Mormon Musings

  "...the world you now enter holds challenges and difficulties. In the days and years ahead, you may suffer some discouragement and disappointment. On occasion you may feel genuine despair, either for yourself or for your children or for the plight and conditions of others. You may even make a personal mistake or two—serious mistakes, perhaps, though I hope not—and you may worry that any chance to be happy and secure in life has eluded you forever. When such times come, I ask you to remember this: This is the Church of the happy endings. Troubles need never be permanent nor fatal. Darkness always yields to light. The sun always rises. Faith, hope, and charity will always triumph in the end. Furthermore, they will triumph all along the way. Our English preacher [John Donne] said of this: We ask our daily bread, and God never says you should have come yesterday, he never says  [I have run out,]  you must  [come]  again to-morrow, but  to-day if you will hear...

Another advantage of dispatching temptations is this: The human mind is remarkably retentive. We must be careful of what we allow in our mind, for it will be there for a long time, reasserting itself at those very times when we may be most vulnerable. Just as harmful chemicals heedlessly dumped in a vacant lot can later prove lethal, so toxic thoughts and the mulching of the wrong memories in the vacant corner of the mind also take their toll. What happens, of course, when we persist in savoring temptations, whether they are temptations of wealth, power, status, or sensuality, is well portrayed by what we read of another people in another time: "Now the cause of this iniquity of the people was this—Satan had great power, unto the stirring up of the people to do all manner of iniquity, and to the puffing them up with pride,  tempting them to seek for power, and authority, and riches , and the vain things of the world." (3 Nephi 6:15. Italics added.) This people actually lost b...

If then, the gospel is simple, it seems to me it is our individual task in the Church to go to the well for the water of the gospel regularly, because the message of the scriptures will be different depending on the stage of life you and I are in. These scriptures seem to me different than they did five years ago, and ten years ago, and certainly than they did twenty years ago in the mission field. Let the scriptures sing their song to you, the very song you need to hear now, in terms of that part of the gospel that is relevant in your life, so that, in the words of the Book of Mormon Prophet, you and I “feast” upon the word of Christ regularly. It’s not enough for returned missionaries to run on the strength of the few scriptures they may know, because as true as those scriptures are, they may not focus on the building of a marriage. As powerful as Revelations 14:6 is in missionary work, it doesn’t help as young couple on the verge of divorce As significant as the scriptures in Isaiah...

Moments are the molecules that make up eternity! Years ago, President Hinckley counseled: “It is not so much the major events as the small day-to-day decisions that map the course of our living. … Our lives are, in reality, the sum total of our seemingly unimportant decisions and of our capacity to live by those decisions” (Caesar, Circus, or Christ? Brigham Young University Speeches of the Year [26 Oct. 1965], 3). Elder Neal A. Maxwell , October 2000 General Conference

Recall the new star that announced the birth at Bethlehem? It was in its precise orbit long before it so shone. We are likewise placed in human orbits to illuminate. Divine correlation functions not only in the cosmos but on this planet, too. After all, the Book of Mormon plates were not buried in Belgium, only to have Joseph Smith born centuries later in distant Bombay. Elder Neal A Maxwell, October 2002 General Conference https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2002/10/encircled-in-the-arms-of-his-love?lang=eng

The Savior has used the word “always” in two settings that may have caused you to wonder. First, you promise to “always remember Him” when you partake of the sacrament. And second, He warns you to “pray always,” (3 Nephi 18:18). You may have wondered, as have I, why He used the word “always,” given the nature of mortality, as its weighs upon us. You know from experience how hard it is to think of anything consciously all the time. Even in service to God, you will not be consciously praying always. So why does the Master exhort us to “pray always”? I am not wise enough to know all of His purposes in giving us a covenant to always remember Him and in warning us to pray always lest we be overcome. But I know one. It is because He knows perfectly the powerful forces that influence us and also what it means to be human. He knows what it is like to have the cares of life press upon us. I plead with you to do with determination the simple things that will move you forward spiritually. Start w...

“Instead of concluding that the Lord has drawn us into difficulties, and compelled us to do that which is unpleasant to our feelings, and to suffer sacrifice upon sacrifice to no purpose, we shall understand that He has designed all this to prepare us to dwell in His presence, to possess His Spirit, which is right and intelligent, for nothing but purity and holiness can dwell where he is”  (Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 2:303).