Time’s sublimest target is a soul I forgot. If we live in harmony with God’s eternal plan and if we have faith in his promises, then our future will shine. We have dreams and goals and that is good. If we work with all our heart to accomplish them, then the Lord will lead us where we cannot lead ourselves; God will make us into what we cannot make of ourselves. At all times, we have to accept God’s will, and become the men and women he is nurturing us to become. Take a guess as to how much you have changed over the last ten years on a scale of 1 to 10. Now, on the same scale, estimate how much one will change over the next decade. Consider how these ratings compare? Do you assess your past changes differently from how you predict your future ones? It turns out that most people do, and that the inconsistencies are glaring. Most people predicted significantly less change than they recalled experiencing, although the predictions improved slightly in older subjects. Many also reported that their personalities were starkly different ten years earlier, yet they foresaw little change ahead. People expect to change little in the future, despite changing a lot in the past. We create a sharp division between our present, fixed self, and our past, evolving selves. We always thing we have settled into ourselves, and we are always wrong. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8

The most interesting finding is that at every age, we feel like we are done with our own evolution. It is like the present is what we have achieved after all those long years of changing. And now we are done. We should pray to feel the love of our Heavenly Father in our lives, so that we will know how to trust ourselves as he trusts us. Being faithful, at all times and in all places, will allow us to express our love and admiration and deep respect for God. This life is a wonderful moment of eternity. We are here with a glorious goal, that of preparing to meet God. Atonement is an infinite gift of love that opens the door to an eternal happiness. Atonement can be a flash of light which, to a person who has lost oneself in a dark night, suddenly reveals a road that, whether it takes one straight home or not, certainly goes one’s way. Our task is to become members of the perfect City. The spirit progressively evolves from forms engaged in matter to forms that have been abstracted from it. Having then become intelligible in act, these forms there by attain the level of intellect in act, reaching the level of pure spiritual forms, those forms that, inasmuch as they exist for the Active Intellect, have not had to pass from power to act. We are inclined to conceive of the past as a story, as some plot that is heading inevitably in one direction. The problem is that thinking this way robs the past, present, and future of their mystery. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8

The old stories in our heads treats who we were ten years ago as evolving and who we are now as fully developed, and it loses sight of how wonderful and frightening both the present and future are in their potential. Our impulse to deny the unpredictability of the future favours neatening the past into a tidy narrative. Misconceptions and misunderstandings of this sort, stemming from aversion to uncertainty and our craving for order have occupied us throughout our lives. The desire to tie the local World of the everyday to the universal realm of religion, by uniting material reality and the spiritual has been a goal of sculpture from the earliest times. People want desperately to understand the World, connect with it and feel so significant and divineness so they feel grounded. In Egypt, for example, larger-than-life-size stone funerary figures were carved to bear the ka, or individual spirt, of the deceased into the eternity of the afterlife. The permanence of the stone was felt to guarantee the ka’s immortality. Ka embodies part of the human soul. The Ka came into existence at the precise moment a human was born and continued as the individual’s double throughout life and after death. The creator god Khnum, for example, was often depicted modeling both the physical body and the ka on his potter’s. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8

After death, ka continued to live on and, like the deceased when he was alike, required food and drink. Food offerings, or depictions of them on tomb walls, sustained the ka, although he did not physically eat them, but absorbed their life-giving forces. For the Egyptians, the body was an essential element for the survival of the individual in the afterlife. This is why it was mummified and placed in an underground tomb for protection from grave robbers. Despite these precautions, it was not certain that the body could be preserved for ever. The Egyptians, therefore, sculpted statues of the deceased, ready to replace the body if it were to disappear. The statue could then support the deceased’s invisible elements, such as the ka. The Ka could be invested in the statue and continue to live on the food offerings made at the tomb, and to sustain the deceased in the afterlife. For the ancients Greeks, only the gods were immortal. What tied the World of the gods to the World of humanity was beauty itself, and the most beautiful thing of all was the perfectly proportioned, usually athletic male form. The essence of doctrines of personal survival (or immortality) is of great human interest as it asserts that after our deaths we shall continue to exist (forever). These logically unique expectations that we shall, to put it as noncommittally as possible, have experiences after death, that death will not be our terminus but the beginning of a new journey. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8

Many people want to have eternal life and believe that this is only possible through having faith in and worshiping God because souls, like everything else, are sustained by God and would be at once annihilated is he chose to withdraw his support. What is the work and glory of God? “To bring to pass immortality and eternal life of humans,” reports Moses 1.39. Bring to pass immortality is essentially a work of creation. God speaks, and World are formed. At the culmination of this work, humans are placed upon the Earth to learn, be tested, and gain experience. “Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation,” reports St. John 5.28-29. The just as well as the unjust are given a priceless and incomprehensible gift; immortality. Because of the Saviour, we will live forever. We are immortal. “And, if you keep my commandments and endure to the end you shall have eternal life, which gift is the greatest of all the gifts of God,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 14.7. Eternal life is the culmination of existence. Eventually, God’s plan will lead to death itself being destroyed in an awesome future almost beyond our comprehension! #RandolphHarris 5 of 8

God wants to give us an everlasting, eternal, immortal life. We are assured that it is more valuable than any physical treasure. God designed the Universe and devised his plan and our reward before he even started creating it. He is planning and preparing an infinitely more exciting and rewarding life for us in his divine family. God wants to give us an eternal life free from human limitations and disappointments, weaknesses and suffering. We must purge our hearts of evil and fill them with the desire to do good continually. Our Heavenly Father, with love that is scarcely within our power to comprehend, desires more than just our immortality. He desires each of us to partake of this greatest of all gifts: eternal life. That makes sense because with technology so advance on Earth, humans can eventually become immortal, but eternal life is something different. It is sharing in God’s reality and secrets being revealed to us. We will experience things that are beyond the pleasures of Earth without any pain or suffering. The life the Heavenly Father lives is eternal. Eternal life means being a god, being married, having spiritual child, and creating World. The highest division of the celestial kingdom is the home for such individuals. The Bible says we are pilgrims and strangers in a foreign land. This World is not our home; our citizenship is in Heaven. Everything that happens here on Earth is a preparation for the journey. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8

Our personality styles are not frozen as we might thing. Our faults tend to get worse before they can get better. If self-centered people do not change as they get older, the result is an increasing sense of vulnerability that transforms the normal losses and changes of aging into insults, outrages, and terrors. Through the ravages of dependence, many emerge transformed before they have no other choice. They reach the point where they are both appalled by themselves and afraid that they will be left along. Many people have undergone religious conversions, seeking clues as to the source of such deep transformations. There are only two ways in which it is possible to get rid of anger, worry, fear, despair, or other undesirable affection. One is that an opposite affection should overpoweringly break over us, and the other is by getting so exhausted with the struggle that we have to stop—so we drop down, give up, and do not care any longer. Out of this emptiness, we derive a readiness for the arrival of a new self. After we come to know God and our spirituality develops, we begin to lighten up, becoming beautiful. Repentance is one of the first principles of he gospel and is essential to our temporal and eternal happiness. It is much more than acknowledging our wrongdoings. It is a change of mind and heart that gives us a fresh view about God, about ourselves and about the World. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8

When we turn away from sin and turn to God for forgiveness, this is a signed that we are being motivated by love for God and the sincere desire to obey his commandments. Repentance builds up a shell of protection. It is not enough to simply try to resist evil or empty our lives of sin. We must fill our lives with righteousness and engage in activities that bring spiritual power. We must immerse ourselves in the scriptures and pray daily for the Lord to give us strength beyond our own. Full obedience brings the complete power of the gospel into our lives, including increased strength to overcome our weaknesses. Our hope and happiness rest in knowing who we are, where we came from and where we can go. We are eternal beings, spirit children of an eternal God. Our lives can be compared to a three-act play: premortal life (before we came to Earth), mortal life (our time here on Earth), and postmortal life (where we go after life on Earth). God has had a plan for our lives since the beginning of the first act—a plan that, if followed, provides comfort and guidance now, as well as salvation an eternal happiness in our post moral life. God is the Farther of our spirits. We are created in his image. We have a divine nature and destiny. Our mortal life on Earth has purpose. Coming to Earth is part of God’s plan for us to gain a physical body and learn to choose between right and wrong. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8