From his book, “To Draw Closer to God,” Henry B. Eyring, now in the First Presidency wrote:
Yield your heart unto God, Ask him what it is he would have you do. Know that he will have prepared a way for you to do it even under great difficulties. Ask him how he would have you share what you have with others, and you will feel his love. He lives and he loves you. He wants you to come home again.
Years ago a young man I had been working with said something like this to me: “Brother Eyring, why don’t you leave me alone? I don’t want to go where you want to go. I don’t want to have celestial life. I’ve got my friends. You keep telling me that if I keep going the way I am going, I’ll end up with my friends. Well, that’s just fine with me.” I thought for a moment, and then I asked him, “Do you ever feel lonely?” He said that he did, and I asked him about the last time he had felt lonely. He said, ” I was at a party the other night with my friends. He said that while he was at the party, something came into his mind. He remembered sitting on his mother’s lap as a little boy, her arms around him. He remembered how he felt compared to how he felt with his friends, and he felt lonely. Then I said to him, “You think you don’t want a celestial life, but yes you do, because the only place in the life to come where there will be families is in the highest degree of the celestial kingdom. That will be the one place you will be able to have that feeling of being in a loving family again.
There is a God, he loves you, and he wants you home again. But that can’t happen unless the gospel of Jesus Christ works in your life. You have to become purified and sanctified to go there. Please find out what the Lord would have you do, believe that he has prepared a way for you to do it, and share what he’s given you with others. As you do that you will feel his love and you will become more like him. You will find joy and consolation, you will become sanctified by the gospel and then you can go home again. I pray with my whole heart that I will see you there. I pray that we will both be smiling, and that we will see smiling at us the faces of Heavenly Father and our Savior. If we will faithfully keep our covenants, preparing a little bit every day for the tests that will come and then meeting them with faith and humility, that great blessing will be ours. ~Henry B. Eyring, To Draw Closer to God (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1997), 89-90
