The responsibility to endure is uniquely yours. However, you are never alone. The lifting power of the Lord can be yours. Energy is always required to provide lift over opposing forces. These same laws apply in our personal lives. Whenever an undertaking is begun, both the energy and the will to endure are essential. Blessings bestowed by God are always predicated upon obedience to the law. Think about the word promise. When did you make your first promise? What promises do you find hardest to keep? Do you promise frequently? What are your expectations when someone makes you a promise? “Eternal purposes of the Lord to roll on until all his promises are fulfilled,” reports Mormon 8.22. Promises are sacred: I promise to love, honor, and cherish you all the days of my life. Promises arise from deep loyalty: I pledge allegiance. Promise is another word for mission. It signifies what you intend to make happen. God’s word is filled with promises from our Creator to provide and deliver, and God is faithful to all of his promises. One of the blessings and gifts that God promises to provide for those whom believe in him is eternal life. It is in the Bible, 1 John 2.25: And this is the promise that God has promised us—eternal life. Things which are impossible with humans are possible with God. Whatever our work maybe, we must endure at the beginning, endure through opposing forces along the way, and endure to the end. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7

Any job must be completed before we can enjoy the result for which we are working. Adult life holds out the promise of personal growth. However, we have to fulfill a promise before we can reap the rewards of adulthood’s promise; we must take our journey seriously. Most often, intense physical challenges are accompanied by spiritual challenges as well. The Lord’s ultimate concern is for the salvation and exaltation of each soul. Keeping the gifts of the covenants we have made with God in mind will help us stay the long and sometimes arduous course along our pathway in life. If we turn our hearts and lives to God he will give us the ability to capitalize on our accumulated knowledge and experience, unifying our analytical and intuitive powers of reasoning, in order to use our great discernment for the creation of innovative solutions to complex problems, which will show our wisdom. God is the father of our spirits, and he loves us. How comforting and reassuring it is each day as we behold the wonders of the Universe and this beautiful World on which we live. We can see God’s hand in the matchless order with which the Heavenly bodies move and the delicate beauty of the flowers and trees and other growing things, all of them bearing silent witness to God’s existence. How stimulating and edifying to approach God in prayer each morning and evening and feel his nearness and his love as we acknowledge his hand, and our need, seek his help. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7

What a blessing to be able to approach the source of life and light and be strengthened and renewed by just humbling seeking and asking. God will give of the ability to savor sensory experience without distractions, to maintain sound physical health, to sustain high energy levels, to end to foster total well-being. Even in tragedy God is there. When traumatic challenges come and life hangs in the balance or is hopelessly marred and the future is dark and hope grows dim and time seems long—God is there. His reassuring feeling comes through, giving u the ability to bounce back quickly from disturbing evens, to connect vibrantly with the pleasures of existence, freeing ourselves from the bondage of painful episodes of the past, and enriching our connections to people and events allowing the story of our lives to convey a new aura of specialness. In some countries, people are submitting themselves to risky, painful, and expensive operations to add inched to their height. In a country where height is associated with status, and where institutions often use stature as a criterion for hiring (males must be at least five foot seven to apply to the Chinese foreign ministry), people are undergoing lengthy procedures to stretch and straighten their limbs. However, God is telling us there is something more real than this, but something which contains everything necessary to living in this World. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7

There is hardly a desire more widespread in the World today than to lead a life of your own. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that the daily struggle for a life of one’s own has become the collective experience of the World. God knows that we need food and clothing and shelter. He is not saying that the divine will imposes suffering upon us, but rather than when we fail to alive in accord with the divine we bring suffering on ourselves. People are getting further and further away from God by trying to propagate a harmful blueprint version of themselves that they think is acceptable to others and will define them as an individual. So we see that giving our lives over to God, or making great surrender to the spirit, does not mean losing anything worthwhile, but getting rid of those things which deny the presence and the power of the spirit right here on Earth. It is the great negations of life that we have to surrender, the doubts and fears and uncertainties, the coldness of unkindness, the lack of love. All of these negative things are called sins. However, the word sin has been misinterpreted and misconstrued, for the original meaning of sin was to miss the mark, to make a mistake, to err in judgment, or to do something that separates us from the conscious daily realization that we already are one with the supreme giver of life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7

As Worldliness spreads, our problems as a society change. No longer are we trying to escape the confinement of restrictive parents, education, religions, and communities. Instead, growing numbers of people are trying to find situations in which we can replicate a sense of belonging. People want to be noticed for being who we are and we want to be told, gently, who we should be. God is love and we cannot get close to the nature of love while we hate. It is the hate we have to surrender and not the love. You have to lose your hate if you wish to find love; you have to let go of everything that is unkind if you wish to discover kindness; you even have to surrender fear if you wish to discover faith. Everything that denies faith and love and life and truth and beauty is called a sin, a mistake, missing the mark. It is not easy to make this surrender, because we are in the habit of thinking of ourselves as being such strong, self-reliant personalities that we can sweep everything before us. It is not easy to be meek. There is a quaint desire of the ordinary to be recognized as somebody, which has lead to people demanding to people recognized not for who they are, but for who they think they should be. People are unable to truly express themselves as individuals. Arranged, monitored, controlled, we cannot find real elation, real excitement. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7

People are now looking to what they can buy to make them special. They even go as far as to share other people’s stories and accomplishments to feel like they have personally achieved a golden star. The result is the faux individuality. The feeling of perpetual stress that one has not come up with a good enough storyline and it sows the seeds of fear, depression, and even insanity. We want peace of mind and an inward sense of security, but are we willing to follow the word of God. We have to resist evil. We are full of resistance and combativeness and antagonism. And the reason we are over-aggressive is because we feel insecure. We put up a great big bluff and make a big noise and throw ourselves around because of this feeling of insecurity. We have to discover the secret, which is simplicity itself. Those who have made this surrender have found real peace of mind, happiness, and wholeness in the only place where in can be found, which is within themselves. Life is a gift of God and not of humans. Once we understand this principle we can establish the ability for having caring relationships with others on the basis of their full range of strengths and weaknesses, which will unify the masculine and feminine aspects of our own personality. Yes, this life is a time of testing. It is not the reward time. That will come later. We are here being tested. God wants to know how we feel in our hearts. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7

Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we play as a society in determining who makes it and who does not. We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the World in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society do not matter at all. The true ingredients of success at the highest level: God, passion, talent, and hard work. However, when are hearts are not right, the Lord withholds his spirit. If people and nations did reach up to God with all their hearts, war would cease. If love of God were in the hearts of people, we would have no desire to destroy another person. There would be no dishonesty if the love of God were in the Heart. Lord, thou have given us thy word for a light to shine upon our path; grant us so to meditate on that word, and to follow its teaching, that we may find in it the light that shines more and more until the perfect day. May God the Father bless us; may God take care of us; the Holy Ghost enlighten us all the days of our life. The Lord be our defender and keeper of body and soul, both now and forever, to the ages of ages. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7