The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

Well, General Conference just ended, Jan is in the kitchen singing "How Great Thou Art" and making an apple pie, and life is good. I have thought many times over the last two days of Conference as I listened to all the mentions of hard times and adversity, how richly blessed my life has been. Times are a little hard right now, and may get a lot harder before they get easier, but life is good.

I was thinking of the hard times my parents have lived through. They were young during the Great Depression and didn't realize they were poor because everyone they knew was poor, too. Then there was the horror of WWII. The US fought for several years before the war started turning in our favor. Millions were killed in that war. My father returned from the war and married, and I was born only 5 1/2 years after the end of the war, and just after the outbreak of the Korean war.

I remember as a little child, watching the news and wondering if we were going to be attacked with atomic weapons. We used to do A-Bomb drills in grade school; just like a fire drill but you didn't get to go outside. I remember thinking the world could end any day.

After my mission we married and almost immediately the Arab oil embargo started. We used to go get in line at the gas station at 5:30 in the morning to have a chance to get gasoline for our cars. Those were hard times in my young life.

When I got out of grad school, Pres. Carter was President, mortgage interest rates were between 12% and 16%, inflation was running at about 20%, and unemployment was at an all time high in my lifetime. Those were hard times, trying to make a living as a young marriage counselor and make a house payment on a new home (it cost $70,000 with a 12.5% mortgage).

Life has easy times; life has hard times. We can never rely on the world's solutions to the world's problems to be very effective. We know what the constant truth is, and if we hold fast to that, come what may, we can make it through. The important thing in this life is not what becomes of us, it is what we become. How greatful we are to know what we know and to know that this will all work out for the best in the end. We have read the book, and the ending is a happy one.