This very morning, my five-year-old daughter wailed in obvious distress, “I know I am supposed to ask God but how do you get an answer when you don’t know HOW to get an answer?!?” Honestly, I sat there stunned.

President Henry B. Eyring’s district president once counseled him, “‘Hal, when you meet someone, treat them as if they were in serious trouble, and you will be right more than half the time.” The pews of the church are filled with members whose bodies bear the burden of trauma from hard experiences.

In April of 1937, my grandmother was sitting in a restaurant with her husband when he suddenly collapsed. Ralph was 25 years old when he died of unknown causes; they had been married just three years. In that same week, the Hindenburg crashed not too far from my grandmother’s Philadelphia home; Fascism was gaining power in Europe, and politics at home were contentious.

Creation has turned into being one of the most important aspects of my life. Which, frankly, is interesting as it took quite a detour.

I had been pondering about joy for a couple of weeks when it greeted me unexpectedly in a crowded hallway one morning. It quickened me with wonder, a sense of flying on the wings of grace while people hurried past. In the hours that followed, I found myself rising to the vibration of the joyful energy within me, ready to shed unhelpful habits and embrace a higher way.

When I was twenty-one, the day before I entered the MTC, I drove out to Manti, Utah with my parents. I had wanted to attend the temple again with them before I left, and we all decided that the Manti temple would make for a memorable trip, not the least because it was the place where my parents had been sealed twenty-five years earlier.

The film crew finished arranging the cameras on my husband who was sitting on a barstool in the middle of our front room. I watched as their filtered lights cast a halo around his head. I had already finished my interview with the director earlier that day. We were part of a documentary about people like me who suffered from a terrible syndrome caused by prescribed tranquilizers.

There are times when I consider moving along this journey in private, working it out quietly in my own head and keeping it all to myself and then trying to move on and leave the past in the past. But when I consider this option, I see your face. You stare me down with your sadness, your confusion, and your sense of isolation. You need answers.

He had the high and holy calling of prophesying Jerusalem’s destruction. He didn’t get to make the standard cry of repentance, however. Instead, God asked him to perform a series of unpleasant symbolic gestures to illustrate the Israelites’ impending fate. One of these tasks inspired the health-food staple, “Ezekiel bread.”

But, the truth is, family has been one of the most glorious parts of my life and also the toughest. I have no idea how to write an essay on what someone else’s experience might be with family. Experiences are wildly different. So, for this, I decided to lay down some truths. Not capital T Truth but more like truth-for-me truth. Because I feel in speaking truth, it helps to make us realize we can live and feel and experience authentically. That there is no one way a family sho

On February 11, 2020, my family drove Rachel, my oldest daughter, to the airport here in Madison, Wisconsin. People streamed past us in the busy airport as we hugged her and said our goodbyes. We told each other it would be two birthdays and one Christmas—18 months—until we saw her again. She was tearful but excited as she boarded her plane to fly to the Mexico City MTC, ready to focus on studying both the gospel and Spanish as she prepared to teach and serve people in Washin

“Grace to you, and peace, from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ . . . ”[1] So Paul begins almost all his letters to the scattered Christian converts from Galatia to Rome. How different from the way I greet people! His words are so much kinder than our English, “hello,” which is really just an etymological cousin of the word “holler” — a modified shout for attention. Paul’s greeting is instead an acknowledgment of love.

There’s a scripture you’ve probably heard referenced before. It’s in D&C 123:16 and it goes like this, “You know, brethren, that a very large ship is benefited very much by a very small helm.” What do you think of when you hear that scripture? Maybe like me, you think of the verse in Alma 37 that says “by small and simple things are great things brought to pass,” and that would be an appropriate interpretation. It’s true, those small and simple things, the Sunday school answe

Aurelia Spencer Rogers was not impressed with the boys in her recently established community of Farmington, Utah. Words like “hoodlum” and “carelessness in the extreme, not only in regard to religion, but also to morality” were thrown around. She was sympathetic – she understood that after all the losses that occurred on the path to Zion and the hard work involved in establishing a new community, parents were exhausted and barely scraping by. But she felt the children’s needs

For my entire life, I would say that one of my core identities has been “I am a believer.” As a result, I have been called naive, brainwashed, stupid, and more. But, for me, there is just no doubt that my Father and Mother in Heaven exist, that They love me, and that They are all powerful and benevolent. So . . . where’s the problem?