Why I’m so grateful someone pushed through awkwardness to serve

The public is invited to visit the newly renovated Oklahoma City Oklahoma Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. An open house begins Wednesday, April 24, 2019, and runs through Wednesday, May 1, 2019, excluding Sunday, April 28, 2019. Reservations for the open house can be made through the www.templeopenhouse.lds.org.

As part of Friday's Salt Lake Temple renovation announcement, President Russell M. Nelson of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said the church will make every reasonable effort to honor and maintain the temple's historic beauty.

After President Russell M. Nelson announced that the Salt Lake Templewill close for four years as it undergoes extensive renovation, the Church released a video providing a virtual walk-through of the new temple grounds.

The sky was pitch black.

When you have a friendship like the one that my friend Bethany and I do, it’s something you treasure. It’s a relationship that not only spans decades but that connects both cultural and physical distances with a strength that surpasses even the most securely engineered bridges.

As Christians in Sri Lanka gathered on Easter Sunday to worship together, explosions devastated three churches filled with worshippers, and additional explosions ripped through four hotels. These attacks have killed more than 200 and left more than 450 people injured. In the wake of this terrible tragedy, the Asia Area Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released the following statement Sunday, April 21, 2019:

Book of Mormon Central released the following video—"I Stand All Amazed" by Tyler Perry—to celebrate our Savior's life, death, and resurrection. With the video, they shared this message: "This Easter season, let us remember the marvelous sacrifice of our Lord and Savior. Oh, it is wonderful! Wonderful to me!"

Each spring, the Lord teaches us that life and warmth follow the fall and the winter. The “fortunate fall” of man brought about spiritual and physical death (Daniel K Judd, The Fortunate Fall: Understanding the Blessings and Burdens of Adversity). These deaths, crucial to the Lord’s plan of salvation, were meant to be overcome. With the budding of the trees and flowers, God teaches us each year that life overpowers death, warmth replaces cold, and light banishes darkness. Martin Luther is credited with saying, “Our Lord has written the promise of the resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in spring-time” (Watchwords for the Warfare of Life from Dr. Martin Luther (New York: M. W. Dodd, 1869), 317).

The following modern stories from the lives of real people show how intimately the Lord knows us and watches over His children, even those who do not hold high position in the Church. Some of these examples are really quite remarkable. Others show that the Lord intervenes even in things some might not consider worthy of an earthly parent’s attention, let alone a Divine One’s. Yet, they truly show “that the tender mercies of the Lord are over all those whom he hath chosen” (1 Nephi 1:20).