Here is a link in the manual to this week’s lesson
Here is the quote from Jen Hatmaker about kindness and school.
“Dear Kids…. You have the best place to practice right now: public school. I can’t remember more insecure, difficult years than middle and high school. You are all a mess, but some kids have it worse, because they are son so different – and the teen years are not safe for the different. Some of your classmates barely get out the door everyday. You see them. They are picked on or mocked or completely ignored, as if they don’t even matter. They pretend they don’t care of can’t hear, but you know they do. These years will hurt for so long.
First, I hope you see them. This is harder than it sounds; you have to learn to see hurt people, because they figure out how to act invisible. Kindness needs recipients. The whole world is filled with lonely and left-out and humiliated and sad kids, and seeing them is the first step. Because they are just as precious as you. If you can learn this during the Family Years, it will change your life, because you’ll develop eyes for pain, which is exactly how Jesus walked around on this earth. If your mercy radar is strong now, God can do anything with your later.
My dream is that you see hurting kids and do the simple, brave work of kindness. This sin’t fancy at all. It sounds like; Do you want to sit with us? or I really like your outfit or What’s up, man? or What are you reading? It doesn’t seem like much, maybe, but if it’s the only kind word they’ve heard all day, it can literally give them strength to go on.
Sometimes kindness requires more serious courage, because hurt kids make easy targets, and cowards both bully and look the other way. I hope you stand between abusers and the abused, refusing to silently watch one kid break another down. I hope you say NO. I hope you say LEAVE HIM ALONE. I hope you tuck hurt kids into your arms, into your friend circles, protecting them. Bring them home to our table, and we will love them together. The tiniest scrap of hope is enough to save a lonely kid from drowning. You’d be surprised how powerful kindness actually is. I am not being dramatic: you can save hearts and lives with grace. Do this good work now, and you will do it for a lifetime.” – Jen Hatmaker For The Love
Here is Elder Uchtdorf’s talk called, The Gift of Grace
And here is a talk in the manual this year that wasn’t there four years ago by Brad Wilcox, (I don’t think it was in the manual last time. Maybe it was… I don’t know!