What are the things that help you look at the world and the life around you in a positive light? What stories or scriptures remind you of the value of simple optimism?

For me, I like spending time with my family. Especially when we're all enjoying a good story--something uplifting--scripture time's great if it isn't something we're forcing onto the end of the day. I like helping a friend. You'd think with all our technology that it'd be easier to live positively, but often the costs with such items seem to exhaust all good will. 

Yesterday morning, we had an early priesthood session at the Stake Center. A man shared a story about going to pick up his son in the Phillipines. He shared a remarkable story about a family that was dirt poor. The father worked 14 hours a day for 25 cents an hour. The family live in a bamboo hut attached to a tree. They had no ammenities, no indoor or outdoor plumbing, no electricity. The son would go to the creek each day and catch frogs to feed the family. Yet the family was overjoyed to have the Gospel, and had converted to it with all their humble hearts. The family had taken Pres. Hinckley (given Aug. 5 2005)challenge to read the Book of Mormon as a family seriously.  It was now a month away from the end of the year, and the family reported to this missionary's parents how their poverty-stricken were on track to have read the Book of Mormon six times as a family. The parents of the missionary were astonished. They asked how it was that this family could even read the book of Mormon, with the father gone to work most of the day and by night there was no light. Turned out that every night the family would walk some half mile to the only source of electricity in their area, a solitary lamppost to read the scriptures as a family.

In our marriage class a sister shared a story about her growing up in an LDS home that went innactive about the age she joined the church. She said that her family was so rowdy that her parents got tired of having family home evening--only to have it turn to chaos--ending in fights among siblings. And their family scripture study stopped because no one was paying attention, anyhow, and it took too much to get the family together. And their family prayer stopped because there was too much giggling going on... And from there it was not that much more difficult for the parents to stop going to church altogether.

We talked about how ironic it was that the little things are always the first to go... and in the void that's left only grows more contention and pessimism and despair.

I think a great deal of being optimistic and happy, comes from being grateful and humbly acknowledging that perhaps things don't go perfectly, but at least we look toward the source of light and life.

I suppose at certain points in my life I've been disappointed that I couldn't give the Devil a good bodyslam and vanquish him to the eternal pits... he's always there nagging me... 

But that's not the point of this existence, is it? In the very least we look when there is light... and live. And when there is darkness, we try to get as close to the source of light as we might, and there we open our scriptures and read a few passages each night.

Then at the end of the day, we read scriptures with some friends and I was worried, cuz we're in Mormon (which is easily the most depressing book in the book of mormon... as the nephites are wiped out). It always makes me a little sad to read Mormon Chapter 5. I thought of that man, how he'd seen so much death and carnage all his life. And he pleaded with the Gentiles (us) that we would not be like his people... 

Mormon 5: