinds to keep track of, agendas to prepare, minutes to take, phone calls to make (I hate to make phone calls), lots of computer work including using the church computer to pull up records, keeping track of Personal Progress records, meetings and more meetings ... the list goes on and on! I felt totally overwhelmed and drowning in paper work. And then there were the doubts that a 75 year "old lady" would ever be able to relate to today's teens. The last secretary was a young woman who is just expecting her first baby, and the girls loved her. She was really involved personally with the girls. How could I compete with that? The stress just got worse and worse and I felt depression coming on. Stress is a known trigger for depression even for someone like me who is on medication for clinical depression (lack of certain "feel good" chemicals in the brain). Even though I received encouraging and supportive words from my family, I still felt like was sliding down a very slippery hill.
This was the beginning of the downward spiral. Then came an "upper" which made me realize that God had been aware of this challenge I would have months before it actually came and had prepared a plan to help me through it.
