Comfort

Bottom line: Life is beautiful, but it's also hard. I find comfort in the fact that the substance of Joseph Smith's prayer in D&C 121 is not why but "how long." A chronic illness is difficult not always because it's necessarily always extremely painful but because it's chronic. Working to root out our weaknesses and turn them into strengths is difficult not so much because our weaknesses are all that disturbing but because they're habits, and they're comfortable - and because some of them take decades to overcome. There were some great talks today at church about endurance. I was reminded of Elder Maxwell's teachings, which I'll paraphrase by saying "it is sometimes permissible to tremble but not to shrink."