It’s been 30 years since one of the more memorable Sunday School lessons of my life. I was a boy sitting in the middle of a half-dozen other gawky kids learning about the gospel.

I don't remember where the lesson was supposed to fly, but I do remember where it landed. We had a surprisingly mature discussion with our teacher about something we dubbed our “packet of problems.”

We wondered: What if we were handed a packet of problems before this life? We thought of it as a spiritual envelope containing challenges we would later face during our mortal lives. Naturally, no two packets would be alike and we wouldn’t know the actual contents until the hour came to tackle them. But despite the unknown, perhaps we all agreed to bring our packet with us because we were promised the contents would never amount to more than we could bear.