These things we write unto you that your joy may be full. 1 John 1:4 

The great plan of our Heavenly Father is for us to be happy. 2Nephi 2:24-25  tells us that in "the wisdom of him who knoweth all things... men are that they might have joy". So what is joy? Joy is the emotion of great delight, happiness or elation. I feel, as a mother, joy is knowing my children are all good people. I feel joy knowing that they embrace the gospel of Jesus Christ and feel the things I tried to share with them are true. I feel joy at their discovery of serving others and seeking to do so. I also feel joy knowing I have hope in my future. I know God is real and that I am his child and that he watches over me. I feel joy as I repent and feel forgiven for the mistakes I have made and joy at being able to partake of the atonement when I renew my baptismal covenants each week.  

This week as I am reading my religion class assignment we focused on 2 Peter and 1 John-3 John and am reminded that to to have "full " joy, we need to remember.  I felt that the word remember or remembering was mentioned a few times. Things mentioned multiple times in a short space usually stand out, because they are important.  Often remembering enables us to have peace, to be happy and to know God and his son Jesus Christ. In 2 Peter 1:3 we are told that through Gods divine power he has given us all things that pertain to life and godliness. And then in 2 Peter3:1, 11 we learn that things were written to stir up our minds by way of remembrance, so we can understand what manner of people we should be. 

Remembering is key to our happiness and eternal salvation. How many times have you had your memory stirred when you needed encouragement, comfort, or understanding?  Satan is so adept and cunning, his design is for us to become confused. He wants us to have our memories clouded or our minds distracted from what we know to be right because he wants us to miss out on the "great and precious promises" that will help us "escape the corruption of the world"(2 Peter1:4). He would like nothing more than to have us forget ourselves and miss out on eternal happiness with God and our Savior and not have any joy let alone full joy. Remembering our Savior, how he lived, loved, and sacrificed for us, we can become like him by seeking to attain his attributes.  As we remember who we are, and whose we are, we can know we are loved perfectly by our Heavenly Father and our Savior and perfect love casteth out all fear (1 John 4:18). We can have joy in this life as we keep these truths  in our hearts. John pleads with us to remember, in 1 John 3:2 , that  we truly  are children of God, and  as we remember who we are, when Christ comes again we shall be like him for we will see him as he is, this will bring us eternal joy.  

The next topic is love. 1 John 4:10-11 "10 Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another". I have been thinking a great deal about this admonishment of loving God and loving one another. The kind of love god and our Savior  have for us seems to be almost incomprehensible to my little mind. I am humbled at the knowledge they would both plan and then make such a sacrifice for me. I am grateful for the Savior offering himself as a ransomed so that I may be able to enter into he and Gods presence again. 

These verses suggest that as we come to love others we come to love God even more. I have had an experience with loving someone and feeling closer to God because of it. The principle and attribute of love is quite powerful. Having had an experience with this principle I feel I should share it. We have a member of our family who decided to stop going to church. After their decision to stop practicing their faith, they rarely associated with our family, I can only assume it was because they were uncomfortable, that we may be judging them. Of course I want them to be active in the church because I know it leads us to our peace and happiness not only here but eternally. Having a close happy relationship with them is also very important. We prayed as a family and individually for help to know what to do and were prompted to show them love. As we’ve done this our relationship has changed. When our focus became to love one another and show love when ever and where ever we could, our relationship improved. We are all strengthened, our love has deepened, become so precious, and we feel heaven close. Love changes things. I know it has in our family. In our experiment on the words in 1 John 4 to seek after and show love one to another we have come to feel Gods love more reverently in our home and family.

As love has diligently become our focus we have had unanticipated consequences. We have seen how one attribute of Christ, which is love, gives way to other attributes just as was written in 2 Peter 1:5-8 

"5 And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge;6 And to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness;7 And to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity.8 For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ." Diligently seeking after love to be given, felt, and received, within our family has also enabled us to become more patient, more kind, and we see the good things. We speak more kindly and with more virtue to and with regards to one another and with others whom we associate with. I guess what I am learning, what we all are learning is heaven. We are learning, "according to his divine power hath given unto us all thins that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called unto us. (4) Whereby we are given exceeding great and precious promises so that we can escape the corruption of the world." ( 2 Peter 1:3-4) These precious promises help us remember who we are and whose we are. They enable us to become redirected when our focus has changed. They help us to remember love and kindness where we may have been impatient and critical. These promises help us to remember what manner of people we are and we were born to love just as God, our Heavenly Father and our Savior, Jesus Christ do. How grateful I am for these lessons in remembering, for the tutelage of the Holy Ghost, and the patience of my Heavenly Father, as I am sometimes a slow learner. I am grateful for happy loving moments and the promise of a fullness of joy.