On Growing Up
I sure am glad that my parents encouraged me (and my siblings) to grow up.
I think I was about ten years old when I got my first job: delivering The Northshore Citizen to maybe 50 or 60 homes in our neighborhood every Wednesday morning. Seems like I split the job with my sister, but my early-onset Alzheimer’s leaves me a little uncertain. Wasn’t long after that, though, that I definitely got my own daily route. I spent about four years unwittingly distributing a lot of liberal propaganda (known then and now as The Seattle Times) to my neighbors, most of whom probably appreciated it (the propaganda, that is).
“Daily,” of course, meant daily: 365 days a year. Mercifully, there were three or four of them each year on which I made it home dry. I remember the dark, wet night I stepped on a nail as I ducked under some dripping rhododendron bushes to get to the Harkenon’s house. It was hard to tell if that sucking sound (and feel) was the nail coming out of my foot or my sneaker coming out of the mud. Saturdays and Sundays—and every Christmas and New Year’s Day (thank goodness for sobriety)—were delivered in the mornings. Nothing like a 5 a.m. wake-up call every weekend morning to try to make an old man out of a young man. School seemed like a pretty desirable place compared to delivering papers in the cold, dark, and rain.
When I was fifteen, my buddy Jeff (who already had a driver’s license) and I were on our way to a church softball game. (I often played catcher and not particularly skillfully. He sometimes enjoyed a little too much watching me get blown up on the occasional play at the plate. We had a competitive stake.) Anyway, he needed to stop by his workplace—as a dishwasher at the prestigious Inglewood Country Club—to pick up his check, since his Trans Am drank a lot of gas. Curious to see the insides of such a posh place, I went with him. Before long, we found his crusty old boss, who summarily dismissed him (on suspicion of breaking some rules, which Jeff vehemently denied) and then looked at me, squinting narrowly, and said, “Son, you want a job?” I said, “Sure,” and after the game Jeff dropped me off for my first night of work.
Those nights cleaning up after country club party-goers sometimes ended at two or three or even four in the morning, depending on how late the evening’s festivities lasted. Calling and waking my parents for a ride home at such hours seemed a bit much—and they rather agreed—so I usually walked. It was just a couple of miles (but, yes, it actually was uphill). The inevitable rain seemed to cleanse my spirit to a certain extent—and that wasn’t all bad after spending the evening in a country club bar kind of environment.
That job didn’t last long, though, as I soon got hired by Jeff’s brother-in-law to work at his art and picture framing store. I cut frames, glass, and mattes—mostly tens of thousands of mattes—after school and full-time in the summers for about three years. Some Saturday mornings (yes, 5 a.m., again), he took us waterskiing. And…
Well, the story of jobs just keeps on going, but I’ll quit boring you. The point is: my parents encouraged responsibility, financial independence, and, to a large extent, emotional independence from my early years. They also encouraged independent thinking, thankfully, but that’s a story for another day.
Of course, there were also chores growing up. (By “growing up,” I’m referring to the 14-year period we were given to turn 18 years old.) Tuesday nights were mine to do the dishes. We actually had a dishwasher, but we never used it. My parents said it was broken, but years later, I’m increasingly suspicious about just how broken it really was. When I was eleven or twelve or so, my mother taught me how to do laundry. I had a hard time remembering which colors to wash in which temperatures, so I made a chart and nailed it to the wall of our unfinished laundry room. It hung there for probably close to 30 years.
My biggest chore, though, may have been our vegetables. (And by “vegetables,” I am not referring to the three rows of our model vegetable garden I was expected to weed every day of the summer.) Mother served at least two vegetables at every dinner and the rule was you had to eat two of them and no less. I’m pretty sure the zucchini, lima beans, spinach, and occasional brussel sprouts were all calculated to be encouragement for us to achieve independent living at the earliest possible age.
Leaving home and going to college was a foregone conclusion. I don’t recall ever considering an alternative. My older brother went off to college after high school. So did my older sister. Three months after graduating from high school, my parents drove me down to Provo, where, believe it or not, I met my new roommate, Shannon. Shannon, you’ll be relieved to know, was not only male, he acted and sounded a lot like Rocky Balboa, only more educated. I wrote my parents a letter most weeks and called home some weeks. When my freshman year was done, I went home and cut another gazillion mattes before leaving on my mission. The rule was you needed to pay for everything you could.
My mother has never forgiven me for this (though having conspired with my father to turn me into an independent adult at an early age, she really has no one to blame): after my mission, I was home for a week and then never lived at home again. And that’s not because I disliked my home or my family—I come from the greatest family on the planet! And who doesn’t want to live 15 minutes from Dick’s Drive-In and 30 minutes from the Seattle Mariners?! It was just time to be the autonomous adult they’d taught me to be.
Why do I mention all this? Well, last Saturday Becky and I were asked to teach a class on helping young women prepare for adulthood—college, missions, the temple, career, marriage, etc. So I’ve been thinking a lot about the role parents play in helping their children become successfully independent—which I guess I would define as having both an understanding of how to live after the manner of happiness and the desire and motivation to independently do so. (Which seems easier to do if you have some practice at it before the actual moment arrives.)
As I mentioned to one of the classes Saturday, I think it is common for young children in our church to hear about “families being together forever” and picture themselves in heaven as little children with their loving parents forever with them and taking care of them, maybe even holding them. I think, though, that there may be parents with the same vision, hoping against wisdom that little Johnny and Suzy will stay their little Johnny and Suzy forever and continuing to nurture an environment that will keep them physically, emotionally, or financially dependent. It seems my parents tended to see me as the adult I would become more than the child I was—and, like I said, I’m glad they did.
In the family Becky and I lead today, we don’t speak so much about achieving emotional, spiritual, and financial independence (though everyone understands that’s the goal; it’s even written in our family plan) as much as we talk about “building character.” Most things that our kids should do but don’t want to do are about (at least as they hear it from us) “building character.” Truth is, we’re trying to build independent adults who know God’s plan and can independently achieve happiness and who have as much character as they are willing to develop.
A favorite scene from five or six years ago gives me great hope. It was early on a weekday morning in the middle of the summer, maybe 6:30 or 6:45. Must have been July. It was one of those nothing-but-blue-sky Utah summer mornings that starts out quite warm. I was getting ready to go to work and, for some reason, glanced out the bedroom window which faces our backyard. There was our son, bent over pulling weeds in our, well, modest vegetable garden. He’d figured out that the faster you get your work done, the cooler the temperature you can work in and the more quickly you can start playing. I suppose the bad news is that our kids won’t be kids forever. But if my parents were right, that’s actually the good news.
On Familiarity and Contempt
Someone—reportedly that (possibly fictitious, himself) fable-teller Aesop—once coined the phrase—or at least popularized it: familiarity breeds contempt. With one exception (more on that later), I don’t think that phrase could possibly be less true.
More than once, I have begun teaching a class of youth—maybe a Sunday School or Primary class or a group of deacons—and come away annoyed with them and their impolite, disrespectful behavior—to the point where I wasn’t anxious to return. But two things inevitably happen: I get to know them and I start to like them. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever really gotten to know a youth and failed to come to appreciate them and become fond of them—and I’ve started out annoyed at quite a few of them! For me, that initially unfortunate experience doesn’t just happen with youth.
I spent this past week out of town on business. I wasn’t looking forward to it because I knew I’d be spending the week with a small group of people led by someone I really did not want to be around at all. I had never actually had a personal or individual conversation with her (you’ll note), but I had been in meetings with her and knew her to be foul-mouthed, sour-faced, and terse. My few interactions with her had completely turned me off and I was about to spend four long days with her (and a half-dozen other people I’d never met).
Well. You can’t spend thirteen hours a day virtually locked in a room with a few people and not get to know quite a bit about them. I met a highly educated young man who, with his girlfriend—now fiancé—is expecting their first child; a single Jewish mother of two teenagers who is under lots of job stress and worried about her kids; a single dad who spent his birthday with his teenage son and his (the father’s) girlfriend; and a woman who has a perpetual fiancé following failed marriages for each of them, no plans to ever formally tie the knot, and whose face lights up at the very mention of reality TV shows.
And then there’s Megan, the person I really pretty much despised before the week began. Megan, it turns out, is an actual person pursuing life and happiness and family and fulfillment just like the rest of us. She has a husband and kids that she cares about and frequently talks about. She has a home she loves. She has a personal history of success and failures (lots of successes). She takes a direct, sometimes curt, but nevertheless sincere interest in others. She goes out of her way to help people advance in their careers and in life in general. And, yes, she has the foulest mouth I’ve ever spent more than a few minutes around. But, by the end of the week, my contempt—bred entirely from both unfamiliarity and repeated personal failure on my part to not give people the benefit of the doubt—had turned into empathy and even appreciation. Another of life’s important lessons learned, rather pathetically, yet again. I hope I learn it well enough soon enough that I don’t have to keep re-learning it.
(I mentioned above an exception. It seems to me that if there is any tendency toward truth with regards to familiarity breeding contempt, that it is within families where we are so familiar with one another that if we’re not careful, we can become complacent in our relationships, take loved ones for granted, actually lose empathy for them, and sometimes let our experiences with their shortcomings and the offenses we’ve taken from them canker within us. You can tell you’re in danger when you notice yourself treating visitors to your home better than you treat its regular residents. We must not stop seeking to understand others and appreciating their efforts—especially those closest to us!)
Longfellow said, “If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” It would be good if I didn’t have to wait to discover the “secret history” of everyone I meet before deciding that I can grant them the generosity, respect, and even appreciation that they deserve. Giving people the benefit of the doubt, of which there is much where familiarity is lacking, is a happier way to live.
On Sports and Wings of Lightning
Seriously. I can hardly think of a bigger waste of time than being a devoted fan and spectator of sports. Some dedicated sports fans seem to see their dedication as a virtue—right up there with faith, hope, and charity—and the absence of it in others as shameful. As for me, I’ve wasted—and continue to waste—way too much of my life on sports. So this post isn’t a criticism of others. It’s a cry for help; an attempt at self-therapy.
I’m 48 years old. I’ve spent at least 39 years attached to various sports teams. Other than a few somewhat vague memories of watching Spencer Haywood of the Sonics with my Dad back in the three-to-make-two days of the NBA; driving around on Saturdays in the car with my Dad listening to Sonny Sixkiller (no kidding, that was his name) throw the ball for the Huskies; and watching (admirably) vicious Bob Gibson pitch for the Cardinals on a little black-and-white TV—again with my Dad (I may have identified the source of the problem! just kidding, Dad)—my real addiction to sports crack began on April 6, 1977.
On that night, I laid on our hallway floor just below our wall-mounted radio listening to Dave Niehaus call the first-ever game for the Seattle Mariners for three hours. In what can clearly be understood now as a precursor of things to come—for at least as long as the Children of Israel wandered in the desert—and with the promised land still nowhere in sight!—they lost 7-0. But! The next night, they lost just 2-0. They were obviously moving in the right direction and I felt encouraged—even optimistic—just as I’ve felt on about 8,000 nights since then.
Let’s say that, on average, since April 1997 I’ve been emotionally attached to about five teams each year (between the Mariners, Seahawks, Sonics, Sounders, UW football, BYU football, and BYU basketball). That’s about 200 sports seasons I’ve lived and (mostly) died through. Guess how many of them ended with a meaningful win? Guess how many of them did not end in disappointment? Three. Three! The 1978-79 Sonics, the 1984 Cougars, and the 2013-14 Seahawks. (Three and a half if I count the 1995 Seattle Mariners.) That’s less than 2%—and a long, long way beneath the Mendoza line.
Not that winning seasons justify the time and emotional energy invested in sports-watching. Winning seasons are actually the worst because they suck you in all the more. In fact, with most teams most seasons, there comes a moment (with the Mariners, it’s usually when they lose for the fiftieth time somewhere around early May) where I’m so fed up that I emotionally let go of the team and the season and then something amazing happens. I feel like a man born again, relieved of my Sisyphean burden. The sky is blue again and I can hear the birds. But then I find out they’ve won a couple of games in a row and… I’m back on the crack.
Some of you will protest. You’ll say that nothing is more important than family and that sports bring your family together. Not buying it. All kinds of crummy things bring families together. Ever heard of the Sopranos? The Gambinos? The Godfather? Shoot, boating on Sundays is a great way to bring the family together!
Others will say that we can’t spend our WHOLE lives doing family history and some diversion is not only tolerable but healthy! (This will typically come from people who aren’t familiar with actually doing family history.) I agree that some diversion is healthy. Among the myriad ways my father has redeemed himself from hooking me on sports is that he took a teenage boy to the opera—and not just once. No kidding. Some of my favorite memories. I realized, while reading this great talk the other day, that I have not yet brought my son—or my daughters—to the opera. So we’re going. (Get ready, kids.) Hopefully we can arrange to go during a so-called important ballgame. (My kids have never seen the Grand Canyon, either—and we live in Utah!)
Still others may say that participating in the drama of human achievement is an admirable form of refinement in itself. Well, I don’t know. Seems there’s a lot more admirable human drama and achievement going on professions all around us which don’t get nearly the attention they ought to get. Perhaps we should be cheering on nurses or mental health workers or school teachers.
There’s a great scene at the end of George C. Scott’s version of A Christmas Carol, which I watch every Christmas season religiously. In it, Scrooge has “come to himself” (see Luke 15:17) and begun mending his ways. When he returns to his nephew and his wife to repent for his lack of kindness and affection over the years, he says, very sincerely “God forgive me for the time I’ve wasted”—a line which reaches the center of my heart every time I hear it. (You can see that here—just go to the nine-minute mark and watch for a minute or two.)
“Time flies on wings of lightning; We cannot call it back,” says the song. We have such little time. Would that I might use mine better!
Lies, Half-Truths, and Clear Vision
The question of whether I believe in the devil has long seemed interesting to me. I remember walking down a street in Hamburg, Germany, knocking on doors with Elder Barton one day and asking him if he had a testimony of Satan. He looked at me as if wondering what he would ever do with his greenie (we actually called new missionaries “goldens” in my mission) and I said, “Well, if we have a testimony of God and of the doctrine of the Church, we must have a testimony that Satan is actually a real, live, specific person.” He agreed.
While I do, indeed, believe in the doctrine of the Church and that Satan is real, I’m honestly not all that certain what to think about his influence in my life or in the lives of others. I think there’s a lot of it, to be sure, but I don’t understand how direct it is. That is, I don’t understand how directly he or his Screwtape-like minions (and I do think he is not alone) influence events or circumstances or my thoughts and feelings. How directly do they create temptation? How directly do they mess with my thinking, understanding, and vision? At any rate, I am sure he exists. I am sure there is evil in this world and other places and that he is the author of much of it. And I am sure that “he seeketh that all men might be miserable like unto himself.”
A few days ago I was asked to consider methods Satan uses to deceive us. I misunderstood my assignment a little and, instead, started creating a list of lies he gets us to buy into. Here is the list I’ve come up with. If I think of more, I’ll probably come back and add them. If you think of other important ones before I do, please shoot me your thoughts. (By the way, with a nod to “full disclosure,” I’ll tell you I keep hearing the Thompson Twins singing “lies, lies, lies, yeah” in my head when I think about this. Perhaps that is one way Satan gets into my head. ;-)
- I’m unworthy to receive God’s help. I am so bad or I’ve done so many bad things that God either can’t or won’t help me. The saving grace of the Atonement is beyond my reach and hope. That is never true for any of us, but if Satan loves to do anything, it is to extinguish hope. For that reason alone, we ought to embrace optimism and shun pessimism. (Not to make light of an important subject, but Mariners fans know this intuitively, even though the aspiration of our hopes remains unrealized.)
- The fact that I can repent later makes it more acceptable for me to sin now. Well. It is true that our sins, though scarlet and crimson, shall be as white as snow. (And it is true that Ute fans are Ute fans in spite of the clear association—and biblical warning, even—between crimson and sin.) But that “shall” is conditioned upon the state of our heart, and hearts that choose to make a mockery of the Savior’s suffering will find the road to a legitimately broken heart and contrite spirit difficult to find. “White as snow” can always happen (see #1 above) but not without sincerity from us—which sincerity, once brushed aside, will be all the harder to achieve later.
- Tolerance is a virtue, so the more of it, the better. If I do not show tolerance for things other people say I should show tolerance for, I am wrong and un-Christ-like. Tolerance is a virtue. So are patience and acceptance and compassion and understanding. We ought to have all of those things, at least to some degree (perhaps there’s a limit with acceptance) with regards to people. But not with people’s actions or words. In fact, nobody in their right mind thinks that literally all behaviors should be tolerated. The lie is that if I don’t accept the same behaviors that others accept, then I’m bad. But Christianity in its best forms has always rejected popular behaviors that depart from God’s plan and His commandments. Good is good and evil is evil. Ours is to understand how God sees them and to be as generous with people as appropriate.
- This problem will never be fixed. My spouse or child will never change. I’ll never change. This circumstance will never improve. Satan loves to mess with our perspective. One of his best tools is to extinguish hope through short-term thinking and a distraction from what should be a long-term, even eternal, perspective. People do change. Usually slowly, but they can and do change. (Surely I change—at least for the better—mostly slowly of all!) Circumstances do change. Some problems go away on their own; some we can fix; most can be endured. My wise pharmacologist father used to tell us that 90-something percent of all physical ailments will fix themselves no matter what you take, so think twice before introducing medicines with inevitable side-effects into your body. Patience, hope, and endurance are virtues for us to embrace. And they are well justified. Just wait and see.
- Men and women are the same—or, at least, they should be. Manly men should be less manly. Women should be more manly. There are no true gender roles. There isn’t even gender—or, at least, it’s whatever I want it to be. Yikes. Vive la difference, I say. And so does God. At least, He does if you believe in living prophets, the plan of salvation, and the Proclamation to the World. Check, check, and check for me (even if the six-hour version of Pride and Prejudice is in my list of top movies). Man up, men. Woman up, women.
- He (or she) did that on purpose! Some years ago, I sat through two days of corporate training on “Crucial Conversations.” (Interestingly, it was conducted by a woman who just knows I’m going to hell because of my false (her word) form of Christianity. Bless her heart, her prayers, love, and caring for me are so sincere! My sincere assurances to her that I have accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior and that I believe I can only be saved by and through his grace bring her no relief.) Anyway, all I remember from those two days is that we hear people say things and/or see them do things and then we tell ourselves stories—often negative stories that fuel our anger—about what that person meant or what their bad intentions were or about how they wanted to hurt us. Truth is, people are generally good, they’re generally trying, they usually don’t want to hurt us, and we’re just plain wrong about ascribing negativity to them. Too often, unfortunately, that doesn’t stop us from sharing our (mis)interpretations about other people’s badness with anyone who will provide a sympathetic ear, so we get a second dose of positive reinforcement for our self-deception to go along with our sense of victimized indignation.
- The Church has in it sinners, posers, and self-righteous hypocrites, so it must be a bad place. Further, Church leaders have said erroneous and, occasionally, stupid things, so the Church’s authority must be hollow. In my mind, this is akin to saying that since hospitals are full of sick people and doctors frequently mistaken, then hospitals and are bad and doctors have nothing to offer. (By the way, teenagers often do something similar with their parents: my parents are flawed parents so I’ll do well to distance myself from them.) Truth is, “they that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick.” We’re all sick and the more of us sick people who get together in search of real healing, the better. That men are fallible ought not be a shock to our naiveté. Moroni, himself, acknowledged this as he closed the Book of Mormon: “If there be faults, they be the faults of a man…” but he warned, “he that condemneth, let him be aware.” Let us reject neither the hospital nor, too broadly, those practicing medicine within it. (And, regarding those practitioners, see #6.)
- Women are sexual creatures. I’m half shaking with fear and half chuckling at my foolishness for broaching a topic here I don’t know how to wisely articulate, but here goes. Of course, all human beings are sexual creatures to some extent or Adam and Eve would have been the end of it. And sexuality varies in healthy ways between genders and individuals. But. Satan is the master of the half-truth. Young women, often ill-equipped to even perceive Satan’s marketing tactics, are taught to sexualize their look and behavior and to view modesty (in appearance and behavior) as passé. Some mature women have gotten so much positive reinforcement (from men and women) from immodesty that they still don’t see the problem with it. And boys and men are living in a virtual swamp of fantasy about how women want sex all the time just like they do. Everybody loses. I suspect we need mothers to explain the female view of sexuality more clearly and effectively to their children (and perhaps to their husbands—who ought to try hard to understand).
- This will make me feel better. Addiction. He’s really good at this one! And, as is so often the case, he’s half right. Nephi described Satan’s method: “He leadeth them by the neck with a flaxen cord, until he bindeth them with his strong cords forever.” Indeed. As I have come to understand addiction (and, as on every other topic, including that last one, I’m no expert, I know), most addictions, chemical or sexual, are inspired by a desire to avoid, cover, or replace pain. Unfortunately, as the man in black, lying limp and helpless, said, nay, shouted to Prince Humperdinck too correctly, “Life is pain!” So our desires for relief can be strong and frequent. The real lie is in believing that there isn’t a better way to handle life’s pain or that life, itself, can’t be made better through other means. The real solution is in finding the real source of pain and addressing it emotionally and spiritually. Easier to say than to do, to be sure. Addicts (a term which may describe you and me more than we care to acknowledge) should be granted patience and very consistent support.
- A little breeze is good; I really don’t need to lean into it. (This one was inspired—post original publication—by alert reader, Jim Golden. Thanks, Jim!) Most of us are probably ready and willing to stand up to substantial, obvious adversity when it comes our way, but Satan can sometimes get us to drop our guard by convincing us that things are going well enough and a little relaxation won’t hurt. “I’ve said my prayers 12 days in a row; it won’t hurt any if I skip them now when I’m so tired.” Or, “My family knows I have a testimony; I don’t really need to bear it again publicly this year.” While it is true that we shouldn’t beat ourselves up to excess over our shortcomings, it is essential that we maintain a constant striving for progress and not let our guard down—and keep leaning into the wind, so to speak. Cliché, maybe, but it seems true: if we’re not progressing we’re regressing. Getting us to relax out of comfort can win the same effect for Satan as getting us to give up from discouragement.
I am convinced that truth isn’t just nice and doesn’t just help provide fairness and justice. It is essential to happiness. Living “after the manner of happiness” includes seeing and dealing with things the way they really are. The Savior spoke, when he spoke of motes and beams, of the necessity to “see clearly.” Life gets really unhappy when we lose our vision or it becomes blurred by lies and half-truths.
Some of the ways that I can tell that I am seeing clearly include seeing myself as being acceptable and OK while needing significant improvement; seeing others as good people trying hard and dealing with their own pain; seeing God as willing—and He is much more than that—to embrace not only me but those I’ve taken offense from; seeing his commandments (such a tough word for us sometimes!) as guard rails along the proverbial road of (not to) happiness; and being optimistic. Almost always, when I am unhappy, it is, at least in part, because I am not seeing something clearly.
On the Just and the Unjust
I was reminded recently, by the anguish of a dear friend, that life is hard—and sometimes it is very, very hard. Given the relative ease of my own life (thus far) and the depths of human misery in faraway (and sometimes near) places, I’m hesitant to say that life is hard for all of us, but—at least to some extent—it is. The Savior said, “he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” We won’t all be tested in the same ways, but we will all be tested. It is part of life’s purpose and, as resistance does for muscles, provides for us opportunities to grow—even when that last phrase seems like such a cliché when we’re in the midst of significant adversity.
Yet, even knowing that life involves testing and opposition, we sometimes seem surprised, even shocked, that extreme difficulty would come to us. We tend to see ourselves as “the just” and think life unfair when the rain falls, as it surely will. Echoing the Savior, Longfellow said (as my mother often reminded me during rainy—meaning most—days in Seattle) that “Into each life some rain must fall.” We ask how this can be and why life is unfair and where God is, for heaven’s sake, and how He could let such things happen to us.
Adding to our confusion and perceived injustice is our knowledge that blessings follow obedience, which they surely do. But that’s not to say that the opposite is true: that adversity follows—and only follows—rebellion. Certainly negative consequences follow poor choices, but the worst consequence can follow even the best choices. Just consider the great martyrs.
Lawrence Corbridge said,
“Life is hard for all of us, but life is also simple. We have only two choices. We can either follow the Lord and be endowed with His power and have peace, light, strength, knowledge, confidence, love, and joy, or we can go some other way, any other way, whatever other way, and go it alone—without His support, without His power, without guidance, in darkness, turmoil, doubt, grief, and despair. And I ask, which way is easier?
“He said, ‘Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; … and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’ Life is hard, but life is simple. Get on the path and never, ever give up. You never give up. You just keep on going. You don’t quit, and you will make it.”
I agree. We do not—indeed cannot—always see specific tests coming. And there is no guarantee that when they come, our prayers and pleas for relief will be answered in the time and manner we want. But. Whatever happens, if we will place our trust in the Savior, walk with Him, and allow Him to walk with us—patiently, submissively, and constantly striving for the best outcome—we will be better off than if we dismiss God and try to go it alone.
Living "after the manner of happiness" 