We’re nearing the time for New Year’s resolutions. They can be helpful, sometimes. We often focus on quantifiable goals, like losing twenty pounds or saving a thousand dollars or exercising five days a week. But the most important goals are often not measurable in such simple ways.
Two of the most important things that we might do over the next year would be to be more self-aware and to be more charitable in judging others.
On which, I cite two passages from the great and heroic Russian Nobel-laureate writer Aleksander Solzhenitsyn:
“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes. . . . We make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions — especially selfish ones.”
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
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We are sent here to improve, and one of the most important ways in which we can and must improve is in our capacity to love others. I quote, again, from the late Swiss-American psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross:
“You have to temper the iron. Every hardship is an opportunity that you are given, an opportunity to grow. To grow is the sole purpose of existence on this planet Earth. You will not grow if you sit in a beautiful flower garden, but you will grow if you are sick, if you are in pain, if you experience losses, and if you do not put your head in the sand, but take the pain as a gift to you with a very, very specific purpose.” (Death is of Vital Importance, 1995)
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Another installment of my regular Thursday column in the Deseret News, “Defending the Faith,” has appeared:
“An Old Testament curriculum year beckons to us (or threatens us!)”
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I find the results of this study extremely interesting:
I have to say that they’re consistent with my own experience and my own impressions.
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The inimitable Irish Latter-day Saint Robert Boylan has just published a new book entitled
Behold the Mother of My Lord: Towards a Mormon Mariology
I look forward to reading it.
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Here’s a nice seven-minute video from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:
I think that it provides a good rationale for “apologetics.”
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A great story:
“Why Elder Packer Invited a Hostile, Less-Active Member to Speak at Stake Conference”
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