the plan of happiness

For this week's Conference Report, I chose President Boyd K. Packer's final public address, "The Plan of Happiness". He passed away a few weeks ago and I will miss hearing from him at our conferences. He was not afraid to be bold, but he was kind and compassionate in his boldness.

In this talk, President Packer lays out the Plan of Happiness, as we believe it, and goes into great detail about the relationship between husbands and wives, how that relationship is essential to the plan, how it can bring us closer to our Heavenly Father, and how it can unite us and bring us joy. He talks about why we should save sexual relations until after marriage, how it is important to "bridle our passions", and how true love can grow through experience and time. It's worth a read if you have a few minutes.

Here are my favorite bits:

First, he says, "The end of all activity in the Church is to see that a man and woman with their children are happy at home, sealed together for time and for all eternity." That is the reason we do all that we do, right? So we can be happy together at home, and so we can be together forever. There is much that is required of us in this life - many difficult things that stretch us and cause us to grow, but those are the things that bring us the most happiness.

And for those who have not married, or cannot have children, or who have difficulties at all in this area, he says, "For now I offer this comfort: God is our Father! All the love and generosity manifest in the ideal earthly father is magnified in Him who is our Father and our God beyond the capacity of the mortal mind to comprehend. His judgments are just; His mercy without limit; His power to compensate beyond any earthly comparison."

One last bit about hope and the Atonement: "Jesus is the Christ and the Son of the living God. Through His Atonement and the power of the priesthood, families which are begun in mortality can be together through the eternities. The Atonement, which can reclaim each one of us, bears no scars. That means that no matter what we have done or where we have been or how something happened, if we truly repent, He has promised that He would atone. And when He atoned, that settled that. There are so many of us who are thrashing around, as it were, with feelings of guilt, not knowing quite how to escape. You escape by accepting the Atonement of Christ, and all that was heartache can turn to beauty and love and eternity."

Read the whole talk here.