MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Birthdays, anniversaries and holidays.
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Tuly
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Re: MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Post by Tuly »

I read this talk from BYU Speeches that I really appreciated at this time of giving. Why Giving Matters - February 24, 2009 - Arthur C. Brooks. I have seen the blessings of thinking of how to make people happy and serve them rather than to think about myself all the time. Giving is a gift in itself. Is it time for some snow in our website, Ian?.

https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/arthur-c ... matters-2/
It turns out that the data on happiness and charitable giving are beyond dispute. People who give to charity are 43 percent more likely than people who don’t give to say they’re very happy people. People who give blood are twice as likely to say they’re very happy people as people who don’t give blood. People who volunteer are happier. The list goes on. You simply can’t find any kind of service that won’t make you happier.

Laboratory experiments using human subjects find that when people are asked to give to other people, it elevates their mood. Furthermore, if you increase your level of charitable giving, you can permanently alter your level of what psychologists call positive effect—which is to say, being in a good mood. You can be a happier person that way. It’s the secret, basically. The real question is not whether that’s true; the question is why that’s true.

There’s a very interesting set of studies that tell us why it is that giving will make you into a happy person. The first has to do with how it changes your brain. I’m going to explain that in a minute. The second is what it does to how other people treat you. Let me explain. The first is that the wiring of our brains is conducive to charitable giving, and it works something like this. In the late 1980s there was a famous study of charitable giving that looked at how people reacted with respect to the endorphins that they experienced. Endorphins are neurochemicals that make you feel a sort of euphoria. If you like to run marathons, it’s probably because afterward you feel really good—you feel sort of high in a way. Psychologists came forth with studies that showed that when people volunteer to help other people, they get what they call “the helper’s high.” Volunteering actually gives people a mild sense of euphoria.
Let me tell you a quick story about a briefcase. I know it’s a weird subject for a story, but it’s actually a magic briefcase. It’s my magic Brigham Young University briefcase. I visited here in the fall of 2007 for the first time—I’d never been here before. My friend Gary Cornia, who is the dean of the business school, gave me a beautiful briefcase that said “Brigham Young University” on it. I took it home and put it away because I already had a briefcase, and I didn’t think about it.

About a month later my briefcase broke, and I was complaining to my wife, and I said, “The handle’s broken. It’s very inconvenient.”

And she said, “What about that BYU briefcase you brought home? Why don’t you carry that?”

And I said, “Oh. Okay. That’s a good idea.”

So I took all my stuff and put it in the BYU briefcase, and I started carrying it around.

At the time, my research assistant at Syracuse University, Nick Bailey (he’s here—he actually works at BYU now), noticed, and he said, “You’re carrying a BYU briefcase.”

I said, “Yeah, it’s great. It’s an Italian briefcase. It’s very nice.”

I travel a lot, and one of the funny things I noticed is that when you are out in public carrying a briefcase that says something on it, the first thing people you don’t know do is read the briefcase and then look at you. It occurred to me that people were thinking, “He’s a Mormon guy.” And that’s actually sort of false religious advertising because I’m a Roman Catholic. I take my faith seriously, but no matter how seriously I take my faith, technically that still doesn’t make me a Mormon.

So I was walking around saying, basically, “I’m a Mormon,” and the funny thing is that it was changing my personality. And the reason it was changing my personality was because I was mortified by the idea that somebody would say, “You know, I was in the airport, and I saw this Mormon guy, and he was being a real jerk.” I wanted to live up to someone else’s reputation, and it was making me into a better person. It was a magic briefcase.

So what’s the implication of this story? Well, obviously it might just be that I’m trying to get a new briefcase right now. (Maybe the greatest kind of evangelization that the LDS Church could undertake would be to buy 300 million briefcases and give them out to all Americans.) But the bigger point here is that carrying the briefcase was actually making my life better. I was happier; things were going really well for me as I was carrying that briefcase. And the reason is that the service for which Mormons have become justifiably famous was infecting my life. It was making me better as a person. It was helping me. And I thank you for that.
"Condemn me not because of mine imperfection,... but rather give thanks unto God that he hath made manifest unto you our imperfections, that ye may learn to be more wise than we have been." Mormon 9:31
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Tuly
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Re: MERRY CHRISTMAS!

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Merry Christmas dear family!! I was inspired this morning by reading Mosiah chapter 5, I love King Benjamin's wisdom. The verse that stood out to me was verse 13 - "For how knoweth a man the master whom he has not served, and who is a stranger unto him, and is far from the thoughts and intents of his heart?" - the Master King Benjamin is talking about is our Savior Jesus Christ and I hope to not make Him a stranger in my life and serve Him forever.
"Condemn me not because of mine imperfection,... but rather give thanks unto God that he hath made manifest unto you our imperfections, that ye may learn to be more wise than we have been." Mormon 9:31
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Tuly
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Re: MERRY CHRISTMAS!

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Merry Christmas dear family!! - When I was around 10 years old, I had an aunt that always reminded me why she hated the month of December especially around Christmas time. Turns out both my grandma Angela and my grandfather Nestor died around Christmas time, so my aunt would remind me every December how awful this Christmas season was to her. So grateful for this excerpt from "Shepherds, Why This Jubilee?" - by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland
On the evening of December 23, 1976, my father underwent surgery to relieve the effect of osteoarthritis in the vertebrae of his back. The surgery was successful, but near the conclusion of it he suffered a major heart attack. Eight hours later he suffered another one. From those two attacks he sustained massive damage to a heart that was already defective from an illness suffered in his youth. By the time we finally got to see him, wired and tubed and gray and unconscious, it was mid-morning on December 24, Christmas Eve. “Magnificent timing,” I muttered to no one in particular.

Pat and I stayed at his side all day, as much for my mother’s sake as for my father’s. He was not going to live, and at age 60 she had never had to confront that possibility in their entire married life. As evening came along, we took her to our home. . . . I gave my mother a blessing and convinced her to try to get some sleep. I stayed with Pat for a while, putting out a Christmas gift or two; then I told her to hold the family together—as she has done all of our married life—and I was going back to the hospital. . . .

At the hospital I sat and walked and read and walked and looked in on Dad and walked. He would not, in fact, recover from all this. I suppose everyone knew that, but the nursing staff were kind to me and gave me free access to him and to the entire hospital. A couple of the nurses wore Santa Claus hats, and all the nursing stations were decorated for the season. During the course of the evening I think I checked them all out, and sure enough, on every floor and in every wing it was Christmas.

You will forgive me if I admit that somewhere in the early hours of the morning I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. “Why does it have to be like this?” I thought. “Why does it have to be on Christmas?” Of all the times to lose your dad, did it have to be the time when dads are the greatest guys in the world and gifts for little boys somehow appear that, in later years, would be recognized to be well beyond the meager Holland budget? Lying under that oxygen tent was the most generous man I have ever known, a Kris Kringle to end all Kris Kringles, and by some seemingly cruel turn of cardiac fate it was Christmas morning and he was in the process of dying. In my self-pity it did not seem right to me, and I confess I was muttering something of that aloud as I walked what surely must have been every square inch of the public (and a fair portion of the private) space in that hospital.

Then and there—2:00 or 3:00 a.m. in a very quiet hospital, immersed as I was in some sorrow and too much selfishness—heaven sent me a small, personal, prepackaged revelation, a tiny Christmas declaration that was as powerful as any I have ever received. In the midst of mumbling about the very poor calendaring in all of this, I heard the clear, unbroken cry of a baby. It truly startled me. I had long since ceased paying attention to where I was wandering that night, and only then did I realize I was near the maternity ward; somewhere, I suppose, near the nursery. To this day I do not know just where that baby was or how I heard it. I like to think it was a brand-new baby taking that first breath and announcing that he or she had arrived in the world, the fact of which everyone was supposed to take note. . . .

“Jeff, my boy,” my Father in Heaven seemed to say with that baby’s cry, “I expected a little more from you. If you can’t remember why all of this matters, then your approach to Christmas is no more virtuous than the overcommercialization everyone laments these days. You need to shape up just a little, to put your theology where your Christmas carols are. You can’t separate Bethlehem from Gethsemane or the hasty flight into Egypt from the slow journey to the summit of Calvary. It’s of one piece. It is a single plan. It considers ‘the fall and rising again of many in Israel,’ but always in that order. Christmas is joyful not because it is a season or decade or lifetime without pain and privation, but precisely because life does hold those moments for us. And that baby, my son, my own beloved and Only Begotten Son in the flesh, born ‘away in a manger, [with] no crib for his bed,’ makes all the difference in the world, all the difference in time and eternity, all the difference everywhere, worlds without number, a lot farther than your eye can see.”

I can’t fully describe to you what happened to me that early yuletide morning, but it was one of the most revelatory Christmas experiences I have ever had. And it dawned on me that that could have been my young parents who were so happy that morning. I was a December baby, and my mother never wearied of telling me that that was her happiest Christmas ever.

Perhaps the joy they felt that day at my birth was to be inextricably, inseparably, eternally linked with my sorrow at their passing—that we could never expect to have the one without the other. It came to me in a profound way that in this life no one can have real love without eventually dealing with real loss, and we certainly can’t rejoice over one’s birth and the joy of living unless we are prepared to understand and accommodate and accept with some grace the inevitability—including the untimeliness—of difficulty and trouble and death. These are God’s gifts to us—birth and life and death and salvation, the whole divine experience in all its richness and complexity.

So there lay my dad, the great gift-giver, he who found bicycles and BB guns and presents of every kind somewhere. Now he was starting to make his way out of the world on Christmas Day, on the wings of the greatest gift ever given. I thought of another Father.

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3:16).
True fathers and mothers were all alike, I realized; coming up with the best gifts imaginable at what is often terrible personal cost—and I am obviously not speaking of material gifts or monetary costs.

So I was mildly but firmly rebuked that night—by the cry of a newborn baby. I got a little refresher course in the plan of salvation and a powerful reminder of why this is “the season to be jolly,” and why any Christmas is a time of comfort, whatever our circumstances may be. In the same breath I was also reminded that life will not always be as cozy as “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” or an unending splendor while we stroll, “walking in a winter wonderland.” No, life will have its valleys and peaks, its moments for the fall and rising in the lives of all of God’s children. So now it is old Simeon’s joyful embrace of that little baby just before his own death that is one of the images I try to remember at Christmas.

I have repented since that night. In fact, I did some repenting there in the maternity ward. If you have to lose your dad, what more comforting time than the Christmas season? . . . These are sad experiences, terribly wrenching experiences, with difficult moments for years and years to come. But because of the birth in Bethlehem and what it led to they are not tragic experiences. They have a happy ending. There is a rising after the falling. There is life always. New births and rebirths and resurrection to eternal life. It is the joy of the stable—the maternity ward—forever.

“If thou hadst been here, my brother had not died,” (John 11:21) Martha said to him once, probably in the same tone of voice I had been using up and down the hallways of the hospital. “If that arthritis just had not required surgery, there wouldn’t have been any strain on his heart. If that conveyer belt had just been shifted a little, it wouldn’t have started that fire. If there just hadn’t been a small patch of ice on that particular stretch of road so close to the Colorado River. . . .” And on and on and on. Jesus has one answer for us all—one answer to all the “whys” and “what ifs,” all the “would haves” and “could haves” and “should haves” of our journey.

Looking sweet Martha firmly in the eyes, he said for all . . . to hear:

"I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die" (John 11:25–26). . . .
Of this witness I am a witness. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
"Condemn me not because of mine imperfection,... but rather give thanks unto God that he hath made manifest unto you our imperfections, that ye may learn to be more wise than we have been." Mormon 9:31
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Tuly
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Re: MERRY CHRISTMAS!

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I get impatient with myself when I'm so busy during this season. But I have tried very hard to balance my time much more and read more of Jesus christ and His life and made myself aware of people who are troubled around this time and worked to be of service to them. I loved this quote from Gordon B. Hinckley
We honor His birth. But without His death that birth would have
been but one more birth. It was the redemption which He worked out in
the Garden of Gethsemane and upon the cross of Calvary which made
His gift immortal, universal, and everlasting. His was a great Atonement
for the sins of all mankind. He was the resurrection and the life, “the
firstfruits of them that slept” (1 Cor 15:20). Because of Him all men will
be raised from the grave.
But beyond this He taught us the way, the truth, and the life. He gave
the keys through which we may go on to immortality and eternal life. . . .
We testify of His living reality. We testify of the divinity of His
nature. In our times of grateful meditation, we acknowledge His priceless
gift to us and pledge our love and faith. This is what Christmas is
really about.
"Condemn me not because of mine imperfection,... but rather give thanks unto God that he hath made manifest unto you our imperfections, that ye may learn to be more wise than we have been." Mormon 9:31
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Tuly
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Re: MERRY CHRISTMAS!

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I enjoy G.K. Chesterton's writings -
The House of Christmas

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)



Source: Burton Egbert Stevenson, ed., The Home Book of Verse, Volume 1 (New York: Henry Holt And Company, 1912); Project Gutenberg Etext #2619.

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honor and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam,
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost - how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky's dome.

This world is wild as an old wives' tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.
"Condemn me not because of mine imperfection,... but rather give thanks unto God that he hath made manifest unto you our imperfections, that ye may learn to be more wise than we have been." Mormon 9:31
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Tuly
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Re: MERRY CHRISTMAS!

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https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/67/dickens-c ... row-older/
You can hear this essay on the website.


WHAT CHRISTMAS IS AS WE GROW OLDER
by Charles Dickens

Time was, with most of us, when Christmas Day encircling all our limited world like a magic ring, left nothing out for us to miss or seek; bound together all our home enjoyments, affections, and hopes; grouped everything and every one around the Christmas fire; and made the little picture shining in our bright young eyes, complete.

Time came, perhaps, all so soon, when our thoughts over-leaped that narrow boundary; when there was some one (very dear, we thought then, very beautiful, and absolutely perfect) wanting to the fulness of our happiness; when we were wanting too (or we thought so, which did just as well) at the Christmas hearth by which that some one sat; and when we intertwined with every wreath and garland of our life that some one’s name.

That was the time for the bright visionary Christmases which have long arisen from us to show faintly, after summer rain, in the palest edges of the rainbow! That was the time for the beatified enjoyment of the things that were to be, and never were, and yet the things that were so real in our resolute hope that it would be hard to say, now, what realities achieved since, have been stronger!

What! Did that Christmas never really come when we and the priceless pearl who was our young choice were received, after the happiest of totally impossible marriages, by the two united families previously at daggers—drawn on our account? When brothers and sisters-in-law who had always been rather cool to us before our relationship was effected, perfectly doted on us, and when fathers and mothers overwhelmed us with unlimited incomes? Was that Christmas dinner never really eaten, after which we arose, and generously and eloquently rendered honour to our late rival, present in the company, then and there exchanging friendship and forgiveness, and founding an attachment, not to be surpassed in Greek or Roman story, which subsisted until death? Has that same rival long ceased to care for that same priceless pearl, and married for money, and become usurious? Above all, do we really know, now, that we should probably have been miserable if we had won and worn the pearl, and that we are better without her?

That Christmas when we had recently achieved so much fame; when we had been carried in triumph somewhere, for doing something great and good; when we had won an honoured and ennobled name, and arrived and were received at home in a shower of tears of joy; is it possible that THAT Christmas has not come yet?

And is our life here, at the best, so constituted that, pausing as we advance at such a noticeable mile-stone in the track as this great birthday, we look back on the things that never were, as naturally and full as gravely as on the things that have been and are gone, or have been and still are? If it be so, and so it seems to be, must we come to the conclusion that life is little better than a dream, and little worth the loves and strivings that we crowd into it?

No! Far be such miscalled philosophy from us, dear Reader, on Christmas Day! Nearer and closer to our hearts be the Christmas spirit, which is the spirit of active usefulness, perseverance, cheerful discharge of duty, kindness and forbearance! It is in the last virtues especially, that we are, or should be, strengthened by the unaccomplished visions of our youth; for, who shall say that they are not our teachers to deal gently even with the impalpable nothings of the earth!

Therefore, as we grow older, let us be more thankful that the circle of our Christmas associations and of the lessons that they bring, expands! Let us welcome every one of them, and summon them to take their places by the Christmas hearth.

Welcome, old aspirations, glittering creatures of an ardent fancy, to your shelter underneath the holly! We know you, and have not outlived you yet. Welcome, old projects and old loves, however fleeting, to your nooks among the steadier lights that burn around us. Welcome, all that was ever real to our hearts; and for the earnestness that made you real, thanks to Heaven! Do we build no Christmas castles in the clouds now? Let our thoughts, fluttering like butterflies among these flowers of children, bear witness! Before this boy, there stretches out a Future, brighter than we ever looked on in our old romantic time, but bright with honour and with truth. Around this little head on which the sunny curls lie heaped, the graces sport, as prettily, as airily, as when there was no scythe within the reach of Time to shear away the curls of our first-love. Upon another girl’s face near it—placider but smiling bright—a quiet and contented little face, we see Home fairly written. Shining from the word, as rays shine from a star, we see how, when our graves are old, other hopes than ours are young, other hearts than ours are moved; how other ways are smoothed; how other happiness blooms, ripens, and decays—no, not decays, for other homes and other bands of children, not yet in being nor for ages yet to be, arise, and bloom and ripen to the end of all!

Welcome, everything! Welcome, alike what has been, and what never was, and what we hope may be, to your shelter underneath the holly, to your places round the Christmas fire, where what is sits open- hearted! In yonder shadow, do we see obtruding furtively upon the blaze, an enemy’s face? By Christmas Day we do forgive him! If the injury he has done us may admit of such companionship, let him come here and take his place. If otherwise, unhappily, let him go hence, assured that we will never injure nor accuse him.

On this day we shut out Nothing!

“Pause,” says a low voice. “Nothing? Think!”

“On Christmas Day, we will shut out from our fireside, Nothing.”

“Not the shadow of a vast City where the withered leaves are lying deep?” the voice replies. “Not the shadow that darkens the whole globe? Not the shadow of the City of the Dead?”

Not even that. Of all days in the year, we will turn our faces towards that City upon Christmas Day, and from its silent hosts bring those we loved, among us. City of the Dead, in the blessed name wherein we are gathered together at this time, and in the Presence that is here among us according to the promise, we will receive, and not dismiss, thy people who are dear to us!

Yes. We can look upon these children angels that alight, so solemnly, so beautifully among the living children by the fire, and can bear to think how they departed from us. Entertaining angels unawares, as the Patriarchs did, the playful children are unconscious of their guests; but we can see them—can see a radiant arm around one favourite neck, as if there were a tempting of that child away. Among the celestial figures there is one, a poor misshapen boy on earth, of a glorious beauty now, of whom his dying mother said it grieved her much to leave him here, alone, for so many years as it was likely would elapse before he came to her—being such a little child. But he went quickly, and was laid upon her breast, and in her hand she leads him.

There was a gallant boy, who fell, far away, upon a burning sand beneath a burning sun, and said, “Tell them at home, with my last love, how much I could have wished to kiss them once, but that I died contented and had done my duty!” Or there was another, over whom they read the words, “Therefore we commit his body to the deep,” and so consigned him to the lonely ocean and sailed on. Or there was another, who lay down to his rest in the dark shadow of great forests, and, on earth, awoke no more. O shall they not, from sand and sea and forest, be brought home at such a time!

There was a dear girl—almost a woman—never to be one—who made a mourning Christmas in a house of joy, and went her trackless way to the silent City. Do we recollect her, worn out, faintly whispering what could not be heard, and falling into that last sleep for weariness? O look upon her now! O look upon her beauty, her serenity, her changeless youth, her happiness! The daughter of Jairus was recalled to life, to die; but she, more blest, has heard the same voice, saying unto her, “Arise for ever!”

We had a friend who was our friend from early days, with whom we often pictured the changes that were to come upon our lives, and merrily imagined how we would speak, and walk, and think, and talk, when we came to be old. His destined habitation in the City of the Dead received him in his prime. Shall he be shut out from our Christmas remembrance? Would his love have so excluded us? Lost friend, lost child, lost parent, sister, brother, husband, wife, we will not so discard you! You shall hold your cherished places in our Christmas hearts, and by our Christmas fires; and in the season of immortal hope, and on the birthday of immortal mercy, we will shut out Nothing!

The winter sun goes down over town and village; on the sea it makes a rosy path, as if the Sacred tread were fresh upon the water. A few more moments, and it sinks, and night comes on, and lights begin to sparkle in the prospect. On the hill-side beyond the shapelessly-diffused town, and in the quiet keeping of the trees that gird the village-steeple, remembrances are cut in stone, planted in common flowers, growing in grass, entwined with lowly brambles around many a mound of earth. In town and village, there are doors and windows closed against the weather, there are flaming logs heaped high, there are joyful faces, there is healthy music of voices. Be all ungentleness and harm excluded from the temples of the Household Gods, but be those remembrances admitted with tender encouragement! They are of the time and all its comforting and peaceful reassurances; and of the history that re-united even upon earth the living and the dead; and of the broad beneficence and goodness that too many men have tried to tear to narrow shreds.
"Condemn me not because of mine imperfection,... but rather give thanks unto God that he hath made manifest unto you our imperfections, that ye may learn to be more wise than we have been." Mormon 9:31
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Tuly
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Re: MERRY CHRISTMAS!

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Merry Christmas world!! So here we are this year, both dad and I covid positive and enjoying this wonderful season with Edward in a quiet peaceful home, missing family but very grateful that we have been surrounded by good people, friends who have been generous and thoughtful.
This is the season to celebrate the birth of our savior Jesus Christ, for whom i am forever grateful for His grace and constant mercy. I love Him and feel His love daily.
"Condemn me not because of mine imperfection,... but rather give thanks unto God that he hath made manifest unto you our imperfections, that ye may learn to be more wise than we have been." Mormon 9:31
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Tuly
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Re: MERRY CHRISTMAS!

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Amen! President Oaks -

“We ought to be the friendliest and most considerate of all people anywhere. We should teach our children to be kind and considerate of everyone.” —President Oaks


https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.or ... al-summary
"Condemn me not because of mine imperfection,... but rather give thanks unto God that he hath made manifest unto you our imperfections, that ye may learn to be more wise than we have been." Mormon 9:31
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