uplifting

A problem is an answer waiting to be opened

Some of our struggles involve making decisions, while others are a result of the decisions we have made. Some of our struggles result from choices others make that affect our lives. We cannot always control everything that happens to us in this life, but we can control how we respond. Many struggles come as problems and pressures that sometimes cause pain. Others come as temptations, trials, and tribulations.

I once believed soft, warm, beautiful things could never flourish in an environment of hard concrete and cold, dark bricks.

If it's not exactly like you thought it would be, you think it's a failure. What about the spectrum of colors in between.

Everybody in this life has their challenges and difficulties. That is part of our mortal test. The reason for some of these trials cannot be readily understood except on the basis of faith and hope because there is often a larger purpose which we do not always understand. Peace comes through hope.

If you have WANNA, you can do ANYTHING!! - The Caterpillar That Wouldn't Change

What men and women need is encouragement. Their natural resisting powers should be strengthened, not weakened ... Instead of always harping on a man's faults, tell him of his virtues. Try to pull him out of his rut ... Hold up to him his better self, his real self that can dare and do and win out! ... People radiate what is in their minds and in their hearts.

Unreasonable," "unrealistic," and "impractical" are all words used to marginalize a person or idea that fails to conform with conventionally expected standards.

Sadness, disappointment, and severe challenge are events in life, not life itself. I do not minimize how hard some of these events are. They can extend over a long period of time, but they should not be allowed to become the confining center of everything you do. The Lord inspired Lehi to declare the fundamental truth, __en are, that they might have joy._ That is a conditional statement: __hey might have joy._ It is not conditional for the Lord. His intent is that each of us finds joy. It will not be conditional for you as you obey the commandments, have faith in the Master, and do the things that are necessary to have joy here on earth.

The Lord gives us a spirit of hope and a feeling of comfort and confidence that we can overcome the obstacles we face. He has shown the way to gain strength during our struggles. With His assistance, we have the ability to succeed. Listen to His words of counsel and comfort: 'Fear not, little children, for you are mine, and I have overcome the world and none of them that my Father hath given me shall be lost.

I have finally reverted the publishing rights for my Cocoon Trilogy back to me and, for the first time, e-published the final book - Butterfly: Tomorrow's Children. Cocoon, the movie and the book, was only the beginning.

The heart that gives thanks is a happy one, for we cannot feel thankful and unhappy at the same time.The more we say thanks, the more we find to be thankful for.And the more we find to be thankful for, the happier we become.We don't give thanks because we're happy.We are happy because we give thanks.

Maybe it__ not metaphysics. Maybe it__ existential. I__ talking about the individual US citizen__ deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we__e lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it__ all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it__ not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than __ie,_ __ass away,_ the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday__ __nd not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have even heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have put in to make sure we__e remembered, these__l last what__ hundred years? two hundred?__nd they__l crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I__ cremated the trees that are nourished by my windblown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and before maybe three or four generations it will be like I never existed, not only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here, and people in 2104 or whatever will no more think of Stuart A. Nichols Jr. than you or I think of John T. Smith, 1790 to 1864, of Livingston, Virginia, or some such. That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we__e all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine, in fact, probably that__ why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world, contribute, shape things, to help distract us from how little and totally insignificant and temporary we are.

You have to keep looking on the bright, because you'll never find anything in the dark.

Don't let them beat down your spirit and the spirit of your ideas go with reality and what seems natural to you ...transpire within this Universe and together we shall have a goal.

I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen--and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies.

The greatest purpose in life, the greatest achievement one could ever have in life, the greatest satisfaction one could ever get in life can only be found in the service of others.

This is my mind , i own it!