Are You Sad, Mad, or Glad?

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In the October 2017 General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I loved listening to the talk given by President Dieter F. Uchtdorf. The humorous way President Uchtdorf taught true principles about how we choose to react when others are unkind to us has caused me a lot of introspection.

This is an excerpt from his talk entitled, “Three Sisters”:

The Third Sister:
Unlike her sad and mad sisters, she was—well, glad. And it wasn’t because she was smarter or more beautiful or more capable than her sisters. No, people sometimes avoided or ignored her too. They sometimes made fun of what she was wearing or the things she was saying. They sometimes said mean things about her. But she did not allow any of that to bother her too much.

This sister loved to sing. She didn’t have great pitch, and people laughed about it, but that didn’t stop her. She would say, “I am not going to let other people and their opinions stop me from singing!"

The very fact that she kept singing made her first sister sad and her second sister mad.

I laughed when I listened to this part of the story because it reminded me of me. I love to sing, but I don’t always sing on pitch. I remember the time when I was driving my son Ben to the airport when we were just beginning to work on my Wings of Glory Album together. As we drove along, I tried to sing him one of my latest songs I’d been working on for a while. When we got to the airport, he kindly said, “You know Mom, if you could just write down the words to that song along with the notes, then I could understand your melody a little bit better.”

Knowing that my singing had been especially bad that day, I laughed and said, “I will be happy to write it all down for you, Ben!”

As President Uchtdorf counseled at the end of his talk, “You cannot allow circumstances to make you sad. You cannot allow them to make you mad. … You can find joy and happiness in the grace of God and in the love of Jesus Christ. You can be glad.”

Yes, I love to sing. And not always on pitch!
I choose to be glad, and I will always keep singing!