Life can be hard. We face challenges. We get sick. We miss loved ones. We feel sad.  And sometimes, spiders bite us.

This past week has been a difficult one.  My daughter went on trek and we spent the first couple of days of the week getting ready for that.  Tuesday my husband went out of town for work, so it fell on me to handle the rest of it.  Tuesday night we were scrambling around trying to find small containers of sunscreen.  My daughter was going to take her spray on block, but it wouldn't fit, and then we read about a man who got burned when he caught on fire after spraying it on himself.  It was too late to run to the store.  The camel back my daughter was taking was leaking water.  And to top it off, I bumped my foot, and upon saying OUCH, realized something was horribly wrong with my foot.  My daughter thought a bone was broken and poking from my foot, stretching the skin.  I admit it--I panicked!  After I calmed down, I had my son look at it and he noticed tiny fang marks.  My foot never did turn red, and never did itch, but was swollen.

Wednesday morning I took my daughter to the stake center, and participated in the stake goodbye--in which we lined the street and saved white hankies as the buses drove by, and then I went home and took Benadryl.  And slept.  And woke up and felt sick.  And a little bit.  And felt sick to my stomach again.   And slept.  And repeated that for the rest of the day.  To top it off I missed my daughter.  And I missed my husband.  Put that all together, and it was a pretty bad week.

The point of my story is that sometimes life just sucks.  And sometimes no one is there to comfort us.  but we can always lean on Jesus.  We can imagine his arms around us, loving us, no matter what we do in life or where we are.  He LOVES us.  He is THERE!