It’s the weekend of the World Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, with three two-hour sessions today and two tomorrow. Look for the tallest man (I think) in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and wave hi at my cousin Jim with me.

Last year, a month before the election, one of the songs the leadership chose had the line “The scepter will fall from the despot’s grasp when with winds of stern justice he copes…” Loved it.

The opening segment today began with a heartfelt plea to choose to be a peacemaker. To follow the teachings of Christ, *the* Peacemaker, who tended to all, women, children, occupier centurions, the much-married and now not bothering with that part Samaritan woman at the well whom he did not judge but simply told her, now that she had felt the immense love and acceptance of his presence, to go and sin–to separate herself from that Love–no more.

The next speaker was a Black woman. The next, Hispanic. There was this unspoken, Do you get the message yet. We are all children of our Heavenly Father and all deserve to be treated with respect and honored as beings created by G_d no matter our faith or our background.

And that last talk of the day! Where a man blamed himself, he was sure it had to have been his fault, that clearly he had not done a good enough job of fully checking out the small plane that his pilot wife and her friends had crashed in. He was in agony.

If someone has wronged you, was the message, forgive. If you have wronged someone, take responsibility for it, fully repent to G_d for having done it, do all that you can to make amends to any who have suffered because of your mistakes.

And then honor the Divine by accepting what the Divine has offered to you: forgive yourself.

A year later, all at once and unexpected and yet in response to fervent prayer in deeply missing his wife, that gift washed over him. He felt her near, felt G_d near, saying it was okay.

And it healed him.