A grateful heart, then, comes through expressing gratitude to our Heavenly Father for His blessings and to those around us for all that they bring into our lives. This requires conscious effort-at least until we have truly learned and cultivated an attitude of gratitude. Often we feel grateful and intend to express our thanks but forget to do so or just don't get around to it. Someone has said that "feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it."

May we realize how close to us He is willing to come, how far He is willing to go to help us and how much He loves us.

In the search for our best selves, several questions will guide our thinking: Am I what I want to be? Am I closer to the Savior today than I was yesterday? Will I be closer yet tomorrow? Do I have the courage to change for the better?

A prayerful life is the key to possessing gratitude. We often take for granted the people who most deserve our gratitude. Let us not wait until it is too late for us to express our gratitude. Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it. If I gratitude be numbered among the serious sins, then gratitude takes its place among the noblest of virtues. To express gratitude is gracious and honorable, to enact gratitude is generous and noble, but to live with gratitude ever in our hearts is to touch heaven.

I hope that you will learn to take responsibility for your decisions. don't take counsel of your fears.

Our challenge is to join forces of the old and the new- experience and experiment, history and destiny, the world of man and the new world of science- but always in accordance with the never-changing word of God.

I dreamt and saw that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was duty. I served and found that duty was joy. See Life a Duty, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, (1816-1841) Topics: beauty, duty & Life I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty; I woke, and found that life was Duty.