Thoughts and stories, by Pal

  Patterns in Stories of Lasting Healing From Depression By  Jacob Z. Hess  · January 26, 2023 This is a longer post, but is very much worth reading! The following first appeared  on Public Square Magazine .  What can we learn from people who find sustainable healing from depression?  This has been a question burning under my fingernails ever since learning about a remarkable researcher named Kelly Turner. Dr. Kelly Turner noticed  something usual in her early studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Across the 1,000+ cases of “spontaneous” or “radical” remission from cancer (where someone heals in a statistically unlikely way after conventional medicine has failed), very few questions were asked of the survivors themselves. So, she set about doing just that—conducting interviews with initially just 20 people and ultimately gathering many hundreds of stories all around the world. Her findings are summarized in the bestseller,  Rad...

  Don't we learn the most from the adversity we go through?  It seems so after!  There are those who are suffering all over the world right now!  Let's pray for them.  Especially Afghanistan!  Could a Loving God Allow Such Suffering? By  Daniel C. Peterson  · August 19, 2021 A reader of my blog “ Sic et Non ” has raised the venerable problem of evil.    Philosophers term it the question of “theodicy,” which focuses on whether and (if so) how, given the existence of evil, a belief in God’s goodness and in divine providence can be justified.  For the faithful, this is often one of the thorniest and most difficult of challenges.  And it seems, at least temporarily, to have cost my reader his faith in a benevolent God. In a recent blog entry titled “ On a Disagreeable God ”, I had written that “the God who revealed himself through the Prophet Joseph Smith and the Restoration” is a kind and benevolent Father who wants to give us eve...

This has some very thoughtful ideas from an LDS Psychologist.  Latter-day Saint psychologist: Navigating the (sometimes) rough road to happiness by Dr. David T. Morgan, Contributor  | Jul. 02, 2021 Our youngest child just graduated from high school. It was a strange experience, sitting in the same football stadium where we had watched her five older siblings celebrate the same accomplishment. Walking to the car, my wife and I reflected on the rapidly approaching end of our full-time parenting. There have been times of joy. There have been times of sorrow. There have been times when I wished I could crawl into a hole and not come out. There have been times when I gushed with tears of gratitude for the privilege of being a father to such amazing children. Coming to the end of this portion of the journey, I can truly say the overall experience has been happy and blessed. So, if my destination was joy, why was there so much difficulty, grief, and sorrow along the way?  The an...

I found this yesterday, and it is really touching.  Kayla Lemmon's father passed away around last Christmas.  To any of you dear people who have sad memories connected with Christmas, our prayers are going out to you.  My own father passed away on December 14, 1975.   New post on  all our lemmony things Why ‘God will give you more than you can handle’ changed my life: And how it fixed Christmastime by  Kayla Lemmon It's been nearly a year since I wrote  God will give you more than you can handle . A whole year. I can hardly believe it. It still surfaces as one of my most-read blogs of all time and I don't think that's a coincidence. It's because out of everything we could ever go through as human beings, that is the one thing that connects us all. The struggle--and the triumph over it. I read it again this morning, throwing myself back to the time when the Christmas lights were strung, the tree decorated, the little mang...