crying

In one of my classes this semester, we discussed a case about a military school that would not accept women as students because they supposedly could not keep up with the men. One of the guys in our class (who happens to be in the military) said that he prefers for there to not be women in the battlefield because when things get too tough, they just break down and cry. He interpreted this as a sign of weakness, and he said that he could never trust someone with his life after he saw them crying. He was basically saying that crying was a sign of someone who was going to just give up. I (obviously) think his logic is wrong.

When we were little, my brother used to have a slight anger issue. Anyone who knows him now would probably never believe it, but he did. He used to play a lot of sports. Unfortunately, he usually did not play on great teams, and they lost pretty often. My poor little 5'2 mom would be the one to try to calm down her almost 6 foot, 200-something pound son so that he didn't punch a hole in the sheet rock of our rented apartment. Does this mean that anyone should have ever been afraid of him? Absolutely not. Just because that was his reaction to one event, that does not mean it would be his reaction to every event.

Up until my mission, I was never a huge cryer. I don't cry during movies. I don't cry when reading books. I don't cry when I share my testimony. However, there are 2 situations in which I always, always, always cry. 1) Whenever I have to say goodbye to people (especially my family... as is obvious in the pic above). I cried for 6 months on my mission because I missed my family so much. I still cry every time I have to say "see you later" to them. 2) I also ALWAYS cry when I get too stressed about things. In any situation when I feel like I hitting a brick wall, when I have done everything in my power and there is nothing else I can do, I just cry about it. Does this mean that I am going to give up? Of course not. The wonderful thing about this is that I will cry about the situation for a while, I am able to get all of that stress out of my system, and then I can move on and figure out how to solve the problem.