Bruce C. Hafen

In the long run, our most deeply held desires will govern our choices, one by one and day by day, until our lives finally add up to what we have really wanted most–for good or otherwise. We can indeed have eternal life, if we really want it, so long as we don’t want something else more.

Each of us will taste the bitter ashes of life, from sin and neglect to sorrow and disappointment. But the atonement of Christ can lift us up in beauty from our ashes on the wings of a sure promise of immortality and eternal life. He will thus lift us up, not only at the end of life, but in each day of our lives.

Life is a school, a place for us to learn and grow. We, like Adam and Eve, experience ‘growing pains’ through the sorrow and contamination of a lone and dreary world. These experiences may include sin, but they also include mistakes, disappointments, and the undeserved pain of adversity. The blessed news of the gospel is that the Atonement of Jesus Christ can purify all the uncleanness and sweeten all the bitterness we taste.

You must realize that the true desire to express affection can be motivated by things other than true love…. In short, one might simply say: save your kisses–you might need them someday. And when anyof you–men and women–are given entrance to the heart of a trusting young friend, you stand on holy ground. In such a place you must be honest with yourself–and with your friend–about love and the expression of it’s symbols.

This earth is not our home. We are away at school, trying to master the lessons of “the great plan of happiness” so we can return home and know what it means to be there. Over and over the Lord tells us why the plan is worth our sacrifice – and His. Eve called it “the joy of our redemption.” Jacob called it “that happiness which is prepared for the saints.” Of necessity, the plan is full of thorns and tears – His and ours. But because He and we are so totally in this together, our being “at one” with Him in overcoming all opposition will itself bring us “incomprehensible joy.”

The Savior desires to save us from our inadequacies as well as our sins. Inadequacy is not the same as being sinful – we have far more control over the choice to sin than we may have over our innate capacity. . . . A sense of falling short or falling down is not only natural but essential to the mortal experience. Still, after all we can do, the Atonement can fill that which is empty, straighten our bent parts, and make strong that which is weak.

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