I love the new Enrichment program because it lets me enjoy what I LOVE and have it count as participation in the Relief Society program! And, as I'll bet you can guess, one of the things I LOVE is reading. So I am the unofficial hostess of our Relief Society's monthly (mostly) book group, and I thought it would be fun to share with you from time to time the books we're reading.

Our most recent book is one that I begged Deseret Book to publish for many years. It is titled The Uses of Adversity, and the author is Carlfred Broderick. If you've heard me speak in the past year, you've probably heard me quote from it, because I think it is the finest treatment I have ever encountered on the subject of the pains and trials of mortality. Dr. Broderick, a nationally respected psychotherapist, teacher, author, and stake president in California, tackles the most unanswerable kinds of pain imaginable--abuse, a child's death, debilitating illness. And he doesn't take the stance so often adopted in LDS culture: "Oh, it's all for the best." He makes it clear that he hates pain, and that it doesn't always make us better, but that we get to have some choice over the effect it has in our lives.

The line from the book that really reshaped my worldview when I first read it was: "The gospel of Jesus Christ is not insurance against pain. It is resource in event of pain." We don't get spared from the consequences of mortality just because we were born in the covenant or got baptized at some point. We all get trials. Where do they come from, and what do we do with them when we encounter them? This book has real answers to those questions.

What I love about Dr. Broderick's writing is that he is a storyteller. He doesn't preach maxims about pain, he shows us several examples of up-close, true suffering and teaches us through those stories what people have learned, what he has learned. It is brilliant writing. The stories hit bone-deep. The magnificence of the Atonement is clearly displayed. I came to realize that one of the things that was restored in the Restoration was our eternal perspective, the knowledge that offers peace in the face of the most perplexing of human problems.

In a time of cyclones and earthquakes and tornadoes and wildfires all hitting the news in one day, The Uses of Adversity is a book the world needs.