Living After the Manner of Happiness

Photo by   Em bé khóc nhè  on  Unsplash It seems 2020 has been a year of mourning. The past few weeks I found myself once again mourning what was supposed to have been a time of family … all together at last. We’ve had a couple of these trips planned this year only to have them all canceled. I’m sure you have had similar experiences of anticipating and planning only to have them canceled.   I have seen such parallelism to the private and public battles we are dealing with this year woven throughout the war chapters as I’ve studied the last couple of weeks. Have you recognized them as well? I’ve had the overwhelming feeling the Nephites completely understood what it means to have a tough year (or years). Yet, tucked in the middle of their difficult years is this nugget:   “… there never was a happier time among the people of Nephi, since the days of Nephi, than the days of Moroni; yea even at this time, in the twenty and first year of the reign of the judges” (Al...

We are taught to watch for patterns “because repetition is a pattern related to receiving and recognizing revelation” (David A. Bednar, “Repeat Over Again … the Same Things as Before,” BYU-I Devotional, 26 January 2016). Sitting in sacrament meeting yesterday, the speaker mentioned a pattern he had recently noticed in which several talks he had been studying all used this quote from Pres. Nelson: “[T]he joy we feel has little to do with the circumstances of our lives and everything to do with the focus of our lives. When the focus of our lives is on God’s plan of salvation … and Jesus Christ and His gospel, we can feel joy regardless of what is happening—or not happening—in our lives. Joy comes from and because of Him. He is the source of all joy” (“Joy and Spiritual Survival,” General Conference , October 2016). This past week we studied some of my favorite chapters in the Book of Mormon. In 2 Nephi 2, Lehi teaches us that we have been created to have joy (vs 25). Then, in 2...