Mormon Musings

It is so easy to be half hearted, but this only produces half the growth, half the blessings, and just half the life, really, with more bud than blossom.  A superficial view of this life, therefore, just will not do, lest we mistakenly speak of this mortal experience only as coming here to get a body, as if we were merely picking up a suit at the cleaners.  Or, lest we casually recite how we have come here to be proved, as if a few brick push-ups and deep knee bends would do. Elder Neal A. Maxwell, April 1985 General Conference https://www.lds.org/general-conference/1985/04/willing-to-submit?lang=eng

“There are no two faces alike, no two persons tempered alike; we are tried with each other, and large drafts are made upon our patience, forbearance, charity, and good will, in short, upon all the higher and Godlike qualities of our nature."                         Brigham Young ( Deseret News, July 6, 1862, 9. )

Sailors and mariners become wise, useful, and qualified for their stations only by experience. Storms, tempests, and hurricanes have to occur in order to give them that experience. If all was calm, and storms never arose at sea, where would the mariner get the experience that is necessary for him to have, that when storms do occur and difficulties arise, when the ship sails out upon the ocean, he shall be prepared to manage and guide his his vessel safely into port. If there are individuals on board that have never experienced storms, or perhaps have never ventured away from land before, when storms arise, you see that trepidation of spirit that you do not witness in those that have had experience. So it is with ourselves in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, we have to learn by the things that take place around us and act in the stations assigned us by the circumstances that transpire and the experience we gain. President Lorenzo Snow, Journal of Discourses 5:322

"The purpose of mortality is to learn and to grow to be more like our Father, and it is often during the difficult times that we learn the most, as painful as the lessons may be." -Thomas S. Monson, "God Be with You Till We Meet Again", Ensign, November 2012

We must have our day of trial—an opportunity to become acquainted with the bitter and the sweet. We are so organized as to be able to choose or to refuse. We can take the downward road that leads to destruction, or the road that leads to life. We can constantly act upon the principles that tend to death, or refuse them and act upon the principles that pertain to life and salvation. This is a day of trial; our faith and patience can now be tried: now is the time for your fortitude and integrity to be tried. Let the trials come; for if we should be so unspeakably happy as to obtain a crown of eternal life, we shall be like gold tried seven times in the fire. Let the fiery furnace burn, and the afflictions come, and the temptations be presented;—if we wish to be crowned with crowns of glory and exalted to dwell with our elder brother Jesus Christ, we must choose the good and refuse the evil. According to our faith, we must strive to live our religion when in the kanyons getting wood a...

I should like, if I may, to share with you on this point the fine writing of your own A. Lester Allen, a dean and scientist on this campus. This is what I have come to call the "Allen Analogy" about time. Let me read you these lines, if I may. Their application will be obvious. Dean Allen writes: Suppose, for instance, that we imagine a "being" moving onto our earth whose entire life-span is only 1/100 of a second. Ten thousand "years" for him, generation after generation, would be only one second of our time. Suppose this imaginary being comes up to a quiet pond in the forest where you are seated. You have just tossed in a rock and are watching the ripples. A leaf is fluttering from the sky and a bird is swooping over the water. He would find everything absolutely motionless. Looking at you, he would say: "In all recorded history nothing has changed. My father and his father before him have seen that everything is absolutely still. This creatur...

“Everyone is tested. One might think it is unfair to be singled out and subjected to a particular temptation, but this is the purpose of mortal life—to be tested. And the answer is the same for everyone: we must, and we can, resist temptations of any kind.”  ― President Boyd K. Packer