So life has its oppositions and its conflicts, and the gospel of Jesus Christ has answers and assurances. In a time of terrible civil warfare, one of the most gifted leaders ever to strive to hold a nation together said what could be said of marriages and families and friendships. Praying for peace, pleading for peace, seeking peace in any way that would not compromise union, Abraham Lincoln said in those dark, dark days of his First Inaugural, “Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory,” he said, “will yet swell … when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”15 – Jeffrey R. Holland, “The Peaceable Things of the Kingdom,” Ensign (CR) November 1996