"Sometimes the Only Way To Go is Through"

(Santa Barbara last week.  I miss it already.)

"Do not let your moods maul your faith. . . . Do not let a bad day cause you to think that life is bad. Do not let low self-esteem discount your high blessings. In short, do not homogenize your hopes by mixing and treating them as if all hopes and aspirations are equal. They are not. The hope for a resurrection is guaranteed unconditionally by the Atonement of the Savior. . . .

"Our transitory disappointments are real, but the missing letter from home is not really comparable to the delivered message from heaven, the good news of the gospel. Today’s unmet hunger for a few more friends must not be allowed to obscure the marvelous reality of the forever friendship of Jesus for each of us. Do not let uncertainty about how others seem to feel about you this week get in the way of how God has always felt about you.

"Our intertwining insecurities, the hunger for peer reassurance, and the tendency to be carried on the tides of today’s troubles and disappointments will diminish as we mature. As our understanding of the gospel deepens, it becomes ever more clear that proximate problems need not, and must not, undercut ultimate realities. Thus, as we confront problems which we might shiveringly sidestep, if we could, let us realize, as one poet did, that 'sometimes the only way to go is through.' We go on that journey with justified hopes to help our hunger and with realities to reassure us. And, in the midst of our transitory troubles, we have the knowledge that He is near at hand, and within us there is even the sense that in the dim past we agreed to all this and that now we must perform on that pledge."

—Neal A. Maxwell, All Hell Is Moved