Be spiritually independent enough that your relationship with the Savior doesn't depend on your circumstances or on what other people say and do. Hav… - Chieko N. Okazaki

Hooray for differences! Without them, there would be no harmony. In principles, great clarity. In practices, great charity.

I remember very clearly the point at which I made the choice to be a bridge builder. On December 7, 1941, the day the Japanese Imperial Air Force destroyed the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, I was fifteen years old… we didn't know if a landing party was on its way, if the Americans would retaliate, or which side might pose the most danger to us as Japanese-Americans. My mother and I were terrified. We gathered everything in the house that had come from Japan and stuffed it into the incinerator… When we were through, I looked in the mirror, saw my face, and thought, I am Japanese. I have never set foot in Japan. I am not Japanese in my heart. If a Japanese submarine landed on our beach and Japanese soldiers came ashore, I would run away from them. But I cannot run away from myself. My eyes, my skin, and my hair are Japanese. I will always be Japanese. That realization cut through my confusion and fear. I realized then that there was no easy answer… But no matter what happened, I would have to deal with reality—and that involved being both Japanese and American. I would have to work out the answer to who I was a day at a time, doing the best that I could.

The answer of faith is a powerful one, even in the most difficult of circumstances, because it does not depend on us—on our strength to endure, on our willpower, on the depth of our intellectual understanding, or on the resources we can accumulate. No, it depends on God, whose strength is omnipotence, whose understanding is that of eternity, and who has the will to walk beside us in love, sharing our burden. He could part the Red Sea before us or calm the angry storm that besets us, but these would be small miracles for the God of nature. Instead, he chooses to do something harder: He wants to transform human nature into divine nature. And thus, when our Red Sea blocks our way and when the storm threatens to overwhelm us, he enters the water with us, holding us in the hands of love, supporting us with the arms of mercy. When we emerge from the valley of the shadow, we will see that he was there with us all the time.