To what level does your patriarchal blessing reach in your life? Can you recollect the time you received it and recover any of the spirit of the occasion? Do you in quiet moments ponder it? Does Karl G.Maeser's phrase, "paragraphs from the book of our possibilities" rest upon you with a sense of mission so that, as President Heber J.Grant exemplified, "you "dream nobly and manfully" and prepare ceaselessly? Do you ever think of Heber C.Kimball's faith that you can "write your own patriarchal blessing" under inspiration, for, saith the Lord, "No good thing will I withhold...

To be or not to be?' That is not the question. What is the question? The question is not one of being, but of becoming. 'To become more or not to become more' This is the question faced by each intelligence in our universe.

See that your difference makes a difference.

A man and his wife, each in a different small plane, were out enjoying a flight, when the husband committed a flight error. He was able to recover, but his wife who was following him, crashed and was killed. The husband was distraught, blaming himself for the accident. One day when pleading with the Lord for forgiveness, he heard a voice saying "Jesus died, even for dumb mistakes."

The greatest tragedy of life is that, having paid that awful price of suffering "according to the flesh that his bowels might be filled with compassion," and being now prepared to reach down and help us, he is forbidden because we won't let him. We look down instead of up.

There is no final solution to loneliness until you recognize that you need the resources which are in yourself to enpy, within limits, being alone being the kind of person that you like to be with, and reaching out to others, not in a grasping way, but in an attempt to be meaningful and loving and of service in their lives.

The answers to the world's perplexities are, in fact, found in the Gospel of Jesus Christ . . . The more we can bring others to see the gospel in action, the more they will be willing to at least tolerate us, then to encourage us, and eventually to cooperate with us.