Bishop Allen asked/assigned me to prepare the Ward Council email on behalf of the Bishopric this week. I am neither spiritual nor wise (obviously), but I know enough to borrow wisdom and spirituality from those who are. The quote below is from Elder Holland and English preacher John Donne (quoted by Elder Holland at the 2018 BYU Commencement).
“…the world…holds challenges and difficulties. In the days and years ahead, you may suffer some discouragement and disappointment. On occasion you may feel genuine despair, either for yourself or for your children or for the plight and conditions of others. You may even make a personal mistake or two—serious mistakes, perhaps, though I hope not—and you may worry that any chance to be happy and secure in life has eluded you forever.
When such times come, I ask you to remember this: This is the Church of the happy endings. Troubles need never be permanent nor fatal. Darkness always yields to light. The sun always rises. Faith, hope, and charity will always triumph in the end. Furthermore, they will triumph all along the way.
English preacher [John Donne] said of this:
We ask our daily bread, and God never says you should have come yesterday, he never says [I have run out,] you must [come] again to-morrow, but to-day if you will hear his voice, to-day he will hear you. . . . God . . . brought light out of darkness, not out of a lesser light; he can bring thy summer out of winter, though thou [had] no [hope of] spring; though in the ways of fortune, or [mis]understanding, or conscience, thou [hast] been benighted till now, wintered and frozen, clouded and eclipsed, damp and benumbed, smothered and stupefied till now, . . . God [yet] comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the sun at [full] noon, to [banish] all shadows, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries, all occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons.
Elder Holland, BYU commencement address on April 26, 2018, “Banishing All Shadows”
https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/jeffrey-r-holland/banishing-all-shadows/
Ryan Jensen, Ward Executive Secretary