DevanJensen

Elderly man in Florence, Italy. Photograph by Matteo Vistocco, Unsplash. An old man in the neighborhood was peaceful. Neighbors wondered what his secret was. He was not healthy or wealthy. Having no family nearby, he spent much of his day alone. But he expressed genuine interest in all around him, and he seemed to relish each new day. When a young boy asked him why he was so happy, the man replied that it was because he had the precious present. The boy wondered what the present could be. Could it be a bicycle? Some other great toy? He wished he could have the same gift. Over years, the old man offered clues to help the boy discover the secret to what the “precious present” meant: “The present has nothing to do with wishing.” “When you have the present, you will be perfectly content to be where you are.” “The present is not something that someone gives you. It is something that you give to yourself.” Then one day it dawned on the boy what the old man m...

R. Devan Jensen and Paul A. Hoffman From a presentation at the Mormon History Association conference at Rochester, New York, on June 10, 2023. Today let’s talk about war—and peace, the transition from Pacific battlefields to sacred temple grounds. The Great Depression triggered terrible hardships in Japan that led the Japanese to seek military solutions, aggressively colonizing northern China and Micronesia. “In the 1930s, the Japanese military capitalized on the [Micronesian] islands’ strategic location, with plans to make them a springboard for expansion into the Central and Southwest Pacific.” Indeed, “the Japanese launched the early air and sea attacks of their Pacific campaign from Micronesia.” The morning of December 7, 1941, Japanese forces bombed the US military in Hawai‘i and Guam (in Guam it was December 8 because of the international date line). Shown here is the USS Arizona ablaze with 1,000 crewmen trapped below deck, including my second cousin Ensign Howard Merri...