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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The great Mediator asks for our repentance not because we must ‘repay’ him in exchange for his paying our debt to justice, but because repentance initiates a developmental process that, with the Savior’s help, leads us along the path to a saintly character

The Savior’s gift of grace to us is not necessarily limited in time to ‘after’ all we can do. We may receive his grace before, during and after the time when we expend our own efforts