Melanie Hollis has always enjoyed planning activities for her friends to do together, and after she joined the Church, she realized that gathering people is a spiritual gift. She put that gift of gathering into practice as a Young Adult counselor for the FSY (For the Strength of Youth) summer conferences around the United States in the summer of 2022. Tell me a little bit about yourself. Melanie Hollis I was born in California, and we moved to Michigan while I was in middle school to help care for my grandma because she was sick with Parkinson’s disease. A couple of years after I graduated from high school, the economy was garbage in Michigan and my family was drained financially. We were trying to go back to California but that’s even more expensive so it didn’t work out. We settled for Las Vegas, Nevada.I was jumping around with schools and majors and trying to figure out what I wanted to do. During COVID, I thought I had a prompting to move to Utah. I’m not sure when or why, but I just went with it. And within just a couple of weeks, I thought, “I can’t do this anymore.” Thinking that you know what a place is like and actually living there are two different things. There are pro’s and con’s and Utah didn’t work for me so I lived there for only a year. I was still thinking, “Let me find what I want to do.” I went to cosmetology school and that’s not for me. So I started working as a baker and cake decorator until I decided to move back to Vegas. I was there for a while until this past summer. I worked as an FSY counselor for the Church (For the Strength of Youth conferences), and at the end of the summer, I realized I was not excited to go back to Vegas. I went to the temple and prayed on it, and the Spirit said, “Try again. You can always move back if it doesn’t work out.” So, I moved to Provo. So far it’s been good! I feel more calm here, and I’ve had more opportunities after FSY. I’ve applied to be a seminary teacher, to teach at the MTC, and will definitely apply to be part of FSY again next year. I saw on social media that you feel you have a spiritual gift of bringing people together. I’d never heard of spiritual gifts in that context and it intrigued me. How do you explain it? I used to travel a lot with my friends. I would hang out and plan stuff together – “Let’s do this. Let’s do that.” One day, I was talking to one of my friends, and she said that she felt like I have a spiritual gift of bringing people together. It put me at pause for a minute because I didn’t realize it myself. But then I thought, yeah, that’s true, I guess I do, because I do like planning stuff in general, and I don’t like to leave people out or leave them behind. That’s what the Savior is about. He never left anybody behind. I learned from the example of one of my friends – she’s that type of person that if you’re sitting by yourself, she will come sit by you. If you’re walking by yourself, she’ll walk with you, because that’s just who she is. She always wants someone to feel like they have a friend. So I learned from her example. I wish I had more people like that in my life. How have you put the gift of gathering into practice in other parts of your life? Melanie Hollis at FSY I was a hospitality management major at UNLV (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) before I moved to Utah. There’s also event planning or wedding planning. I know someone who is a wedding planner and she did not go to school for it. She just kind of went up the ladder and kept cross-training for other stuff. She was working at a hotel in Vegas, but when COVID hit, she decided to do it on her own and she’s her own boss. So I’ve been thinking, do I really want to keep going to school for this? But at the same time, it’d be good to have a bachelor’s with a Hospitality Management degree. And working FSY – you’re working with the youth and you have a co-counselor, so you’re not doing it all by yourself. The first week, I struggled with thinking, “I wish I could teach as good as he does,” and I wasn’t getting things out correctly. But people told me that everyone is at FSY for a different reason. Your gift and my gift are two different things, and that’s fine. One of the things my trainer told me is that the Lord needs you for who you are. That’s really stuck to me. We’re all here for a different purposes. It’s not going to always be the same. How did you get into FSY in the first place? I was just sniffing around online. I’d heard of EFY (Especially For Youth) and started looking. They mentioned FSY on the EFY page, and I’d never heard of it. I applied in November last year and they got back to me for an interview within three weeks. I flew out to Provo to the interview in person and in a few more weeks, they told me I got the job. They don’t just throw you out there. They email a workbook of the do’s and don’ts as a counselor and have in-person training as well. It wasn’t the youth that stressed me out. It’s sometimes the material that you need to know that can be stressful. But I loved doing it, and I want to keep doing something to be part of FSY even after I age out of being a Young Adult counselor. Had you not heard of EFY and FSY before? Are you a convert? I was baptized eight years ago. At that time, I just moved from Michigan to Vegas. I felt like Joseph Smith when he didn’t know what church to join – that phase in his life. I was in a new state. Didn’t know what I was doing. Where I was going. I didn’t know what church to be a part of. I had never been baptized into my church in Michigan because I thought the more important part was just to attend church, and they only read the Bible there. During this time, I was a night student. I was going home one night after classes, and I came across these Elders and I noticed they were so dressed up. I thought it was kind of weird, eight o’clock at night, pitch black outside. They wanted to talk to me, get to know me, and my testimony. I didn’t even know what a testimony was. So I turned it around and made them do more of the talking. They told me who they are and what we believe, and a few days later, they passed me over to the Sisters and came to my house. Melanie Hollis' Baptism The first thing we talked about was the Restoration and how it started with Joseph Smith and the First Vision. They gave me a Book of Mormon and invited me to pray if the gospel altogether is true. I couldn’t explain the good feeling that I had then. I told them, “I feel good. I feel like the gospel is church.” She said, “Well, that’s the Spirit you’re feeling.” It took two months for me to be baptized because I was so stressed out with life and everything was a mess with work and school. Even the week of my baptism, I think it’s so convenient for Satan when he knows something good is gonna happen to you. He tries to come in and get at you with every crack. It was just an irritating week. But then that Saturday came and I was baptized. I just felt so clean and fresh and brand new. All this weight lifted off my shoulders – that was a really special moment. When my baptism anniversary comes around, I like to do something special. I love the temple. I try to pick which temple to go to that I have not been to. Yeah, that’s what I like to do every year to celebrate that moment. I’ve been to all in Utah except one. I think it’s Monticello that I’ve never been to yet. I’ve been to Vegas, of course. Tucson, Arizona. Los Angeles. I went to Boise this summer. Some friends and I went to the temple open house in Cedar City, Utah and stayed with one of my bishop’s friends. We were talking about family history, church history, and the bishop’s wife asked who is a convert, and I raised my hand. She said, “Did you guys ever think about how your family will be changed forever? Because you’re a pioneer, you’re the first generation in your family.” I never thought about that but yeah, that’s so true. It was a little challenging with my family in the beginning, but now that it’s been eight years, my family doesn’t really ask questions or anything. But my lineage is forever changed because of that decision I made. It absolutely is changed. How has your connection to the Lord and spiritual gifts been enhanced for you since then? Melanie Hollis with Friends at the Logan Temple I feel like that gathering people is a gift that I didn’t even notice until later. Certain people in my life pointed it out and helped me to mold myself into that after it was noticed. I know what it’s like to not feel included or part of the crowd. It makes me think about Jesus and how He doesn’t leave people behind. When I go to church, I get kind of irritated when I see cliques because Jesus was never about cliques. He saw us all as one. We’re all equal as His children, but we’re all different, unique, and we stand out in our own way. The fact that He’s never been about cliques or choosing favorites makes me want to keep acting more on that spiritual gift. The more I think about the Savior’s example, the more I don’t want people to feel left behind or left out. When working at FSY, I could see that some were not wanting to be part of the group because they already feel left out. That’s sad, because their parents paid money for them to go. I wanted them to leave the experience on a good note, have fun, they’ve at least accomplished something. They’re not just learning stuff spiritually at FSY, they’re also having fun. I love the youth and it’s very interesting to hear their perspectives because they’re so young. It does hurt and it does make me sad when I see someone feel like they’re not a part of the group. So, I sit with them, and I talk to them. But at the same time, if they don’t feel comfortable, I don’t want to be too pushy. I want to let them progress in their time as well. How was FSY for you as a counselor? It was really, really, really great. I worked a week in Provo, three weeks in Kentucky, four weeks in Logan, Utah, and one week in Rexburg, Idaho. Out of all the sessions, Provo and Kentucky were my favorite. I just didn’t like the humidity part, but it’s so green and the people are super friendly. I had random kids come up to me and say Hi even though I didn’t know them. Everyone is so properly mannered, they say “yes ma’am, no ma’am.” They actually treat you with respect, honor. Our objective was just to serve the kids and the Lord. We were to teach new habits to the kids to help strengthen their faith and testimony of Jesus Christ. I really love the FSY medley – it’s a combination of the songs As Sisters in Zion and Army of Helaman. What were the different things you did in the week? Melanie Hollis at FSY Sunday night is when you find out who your co-counselor is for the week – you’re partnering with someone who is the opposite sex. I had the girls, he had the boys, and we come together as a company. Sometimes we had a third co-counselor so it was kind of a party with about 35 kids. We would sometimes separate and have our own activities – me and my girls, him and his boys. And the company would come together for other activities. Every day, there’s something different happening. Monday is when we get things ready for the kids, check-in, and orientation. We wanted them to understand the rules, like no talking about politics. We had icebreaker games. We had a company name – one week, my company name was Always Remember, and we had a scripture that went with it. The kids were supposed to come together and come with a cheer and a chant to help build unity. The Savior was about unity and coming together because we’re all children of God. Everything we did was focused on the Savior and His teachings. There were a couple of days of classes that the kids could choose and learn spiritual things. For fun things, we had a game night and a pizza night, and a variety show with skits. There were dances on Tuesday and Friday nights. Thursdays were a really great day – we wore church clothes all day because it was a spiritual day, with testimony meeting that night. We had an activity and devotional about the First Vision – we studied the different accounts of the First Vision. I heard a song called My Sacred Grove – I played it for the kids and encouraged them, as well as myself, to find our own sacred grove as well because the world has so many noises. It’s confusing. So we need to invest our time with Heavenly Father, between you and Him, away from all the noise. There were other lessons as well – we talked about goal setting, and the point of goal setting was to help them understand that to return to our Heavenly Father, we need to make progress in this life. We asked what goals they wanted to set individually for the week in four categories: physical, spiritual, intellectual, and social. We talked about scripture study – before they did personal scripture study, we had a short lesson. One was, what does it mean to feast on the words of Christ? Things like that. The things we taught the youth, we hoped that they would take it home and not just leave it. Learning new habits, we want them to keep going, especially with goal setting. We have the goal to live with our Heavenly Father again. I also felt prompted to talk to them about their worth, that they are a child of God and there’s so much more to them than their names and their flaws. There was a speaker who is a Seventy – I don’t remember his name – but he gave a message that there will be times when you might have to demonstrate your courage and what you know is true by yourself. He said to be strong, stand up in holy places, and be not moved. I encouraged the kids as well, to stay true to the faith even though it may be discouraging doing it by yourself. FSY is obviously set up to have a positive impact on the youth, but I would figure it had a positive impact on you too. What were some of those positive things? For a few weeks, it was a struggle for me that had nothing to do with the kids or the co’s – it had to do with myself. I was constantly stressing and not feeling good about myself. I had to take some time to really realize that is not what the Lord wants anyone to feel. That’s definitely not from Him, that’s from the adversary. One of my friends said that just the fact that I was there and I get to be part of it shows how much the Lord trusts me. When I got to Logan, I was talking to one of my co’s. He has clinical depression and he was really struggling. Also, he had injured himself before he got to Logan so he was in a wheelchair the whole week. I don’t remember what he was saying but the tone was that he was upset and feeling like, What’s my purpose her? I can’t even walk. And I don’t remember what I said to him, but I felt really strong and things started coming out of my mouth that I normally wouldn’t say. I thought, “I wouldn’t have said that weeks ago.” I started to realize I was feeling stronger, more confident, happier. I even had one of my kids ask me, “Can you give me tips on how to be confident?” Girl, I’m not confident. But I thought about that too. I realized I was so focused on the kids and the Lord that I didn’t pay attention to my insecurities or doubts about myself, all those little things. It was like I gave it to the Lord and He took care of it for me. I just didn’t realize until somebody pointed it out to me. Melanie Hollis with Brad Wilcox I met Brad Wilcox as well. It was a week when I was stressing about myself. He looked at me and hugged me. He pointed at me and said to my girls, “You are so lucky to have her as a counselor.” He took a picture with me and posted it on his Instagram. It was a tender moment of meeting someone I wasn’t expecting. One of the assistant coordinators also talked to me – her job was to just see how I was doing and help me plan things. She said, “Your girls love you and are talking about you all the time.” But I’m stubborn. Even when someone tells me I’m doing so well, it’s hard for me to believe it. I feel like the Lord definitely uses people to help me understand that I’m doing just fine. I’m doing great and I need to give myself more credit. I would say the Lord really worked on me a lot when it came to my self-worth and being more kind to myself. The Spirit also prompted me to do things as a counselor that I probably wouldn’t have done months ago. When I was packing and getting ready to leave, the Spirit said to me, “When you go home, you are going to be different.” I feel ten times stronger and happier. I feel better about myself. I’m not doubting myself as much, especially with the whole body image. I definitely feel different now than months ago, and I want to keep it that way. What’s the one thing you wanted the youth at FSY to know when they went home? The Lord loves you and He hears you. He accepts you and needs you for who you are. One thing that stood out to me, when I was working in Kentucky – it was our last day with our company. My co said to our kids something I really loved: “You don’t need to go home and be perfect. You need to go home and be different.” At A Glance Name: Melanie Hollis Age: 30 Location: Provo, Utah Marital History: Single Occupation: I work for the Marriott Hotel Convert to the Church: November 17, 2013 Schools Attended: Hospitality Management major at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, hoping to transfer to BYU Languages Spoken At Home: English, sometimes Spanish Favorite Hymn: If the Savior Stood Beside Me Social Media: @themelaniemichelle_ Interview Produced by Trina Caudle

Sheila Prins-Knight lives in the Netherlands and participates in her small church branch. When she had cancer, her branch rallied around her and her family, which reinforced her understanding that the gospel is about service and sharing the love of Christ. Could you tell us about yourself? Sheila Prins-Knight I’m 46 years old. I was born in England to a Dutch mother and an English father, who was from a Jewish upbringing. He had Jewish parents and was raised as a liberal Jew. As an adult, he joined the Church. My parents met each other in church and got married. But when I was seven, my mom decided that it wasn’t wise to stay with my father. He was mentally ill – he suffered from schizophrenia but didn’t take his medication and brought the family into difficult situations. So my mom decided to take us away. She went back to Holland and took me, my brother, and my sister with her. So I was raised for the most part in Holland, in Lelystad, where I live now. What is Lelystad like? Lelystad used to be water. Before 1960, it was a sea. But they regained the land and pumped away the water. It’s really clay ground here, where we live, and they built this city. We have a little museum and things that tell about this past here, and we have two statues in the center – one of Mr. Lely, who designed the city and had the idea for it, but it was built after he died. The other statue sets a line where the level of the sea used to be – in Lelystad, it is 4.8 meters high. It’s not the only city on reclaimed land, the whole province has been reclaimed. Throughout the province, you will see markers, like a long pole and it will have the symbol of an airplane or a ship. When they reclaimed the land, on the bottom of the sea, that object was found – a ship or an airplane. So that’s cool. I don’t even pay notice to it anymore. For us, it’s normal. A Marker for Where a Ship Was Found We have the dikes close by. We know there might be moments that the dike will break and we will have to flee, especially with all the things that have been prophesied in the last days, so we have our backpacks in the attic, ready to leave. It has never happened here. It has happened in another part of Holland, in the south in 1953, and a lot of people died. Since then, they really worked hard to make strong dikes, so we’ll see what happens. Did you use Church materials to prepare, or does your local government help support preparation like that? If your province was flooding and underwater, where would you go? I have no idea. I think we would go to the roof of the house and sit there and wait until help comes. That’s the only thing you can do. We live really close by the dike. I mean, it’s a 10 to 15 minute bike, so with flooding, you don’t have time to get in your car. You just have to go up.The government really doesn’t pay any attention to those kinds of things here. It’s a personal matter. It’s because of what we learn in church to be prepared and to have a year supply, the 72-hour backpacks ready, that we do that. I talked to a friend about it recently. She said, “My dad, he’s mad. He has all the storage, and all these things for something might happen.” And I said, “Well, actually we have it as well. We learn it in church.” I told her a little bit about it – of course God will help you. But you have to be prepared and use your mind. And she said, “Oh, well, maybe my dad isn’t so weird and crazy after all, then.” We have a test alarm that goes off every first Monday of the month at 12 o’clock. If an emergency happens, people know to look on your phone and everybody gets a message on the phone about what’s happening. It could go off if a factory explodes and there are toxic gases in the air, then the message on your phone would be “close all windows and doors and stay inside until the police give more instructions.” I guess that would happen with flooding – the alarm would go off and you would receive a warning on your phone what to do, or what not to. And that’s it. I think we rely a lot on the dike builders here. I look at it a bit differently and I like to be prepared. I hope it won’t happen, but you never know. We have a lot of positive consequences because of the water – a lot of tourism, a lot of fishing, a lot of swimming. We have sailing events. There’s not only the water behind the dikes, but in the city, we have a lot of little lakes and ponds. When it’s freezing, we can skate on the water – that doesn’t happen too often nowadays, because it doesn’t get cold long enough. But we got to skate once this past winter, and then the temperature went up again. So there’s a lot of positive to the water as well. We like to enjoy the positive sides instead of being fearful. What’s your personal history in Lelystad? I’ve lived in Lelystad since I was seven years old. I went to church here and it was a small branch. It has stayed a small branch. People came in, people moved out. That changes all the time. I moved out of Lelystad when I started to study. I became a psychiatric nurse, which I really love doing. I think I was gone for eight years. I got married in that time – my husband and I were both raised in the Church but he was in another stake. As young single adults, we met sometimes at dances and camps. I didn’t really talk to him, but I knew his sister because the Church is small in Holland, so everybody knows each other. I heard he was going to go on a mission.A couple of months later, I went to the London Temple with my mother and sister. I hadn’t had my endowment yet so I was sitting downstairs. The missionary training center was at the London Temple, and I saw the missionaries come for lunch. All of a sudden, I saw Hank, who’s now my husband, and we had a little chat. I promised I would write him, and that’s how it all started. We dated when he came back from his mission. I had plans to go on a mission but that never happened. Sheila Prins-Knight and Her Family We had two children, and we decided to come back to live in Lelystad because my family still lives here. And the houses in this province are cheaper than in other areas of Holland, and we really wanted to buy a house. It wasn’t really possible to buy a house in the area where my husband lived because that’s where the most people live and the most jobs are. My husband said as a joke, before we were thinking about it, “If I ever have to live in Lelystad and go to church in Lelystad, I’ll become inactive.” It’s a small branch with members who have problems. It’s lower social class also. But we have a lovely branch. So is he inactive or is he the bishop? laughing He used to be the branch president; he was released last year. All the members know each other so well. And they help and support each other with all the little and big things. When I just had my fourth child, which was my last child, I had a lump growing on my shoulder. I nursed my baby in the car once in the parking lot and that felt uncomfortable, so I thought maybe something had happened then and something wasn’t correct with the muscle. I thought maybe I should go to physiotherapy, but I don’t have time to do that, it will pass. It didn’t pass, and the lump grew. When my baby was five months old, I did go to the doctor and it went really fast forward, because they wanted to do some research and this and that. Within a week, I got the diagnosis of bone cancer, which was Ewing sarcoma. You don’t hear too often. It’s weird that I got it when I was 32 because I was relatively old to get to Ewing sarcoma – it is most common in teenagers. But it was only in my collarbone – there was no metastasizing. I had a year of chemotherapy and treatments and staying in the hospital for many, many days. Our branch proved to be wonderful because they cooked weekly for us. They helped with the children. I mean, when you’re a small branch, it’s easy to help for short term, but this was for a year. And they really supported us for a year. The Relief Society president visited me in the hospital, she massaged my feet. She was wonderful. We had so much support. I think that’s the strength of a small branch – so much personal support. Was your family prepared in any way for something so dramatic? You have your emergency backpacks in case of flooding. What helped with a long-term illness? We took it one day at a time. The situation in the Netherlands is very different from America, things are really well arranged here. With health care, if somebody gets ill like I did, you’re always insured. You have to be insured and you can choose to have the basic insurance or a higher insurance, but hospital care is in the basic insurance. So I had to pay 385 euros per year for the health care I received. So there was no financial stress. For my work, the laws in Holland are that if you are ill and you need treatment in the hospital, your employer will register that you will not have to work, and they will pay your complete salary for up to two years. If you still cannot work after that, then they get doctors and insurance and people to look at you and talk to you, and see what you can or can’t do. I was working within these two years but I was burned out – I started working too early, and I had my four little children to take care of, and my energy levels were so down. And I had anxiety of the cancer returning. So I did work but after five months, I completely collapsed, and was mentally down to a level that I really hope to never go back to. I reached two years of not working, and then I got maybe a tenth of my income. I was maintained in that security network where you at least get some income. Two years ago, I felt strong enough to try again. I did all my work to register again as a nurse and get all my training up to date. Now I’m working again as a nurse with elderly people in a psychiatric ward. But the healthcare is set up very well here and employees are very protected. Sheila Prins-Knight and Her Daughter That’s fantastic. And that was a while ago, so your kids are all teenagers now? My youngest is 14, I have a 17-, 19- and 21-year-old. They’re all living at home. In America you have dorms? That’s not here in the Netherlands. If children want to study, they have to find a room in the city that they can rent. Sometimes there are apartments especially for students, but they’re not connected to the university. And we have the energy crisis here in Europe, and the crisis of the housing market. There are so many people in our country and too few houses. It’s really difficult for teenagers who grow up and go to study and start their job – they live at home for a long time before they can find their own house to live in. My oldest daughter really wished she could live on her own. She cannot find anything. There are opportunities here but not as many as closer to Amsterdam. Tell me more about the Church in the Netherlands. There are a few families in our branch and the whole branch functions on those few families. There’s never been a moment, except for when I was ill, that I didn’t have a calling. You always have a calling and sometimes you have more than one calling. I also taught seminary while I was Young Women president. The big challenge here is that because we have so little members, throughout the Netherlands, it’s really a struggle for the youth – even more if they don’t have friends in church. If they’re the only one in Young Men or Young Women, if they are the only one in high school who’s a member of the Church, if they’re the only one who goes to seminary before school, they don’t get a lot of understanding and acceptance. I have four children, and my oldest two children don’t go to church anymore. I never, never thought that that would happen because we are a strong family. We are strong members and our children were really strong in the gospel as well. But still, things happened and they left, which is really sad. I do think because we are so small here and there are little people who understand the gospel and our beliefs, it is more difficult for the youth to stay strong. My oldest daughter had questions that weren’t really answered at seminary, and she didn’t really discuss it with us. But it was questions that a lot of members have, such as: what happened with the black people that didn’t receive the priesthood? Why? Why are there Church rules about LGBTQ people? She isn’t somebody who talks easily so we had to see changes in her behavior before we could ask what’s going on? That was the beginning of COVID as well. How do you find comfort and peace in the challenge of being in such a small Church population? I’m used to it and I don’t know anything different. I think because we get the opportunity to serve so much, that keeps you strong, because I am supposed to help the young women to build their testimonies. I am supposed to be the spiritual leader to those young women who need an example. I have a few women in my life who are really, really important to me – my mom, and my mom’s best friend who I’m named after. And my former Young Women president – she was such a support for me in my teenage drama. I could trust her. She was such an example for me in the gospel. She was also my seminary teacher. So I really trusted her and she gave me these little loving notes, and let me feel that I am a child of God who loves me, and I’m worth it. It’s so important for teenagers to feel that. I think that’s what keeps me strong in the Gospel. How do you define the gospel? To me, the gospel is a way of living, it’s just who I am. The most important thing of living the gospel is following Christ, and the best way to follow Christ is to share and to help and to smile. I think what characterizes me is that I love to help others. That’s also why I work with people as a nurse – because I love people. I love to see that in my children as well. My two older daughters chose not to go to church anymore, but they are such good people. They want to help, they want to serve. I received a phone call from a friend – she needed help with cleaning her house because she is injured. My oldest daughter volunteered to go do it. My other daughter heard about all the Ukrainian refugees and asked what she can do to help.That’s the strength of the Gospel – we can spread the love of Christ. Charity is so important. It’s not only serving in your calling and serving Church members, but serving all the people around you. A little experience comes to mind – a few months ago, I had gone to work, and I still have energy problems so working can make me really tired. I wanted to rush home and I was on my bike, so I biked home. I was nearly there and saw a lady sitting on the edge of the road and she looked as if she wasn’t doing too well. I looked again as I passed her on my bike and recognized her – she lives in our street but I’d never talked to her before. I biked further to go home quickly to see my daughter and my bed. But I got this feeling, you know the feeling when the Spirit prompts you – that woman needs help. I literally said in my mind, “No, I want to go home.” I felt it again, the second prompting, that woman needs help. And I was like, “oh, please stop. I want to go home.” And then I had the third prompting, okay, I’ll turn around. So I turned my bike and went back. I said, “Hi, neighbor. Are you alright? Do you need any help?” She didn’t know who I was, or that I lived in her street. But she said she had heart problems. She was on her way to walk to the shops, but she felt so unwell that she couldn’t make it to the shops, and she couldn’t make it home either, so she sat down right there where she was. I have heart rhythm problems as well, due to the chemotherapy. So I knew she was going through and how miserable you can feel. So I had my bike in my right hand, and I gave her an arm with my left arm, and we walked back home. I felt so blessed that I was able to help her and she was so grateful. But I was even more grateful that I chose to listen to the prompting. That’s a testimony to me that the Spirit lives and Christ is in our lives and that the Gospel is true. At A Glance Name: Sheila Prins-Knight Age: 46 Location: Lelystad, the Netherlands Marital History: Married Children: 4 Occupation: Psychiatric Nurse Convert to the Church: Raised in the Church Languages Spoken At Home: Dutch Favorite Hymn: Nearer, My God, To Thee Interview Produced by Trina Caudle

Mandy Green has created her own career as a learner, tour guide, and educator of Mary Magdalene and other women in the scriptures, in pursuit of developing women’s divinity. Tell me about yourself and what you do. Mandy Green My name is Mandy Green, and I have created a unique potpourri of things that I love. I teach Biblical Hebrew and classes about Mary Magdalene, the divine feminine, and the Holy Grail. I have a course called Finding Heavenly Mother in Scripture. I lead tours about Jesus Christ and the bloodline to the Middle East and Europe. Egypt is the most recent tour – it’s amazing. I’m visiting France for the first time next week for a Mary Magdalene Tour and I am stoked about that! I have a podcast called Reflecting Light. I’m a humanities major so I love to infuse the arts with truth. I’m an esoteric learner – it’s more about asking good questions and less about cut-and-dry answers, embracing the nitty gritty, and understanding that the gospel has a lot of nuance. It’s multifaceted and we each have to carve out our space there. There are definitely divine principles and doctrines, but how we learn and live that in our day-to-day lives is unique and part of the beauty of our journey. The things I offer are for people who just need more – more meat, more things to think about, more connection. We like that stuff. I’ve felt really inspired to learn Greek and Hebrew so I can read the scriptures better and understand how things got lost in translation. Both languages have a multiplicity of meanings for many of the words, so rather than translating one verse with one definition, it’s more like, “This equals A-B-C-D-E-F.” That also helps me in my own spiritual practice to understand that there’s a lot behind words like faith or wisdom. I’m kind of a mosh of things I love, and I’ve tried to turn it into a career slowly because that’s what I end up spending ten hours a day doing, so I might as well. What brought you to this type of study in the first place? Divine intervention. I had a friend who kept saying, “You need to come take this Old Testament class with me, taught by Rebecca Stay.” And I was not interested. Who likes the Old Testament? Well, this sounds terrible, but it’s true, so let’s just be real. My youngest child had just started first grade. I knelt down and said a prayer, “Okay, now I have time and ability, put me to work. Tell me what you want me doing.” I was just coming out of what I call my childbearing coma – you’re in this with Teletubbies and Cheerios and Dr. Seuss, and I love this stage. But you eventually come out of that, and you’re thinking, “Wait. I have a mind. And I think I have a soul left. Let’s try to plug it back in.”So I said that prayer, and my friend kept asking me to take this Old Testament class. (It was a BYU adult extension class in religion.) So, I went, and within ten minutes, I just lit on fire. It was like something ignited in me. I had served a mission in Russia, and it was intense. I got all the boxes checked of college and marriage and children and settled into the complacency of “I’m good,” but it felt hollow. I wasn’t growing. At church, I felt like – how many times can we ask the same questions and give the same typical answers. So that Old Testament class really lit a fire in me. I understood I had been spiritually dead for a very, very long time. Mandy Green in Cambridge It started as a catalyst for so many things. A couple of weeks later, I was driving away from class and it was one of the few experiences in my life when I actually heard the Spirit say something: “You need to learn Biblical Hebrew.” I didn’t even know it was a language! It persisted all week, “You need to learn Biblical Hebrew.” And I did tempt God; I said, “If I’m derailing my life for Biblical Hebrew, I need a sign.” The next week, I walked into class and literally the first words out of the teacher’s mouth were, “For those of you wanting to learn Biblical Hebrew, here’s how.” So I enrolled in a condensed course at BYU that covers a year of Biblical Hebrew in twelve weeks during the summer term. It’s intense. So I was there for several hours a day with wonderful people, wonderful instructors, and kept learning it in the fall. In 2014, I went to Hebrew University in Jerusalem during the summer to learn there and do an archaeology class, and there were missiles going off! I don’t watch the news because I think it’s so negative. So, I was all good and showed up in the Middle East, and my driver said, “What are you doing here? You shouldn’t be here right now.” He drove me to the Hebrew University and there were soldiers on every street corner with machine guns and AK-47s. My phone didn’t work – I couldn’t even tell my husband and my family I’d made it. I was sick to my stomach for three days. I finally got through to my husband – “I don’t know what I’m doing, I should probably come home.” So he got on the phone with the airline, and they said, “Okay, we’ll get her home.” He called when it was all ready to go, but I had a feeling – “Something brought you out here. If you walk away now, you’ll never know.” What was happening in 2014? There was a Gaza crisis between Israel and the Palestinians. Within the first day, I learned that each apartment has a bomb shelter in one of the rooms. The rockets were hitting Tel Aviv and they said a rocket had never gotten as far as Jerusalem, so don’t worry about it. Well, that was the first time I heard an air raid siren go off. That will make your heart pump. It’s loud. It’s intense. You’re sitting in an apartment with – oh, by the way, they put me in a co-ed apartment. I don’t know how that happened. But just everything that could have gone wrong did –Anyway, it was that do-or-die moment. Do I follow through? Do I have the courage and the faith to believe there was a reason I’m here? Or do I just go back to my cowardly life? I stayed, and that month was illuminating, and challenging, and so many things. I think I needed to do that by myself. I needed to find heaven in that hell. I needed to sift through all of the things that I had become and realize there’s tremendous strength in us as women. We’re far more capable and resilient than we think. Mandy Green in Karnak, Egypt That was the giant springboard. From there, I thought, oh, I gotta learn Greek. So I started learning Greek. Oh, I need to learn about Egypt. I started learning about Egypt. I read a lot of Hugh Nibley and came across this tale of the Holy Grail and Mary Magdalene as perhaps the wife of Jesus Christ. And that really became my passion, and it led to me really wanting to understand the attributes of a woman of God – what does she look and behave like? What does her Heavenly Mother look and behave like? What’s our prototype? I think Mary Magdalene gives us the best shot for looking at that, even though the text is really changed and adulterated. We come from a western tradition that paints her as a prostitute, which isn’t true at all. So I’ve had a lot of unraveling to do. As Yoda says, You must unlearn what you have learned. One step has beautifully led to another. I started teaching a few students. Then someone said, “Would you mind leading a tour?” I really feel like heaven has led me on this path and I never know the next step. My Heavenly Parents have done far more with my life than I ever dreamed possible. The last eight or nine years have just been amazing, and nothing that I ever conceived of doing. It’s been wonderful to see that there’s a plan and there’s space for all of us to find what we love and run with it. Backing up a little, when your youngest child started school, it was, “All right, Mom, time for you to do your own thing,” while still raising your family. How have they felt about all this? My husband is a better parent than I am in so many ways – he is an amazing dad. At the beginning, it was challenging because it was, wait, this is different. This is new and where’s the stability? I hated the tremendous backlash – so many people said, “How can you do that? What about your kids?” I started fighting back on that. “Have you ever asked my husband this question? He’s traveling all over the world. Are you asking my brothers these questions? They go on big work trips for several weeks.” And this crazy idea that you’re going to be led right into temptation if you’re away from your family for a month? I give my husband and my family kudos for being awesome. I really don’t make much money at all so my husband is wonderful to bring home the bacon so I can do my job. One of the best gifts I’ve given my two girls and my son is the idea that you can do everything you feel prompted to do. When I grew up, the line was – you can be a professional or a mom, but you can’t do both. I no longer believe that. I am a much better wife, mom, human, and member of the Church, because I’m fulfilled as a person. Because I pursue things that light my soul on fire. Because I am alive as a spirit child of our Heavenly Parents. Mandy Green There are a lot of women who 100% feel called to motherhood and have no desire to go beyond that. I absolutely support that. I’m not saying that there’s one template. But that’s just it – there’s not one template. What I was taught was – this is the one template. But I think a reason I felt so empty and spiritually dead was I had not pursued the things that made my soul feel light and fire and love. I want my daughters and other women to know: you are here for a reason and whatever that reason is, you can pursue it tenaciously. You don’t have to check boxes. When you’re doing more, it makes you a wider, deeper person. That’s been my experience, and it has been life-changing. I am so proud of the way this has beautifully influenced the people I love most in the world, but it’s meant for all of us to share. I’m so much richer from all of the women who have studied and who share what they’ve learned, and who are doing good in different ways. We create a cultural richness when we engage. I liked what you said earlier – the courage and faith to follow through. I think a lot of us can be nervous when we’ve been prompted with something in life, like you with learning Hebrew. How has courage and faith worked for you? The root of courage is coeur, the French word for heart. Your heart really has to be engaged. It took a lot of courage when I got on that plane in 2014. I should show you a picture – my face was white. I think I lost ten pounds because I couldn’t keep food down. It was the longest I’ve ever been away from my family. It was a genuine leap of faith. What’s the phrase…feel the fear and do it anyway. Every time I leave on a tour, I always have this same terror when getting on the plane. But I’ve done it enough times now that I know that illumination is on the other side of that courage. I know what comes when you extend yourself. If you go to college, you pay tuition before you ever step into the classroom. I think Heaven follows a similar pattern. They want to know that you are really all in. It takes courage to make that leap and courage to stay in the game. And then, as Heaven sees that you are steadfast and you’re going to knock on Heaven’s door as long as it takes, They deliver. Hugh Nibley said, “Stirrings below create stirrings above.” It takes a lot of heart. It takes a lot of guts – a female thing is our gut, that center of us. I think we’ve silenced that over the years. But our intuition/gut always knows, even if it’s sick and churning and maybe can’t keep food in. To me, that’s a sign that you’ve got to stick it out. If your heart tells you to pursue something, gut it out and know that illumination will come. I have never not had a profound experience when I follow those two things. Since God wants us to “pay the tuition,” what has the pursuit of this study required of you? Mandy Green in Galilee, Israel A lot of tenacity and the willingness to keep going. It has also been a sizable financial investment. I finally started charging for things, because it costs a lot of money to travel to these places and take classes. I know that Heaven’s currency is different, but that’s how we measure value here. It requires a lot of tenacity, sacrifice, and heart. And that’s why I say that it has to be something inside of you. That will lead you and give you intrinsic reward – it’s the most fulfilling, rewarding experience for me. Also, authentic devotion to the Lord, and a devotion to our Heavenly Mother and our Heavenly Father and to Mary Magdalene. Love is definitely part of that – love is what propels you forward and gets you through the hard stuff. Everything I do – my job as I see it, is to point to Them out of love and devotion and a desire to share the great things I’ve learned. Sharing is what makes it even more rewarding. That desire to share that beauty and love with others is to realize that it’s not yours, but you have to be a really good custodian of sacred things. Sometimes it requires silence. It always requires you to do it with reverence and on Heaven’s terms, and that’s difficult to learn. You’ll mess up a lot as you start out, but Heaven is a great tutor. Pointing people to Christ is so crucial. What do you see as the core of the gospel, and how does this type of study point you into it? I think the gospel is so rich and multifaceted. A line in one of the Grail tales says, “I’ve hardly taken a step, yet I feel I have gone so far.” That perfectly describes my journey. There’s a tremendous richness and beauty of the gospel that we haven’t really begun to uncover. It’s far more than stamping your temple recommend and checking the box for church. People say they’ve read the Book of Mormon thirty times, and they’re still learning from it. There’s a never-ending well of truth to be gleaned there. Dostoevsky has a beautiful quote that everything beautiful is found in the Savior, and if he were to find that truth was outside of the Lord, he would rather stand with the Lord than with truth. I love that. Everything will point you to Christ. All things testify of Christ. I have found it in the arts. I have found it in literature. I have found it in music. You can find it in medicine, in color, in science, or anywhere! Everything testifies of Christ. You can pick anything in the world and learn about the Lord from that. Additionally, we have the template of a divine family. Once you know a few things about our Mother, it’s ridiculous to shroud Her. Can you imagine talking about yourself and never mentioning your mother? Can you imagine talking about your life – “Yeah, that’s my mom; my dad doesn’t let me talk about her.” She’s so critical to your formation and your character. Since I was four or five, I can recall desperately craving to know more about who I was as a woman. For men, the masculine salvific path is very delineated, but for women, we’re over here banging two rocks together, trying to understand what’s inside of us, what our path is, and how it’s different. My quest has been to discover what that equal opposite looks and behaves like. In doing so, really coming to feel that part of your Mother that lives in you changes everything. You trust your heart, you trust your gut, and you want to help other women connect with it too. You have force, you have beauty, you have strength, you have power. You are your Mother’s daughter, and you go after it. There’s nothing in this world you can’t do because of that divine inheritance because you are Hers. Mandy Green in Jordan, Petra An important thing is that She never takes away from the beauty of the divine masculine. She would never detract from that, she would never tear it down. She upholds it. But we need to bring our understanding of Her up to being an equal opposite that mirrors their amazing balance. Our Heavenly Parents are our archetypes. I really worked hard to flesh out that portion of my studies so we as women understand and can stand together – the men of the kingdom and the women of the kingdom in equal and perfectly complementary strength and power and beauty. I think that’s what the grand design is. This idea keeps showing up in different ways, and that tells us that Heaven is trying to teach us. Something keeps showing up – all these movements for women. A wave is coming, and it’s not just isolated to us in the Church – the entire female population is really waking up and arising. The usual women in the scriptures that we focus on are Eve and Mary, the mother of the Savior, you’ve extensively studied Mary Magdalene. Are there any other women in the scriptures that you focus on? I love the prophetess Miriam. You can learn volumes from her. One really beautiful thing about the prophetess Miriam is, according to the Jewish Women’s Study Library, there’s no comment on her as a wife or a mother. The writing is strictly about her power as a woman, which I think is instructive. I love Anna the prophetess and some of the things she teaches us. I talk about the woman with the issue of blood – so much we can learn from her. Many are unnamed women of the Old Testament. I love the Queen of Sheba, and there’s a lot to her story with Solomon – I have a podcast episode about that. Once we clue into the key attributes of what a divine woman looks like, behaves like – you’ve got to read between the lines and pull the pieces out, but there’s a lot there– you gain a clearer picture. All of them have tenacity, all of them have courage and a certain fearlessness. Anna in the temple – how many years? That’s what I’m talking about with “tuition” – I can’t imagine sitting there for decades waiting, but she does. All these women can teach us something wonderful. How do you read between the lines when we’re asked to not speculate? How do you pull that stuff out? This is where Hebrew and Greek have been helpful because the keywords denote bigger symbols. Wisdom is a huge keyword in the Old Testament for our Mother in Heaven. When you see a wisdom text, that can clue you in because the text was heavily edited, and most mentions of Her are cut out. Tree of Life is another keyword. You look for symbols or keywords that are Hers, then trace it back.Read Proverbs 8 – it’s Wisdom speaking in first person. The Hebrew word hokhmah is feminine for Wisdom. In the Greek, the King James Bible talks about Her helping weave the cosmos when the Father sets the bounds of heaven. She’s there as his daily delight – there’s a sermon on marriage right there (verse 30). You could spend weeks trying to tease that out. So I think you look for clues. And the Spirit. Throughout my studies, the Spirit has taught me so much. I’ve been translating Isaiah and every chapter, I’m thinking, this is about Her. I’ve got all those symbols and all that language to sift through, but She’s there. I’ve talked about finding Her one-on-one – I think She always meant for us to find Her one-on-one like the Madonna and Child paintings. You are Her child, and She would have you find Her in your own sacred, beautiful way. That’s how I found Her, and all these beautiful little clues, a breadcrumb trail to the veil She sits behind. She is veiled because She is terrifying and full of majesty and power, strength and beauty and love. And if you want to lift that veil, it’s not out of curiosity, it has to be out of love and devotion and a desire to do things She would ask of you. What is your overall goal with these different threads of study? My goal in all this is that people begin to see golden threads of divine womanhood, and it’s not just for women. My favorite emails are from dads and husbands who say, “I want my wife and my daughters to know this. I want them to feel this!” And that really is what it’s about.When you understand who you are, you connect in your soul, and you connect in your heart. And it does give you the courage and tenacity to go after what you’re prompted to do and add your beautiful layer to the canvas of life. I think that’s where we are in history – we all get to add our own brushstrokes. You can add light and illumination to this beautiful canvas of mortality we’re all part of, centered around this divine family, around our Heavenly Parents and the Lord. When we all play to our strengths, we employ our light, our souls, and our hearts to add to the canvas. It’s going to become more and more beautiful with all of our different shades, textures, and layers. It’s time for us to take our place, and then pass it to those who come after us and encourage them to make those strokes and add their own colors and dimensions. It just becomes richer. That’s what I hope to add to and encourage others to contribute to as well. At A Glance Name: Mandy Green Age: 49 Location: Herriman, UT Marital History: Married to a stellar man Children: 3 Occupation: Teacher, Educator, Tour guide, Podcaster Convert to the Church: No Schools Attended: BA/ Humanities, Just got accepted to Duke Divinity to pursue a Masters Degree. Languages Spoken At Home: English Favorite Hymn: Our Saviour's Love Website or Social Media You Would Like Featured: http://Mandybgreen.com Interview Produced by Trina Caudle

Melissa Tshikamba always wanted to be an artist but did not see many people of color depicted beautifully in illustrations and paintings. So she changed that in her own work. Tell me a little bit about yourself. I’m from Alberta, Canada, a small town called Fort Saskatchewan. It’s more up north. I come from a mixed-race family. My dad is from the Congo and my mom is originally from the US. She grew up in Connecticut and a little bit in Australia, and went on a study-abroad program to Canada. My dad immigrated from Congo to Canada to work and ended up in Alberta. That’s where my parents met. Melissa Tshikamba Growing up, I was always drawing and creating. I love children’s books and I was really obsessed with them. I’d put like twenty on my bed each night and look through them at all the illustrations. I really, really loved art. At school, I always drew on my notebooks and I got in trouble when I drew on the walls. I know a lot of kids do this when they’re younger, but I never grew out of it. I just always knew that this is what I was supposed to do and this is my purpose. I never really questioned it because I was super passionate about it even though I wasn’t great at it. I feel like when you’re passionate about something, you put your all into it, and you want to get better. I was raised in the church, so I wanted to go to BYU and get into the illustration program. They have a really good illustration program. I had family in Utah and I knew I wanted to be an artist, so I thought it was a good match. I didn’t get in the first time and there are only two chances to apply. I remember being so nervous and heartbroken because I knew this is what I’m supposed to do. I put my all into developing my skills that year, taking figure drawing classes and developing my techniques so I could get into the program. I was accepted the second time, which was great because I don’t know what else I would have done. I still would have said this. What was the process to be accepted? You had to apply and turn in a portfolio with a certain amount of figure drawings in it. I actually hadn’t taken any figure drawing classes before I went to BYU, and I didn’t know how to draw people, to be honest. I think that was what hindered me from getting in because my technique wasn’t great. I’d never had instructional classes, so taking classes at BYU that year for technical stuff and figure drawing really helped me get in with the second application. There was a lot of developing my technique because I’d never had any training before that. How did your work develop into what you’re doing now with multimedia – gold leaf and resin and dried flowers? You’re getting a whole mix of stuff in there. I really like experimenting with different mediums. At BYU, they mostly taught traditional oil painting. But I really like texture, I really like 3-D elements, I like texture. And I like sculpture. I hadn’t taken any sculpture classes but I wanted to somehow incorporate 3-D or texture elements into my painting. I became fascinated with resin and gold leaf because it brought dimension to my artwork that I really wanted. I ended up figuring out how to do that by myself. I followed different artists that I loved – saw an artist use resin and thought, “What is that?” I followed artists who had a lot of gold leaf and I was drawn to the gold. Yellow has always been my favorite color so I was drawn to it. I looked at YouTube videos and probably spent thousands of hours figuring out how to use sculpture, how to use resin, what kind of resin to get, how to gold leaf. I taught myself from online and from watching different artists. Then I combined it into my own style. I combined everything into one because I love that all so much. I understand about the University of YouTube; one of my kids watches art tutorials and is learning a lot. Then how did you get into selling your art? It was a long process. When I went to school, I didn’t have a Plan B. I feel like a lot of artists or creative people often have something else to fall back on. They say, “If art doesn’t work out, I’ll do this other thing instead.” But maybe they never put their full focus on what they actually want to do with art because they feel like they’re going to fail or people have told them they’ll fail. I think when you’re really confident and know that you’re supposed to be doing something, you go all in. I just went all in. I didn’t have a Plan B, I said, “This is what I’m doing so I need to figure it out.” I followed a whole bunch of different artists that I loved and watched their process. If they sold stuff, I watched where they sold stuff. If they sold prints, I watched how they sold prints. I studied what they did and I mimicked it because I didn’t know what I was doing before that. So I was self-taught when it came to that. I had some great opportunities and I was lucky because I had a lot of support from other artists. J. Kirk Richards reached out to me and wanted to do daily paintings with me. That helped advertise my paintings more. I built my website and started selling prints. I used to make my prints at the print lab in a basement at BYU – I personally would go down and print each one. I saw different artists who embellished their prints and I thought that was so cool. I used a lot of gold-leaf in my original paintings, and I thought, how can I incorporate this into my prints. So I ended up gold-leafing my prints. I feel like that was more of a niche market because not a lot of people were doing that. I had people reach out slowly because they were interested in what I was painting. I think this is because I was at BYU and it’s predominantly white. Not a lot of people painted people of color. They didn’t even think to paint people who didn’t look like them. I think that’s what made me stand out and start my career a little bit faster than it otherwise would have. It helped that I stood out in a place where artists weren’t painting a lot of people of color and I wanted to change that, because it’s isolating not to see yourself as the norm. Going from technique to the themes of your art – I’ve seen some of your pieces about Heavenly Mother and other religious themes. How do you choose a subject to focus on in a piece of art? I’m not sure that I necessarily pick it. I think I’m more drawn to it. If I pick something specifically, it’s because I’m not seeing it in other art. Auset and Heru by Melissa Tshikamba It came naturally, I just started painting what I knew, and we know ourselves better than anyone. People paint what they know and it’s a reflection of themselves. It’s so funny – we had an assignment in school when we had to paint eyes. I painted my eye, my husband’s eye, and my dad’s eye. They happened to be of a different ethnicity. I didn’t pick doing that, that’s just me, that’s who I am. I painted what I knew. But I had people come up to me and say, “Oh, it’s so interesting that you’re painting a Black eye.” How is that interesting? I don’t go up to any white artists and say, “It’s so interesting that you paint white people, why do you do that? What makes you so interested in that?” It was interesting that people automatically thought diversity and painting different ethnicities was not the norm. Diversity is the norm – this whole world is very diverse, and I feel like art should reflect our world. We should normalize it and redefine what it means to be normal. We need to expand our boxes of what normal is. I think people have really limited views of what they think is normal, especially when they don’t travel. There’s so much diversity and people tend to forget. Is there any theme in your art that has stood out as a favorite? I feel like I’m on a journey of self-discovery. Every painting I do is somehow part of me or part of my process, and I develop and get better as I go. So maybe my favorite painting of the past is no longer my favorite painting now.I think I have current favorites. Not to say one is above the other, because they’re all an important part of my journey and process, and they’ve added some value in some way. Maybe it was a terrible painting that taught me different skills on how to be better, or a favorite painting when I had a breakthrough and I was able to do something I thought I couldn’t. They’re all favorites for different reasons, based on where I was emotionally or technically at the time. I have a strong theme of women because I didn’t have a lot of black female art around me growing up, and I didn’t see myself in art. Because of that, it was hard to see myself as divine. Part of painting myself and other Black women was a process to develop self-love, maybe find my identity culturally, and redefine what beauty was to me outside of what the world was telling me what beauty was. It was to help myself to unlearn false things. I saw a photo shoot you did with many women of color and it was amazing. Tell me about that whole experience and process. It was gorgeous. Thank you! It was so stressful. I had some great friends and acquaintances. So this is a bit about my process – I can’t hire a model to pose for me for eight hours while I paint them, so artists really rely on high-resolution photos. I wanted to get a photoshoot together to get great reference photos of some concepts and ideas I had for future paintings. This photo shoot was important to me to show the diversity in Blackness. I think people look at it as a monolith. There are different languages, different cultures, different skin tones, nose shapes and lip shapes, different body types and hair textures … I noticed when I was growing up that people put it into one monolith, and that’s not how it is. The photo shoot was mostly to highlight the diverse Blackness in Utah and what it looks like – to honestly be inclusive, to educate people, to express unity and self-love and sisterhood. That’s a really important message for me. The photo shoot was a fun process. We woke up super early in the morning, got everyone’s makeup done. Someone helped me find outfits and we all drove to the Salt Lake flats. It was hard to get that many people to do the same things or pose, but it ended up working out. There was one shot that was almost like a pyramid. I had them all leaning on each other and it was going up to the top. Their hands were all intertwined and they were leaning on each other for comfort or support. That was one of my favorite shots because it really emphasized the message I wanted to share, which is: “All are alike unto God.” We are all loved by God, but we tend to forget that when we’re constrained or boxed into what we think “normal” is. I really wanted to break the negativity associated with blackness. There are a lot of negative connotations ignorantly or naively passed down when we’re talking about blackness. I wanted to deconstruct what that meant and show people how diverse and beautiful and different we all are. I still haven’t finished the painting from that, but I think the photos stood on their own. My Sister's Keeper by Melissa Tshikamba We had so much fun. I brought a ton of snacks. Everyone was super helpful and kind. I have a really great friend who photographed it for me, and she helps me with a lot of the shoots that I do. It was a chaotic yet smooth process. They loved it. They said, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I’ve never seen this many Black girls in Utah all at once, this is amazing!” It felt like a safe place, a place of unity and love, a place where people look like you, and you could really relate with, which is sometimes rare when you’re here. You’ve said that your art’s purpose is to share the message about divinity in each of us. How does sharing this message connect you to the Savior and our Heavenly Parents? I love that. We all have different talents and strengths that God gives us, and when we’re put on this earth, we all have different things we’re supposed to do. Part of life is discovering our gifts and how we can help and uplift others with them. So I think when we are developing our talents and sharing them for good, it’s bringing us closer to God because we’re using the gifts that they gave us. That’s so important. We’re showing it, showing them. We show that we love God when we help and uplift others. It brings me closer to God when I see someone connect with my art, or it makes them cry and feel loved. That’s what God wants us to feel. When we’re helping God do that, we become more like God, and we become closer to God. We do. What are your next steps and goals going forward? I have a lot of different goals. I want to own my own gallery one day. This year, I’m focusing on making a solo show, and I’m going to call it “The Divine Feminine.” I’m working on really large pieces of art just for me. Honestly, there are a lot of different paintings I’ve been wanting to work on, but I haven’t had the time or opportunity to do so yet because of commissions or other projects that I had to complete first. So I’m super, super excited about that. I think “The Divine Feminine” is going to emphasize what I want to portray and what I want people to see and feel in my art: healing internalized racism, developing self-love, reconnecting with your cultural identity, eradicating self-hate and colorism … These are huge messages in my art. We’re deconstructing what it is to be beautiful and what we were told is beautiful. When I was growing up, just in the media – what I watched, the books I read – it largely didn’t portray me, especially in religious and historical contexts. Black wasn’t seen as positive or good. I hope I’m changing the narrative and redefining what normal is with my art. It’s a huge goal. Also, showing different types of beauty – for a different audience, maybe that could seem shallow. But when you come from a background historically, in which it was shown that Black is ugly, it was said that Black is ugly, not divine, and not worthy of divine places…We don’t see it shown as the mainstream of beauty. It really affects people mentally and emotionally, and develops self-hate. Showing beauty is an important thing for me because it’s eradicating self-hate. You see yourself as beautiful. It’s interesting to me that there are so many divine places and temples and churches, but we still only see one ethnicity in these places. That’s just not accurate historically or fair. I want to change that narrative because Black is also divine and it is also beautiful. Have you had any of your art purchased by the Church with that end in mind, of it being displayed in our church buildings? I hope it will get to that point. I did have one painting purchased by the Church History Museum, which is exciting – it was a Black man with his son. It’s not going to be in the church halls, but I think that’s a great step. You don’t see Black men in divine spaces when it comes to our videos. I think the narrative is changing to be more inclusive, and I’m really glad that they have that piece because that’s important to see. So hopefully, we’ll have more of that.I try to identify what’s missing in art or what people need to see, and create based on that. If a painting is not for me, it’s because sometimes I feel like I’ve been inspired – I didn’t really need the message because I already felt that it was true. But then people reach out to me and say, “Oh, I really needed to see this.” Or, “It just really made me see myself so differently.” That’s such a cool part about creating, that you can uplift someone just by an image. The Church and religion and spirituality in general claim that we’re all children of one Creator. I feel like if the central figure of a faith doesn’t look like you and looks like someone else, you revere a different ethnicity besides yourself. You put them above you, and it creates a barrier between you and your spirit because you don’t love yourself. You want to be someone else, you want to look like someone else, and you put that person above you. It stops you from being able to see the divinity within yourself, and it inhibits us from seeing ourselves the way God sees us. You really need to be mindful of what you watch, what you read, and in your thoughts to reprogram yourself to see yourself the way God sees you. And I guess that’s, that’s honestly my goal with my art: to eradicate self-hate and develop self-love. When you have love for yourself, you can see beauty in others and really, truly love others even more. We’re supposed to love others as ourselves, and if you don’t love yourself, it’s hard to love other people. At A Glance Name: Melissa Tshikamba Age: 28 Location: Utah Marital History: Married Children: None Occupation: Artist Convert to the Church: Born in the Church Schools Attended: BFA illustration BYU Languages Spoken At Home: English and French Favorite Hymn: How Great Thou Art Website or Social Media You Would Like Featured: http://tshikamba.com Social Media: @tshikamba Interview Produced by Trina Caudle

Ashli Carnicelli has always been a seeker – she studied many religions to identify the divine. She was adopted as a child and searched for her biological family. In just the past five years, in her late 30s, the pieces have been falling into place. I hear you have an interesting conversion story. I was raised Catholic until I was ten years old. My parents were very active – they ran the children’s choir, and we were very close to our priest. But when I was ten, my mom went back to school and was in a class where they studied scripture like a piece of literature or mythology, rather than as the word of God. My mom had really struggled with how she understood misogyny in organized religion – she didn’t like how it seemed very unequal between men and women. The class seemed to be the straw that broke the camel’s back for her. She couldn’t subscribe to it anymore, so we left the church. Ashli Carnicelli with Her Family All growing up, I was a seeker. I read different religious texts, I went to temple with my Jewish friends. The only book I haven’t read is the Quran. I went on this exploration and always felt very close to Christ, but I still felt something was missing. When I got my driver’s license as a teenager, I started going back to the Catholic parish that we had left. All through college, I went to St. Clement’s and St. Cecilia’s in Boston’s Back Bay. My husband Tony and I met on the first day of class in college. His family is Italian and Roman Catholic. They’ve been going to the same church for forty years, and that’s where we got married – in the Catholic Church at St. Bonaventure in Allegany, New York with the Franciscan friars. His grandparents were too ill to travel to Boston, so we had a little ceremony for them a few months after our big wedding in Newport, Rhode Island. After we married, I was still very active in my religious discovery, reading books on The Kabbalah, The Bhagavad Gita, Living Buddha, Living Christ by Thich Nach Han, and I was studying for my yoga teacher certification with Kenpo Lama Migmar Rinpoche, Buddhist Chaplain at Harvard. I remember one day, we were studying Karma. He raised his finger in the air and said, “No one can change your Karma. Not even God!” My reaction was that my heart burst open with love. I felt that I knew a divine truth – that MY God could transform our errors and sins. I knew that I would never be able to get my karma perfect enough in this lifetime to transcend all, as I was being taught, because of all my mistakes and failings, and all my imperfections. But I knew my Lord and Savior had the power to bring me to the highest place through the gift of His Atonement. I had a lot of exposure to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints before I joined the Church. When my husband was in medical school in Rochester, New York, a more experienced student was assigned to him as a mentor. The mentor and his wife were members of the Church, and we really loved them and spent a lot of time together. The missionaries knocked on our door, but it wasn’t the right time.Then, when my husband did his residency in Boston, we had an au pair who lived with us, and she was from a large Latter-day Saint family. When I first met Renae, I had a really vivid dream about her – I went into a greenhouse and there were all these women with an older woman who was clearly the mother of the group. They sat me down and said, “You have to help us bring Renae back to the church.” I said okay, and I woke up. I told Renae this and she said, “You’re gonna die. I am number eleven of twelve children, and I’m the only one in my family who has decided not to be a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I have six sisters. It’s probably who you met in your dream.” For the year she was with us, the missionaries and people from the local ward knocked on our door. I would open it and find little treats they left for her. Over that year, she talked with me about her qualms, the things she saw that were negative. Through those same years, I was following an Instagram account by Rachel Parcell – she has a clothing line and a home goods line and at the time had a lifestyle and beauty blog called “Pink Peonies.” A friend sent me one of her posts and said we look like twins – we both have long dark hair, and we both have daughters named Isla Rose. I had no idea she was a Latter-day Saint for years. But one year, she posted a Christmas picture with the hashtag #LightTheWorld and I thought, “Wait a minute. She’s part of this church?!” You were influenced toward the LDS Church by an Instagram influencer? I was. It was one of the biggest blessings. The big turning point in my life when I decided I needed to yoke myself with Christ was when I went through infertility. In 2015, to become pregnant with our second daughter, we went through IVF, and it failed. I mean, it crashed and burned. We lost five babies. It was awful.I had this little jewelry tray that said, “It is well with my soul,” which is one of my favorite hymns. I kept it on my nightstand and every night when I took off my rings, I felt that my family’s life was in Christ’s hands. I felt His love, and I felt His presence for the first time. Before that, I had understood God as a disdainful patriarch. But through that trial, I entered into relationship with Christ and felt that He was in the weeds with me. He was in my pain and my suffering and my loss and my uncertainty and all of these things that I was struggling with.The Lord gave us a miracle – I got pregnant spontaneously with our second daughter Everly between IVF cycles. When she was six months old, we moved to Durham, North Carolina. Our backyard looked like the Sacred Grove with a beautiful canopy of trees. I had just gotten my dream job, I found out I was pregnant with our third baby without even trying, just miraculous. Since we were new to the state, I thought, “Okay, what church are we going to join?” I didn’t know the story of Joseph Smith – I had no idea. But I went into the woods behind my house and prayed, and asked, “what church should I join?” (As in, which Catholic parish?) Every step I took, all the way up through my temple endowment, I had no idea what I was really doing. I just knew that Christ had seen me through that terrible trial. Another question was – I’d been reading the Bible my entire life and understood that we need to be like Jesus; we need to embody all these qualities. I wanted to, but I didn’t know how. My answer has been making and keeping sacred covenants with the Lord. Christ is always in our story. I feel like He’s always reaching out to us. As I was praying in my backyard, the Holy Ghost said, “Read the Book of Mormon.” I thought about Renae, our au pair who struggled with the Church, and kind of compared her to Rachel – she was an everyday woman like me, married, had two kids and a career, and I felt a really deep connection with her. I thought, “I will give it a read. If Rachel is part of this church, it must be really special.” So I sent away for a Book of Mormon, which of course was delivered by the sister missionaries. I still keep in touch with them! I took one lesson, two lessons, and that was it. I was baptized in December 2017. That was it; there was no turning back for me. Rachel, her family, and I ended up being connected in a miraculous way – her ministering sister’s son was the Elder who baptized me, which we found out four years later!! Shortly after, her parents were visiting North Carolina and attended church at the same building as my ward, and we were able to meet. I had to hug them and tell them that they were the reason I was there! These tender mercies are not lost on me! You were doing all these things and then decided to commit your life to Christ. But it sounds to me like you had committed to Christ your entire life. What was the difference? Ashli Carnicelli with Her Family There was a period of time when I sort of wandered. Right before my husband and I were married, I went to school to become a massage therapist. I was introduced to all of the New Age things. I also got my yoga teacher certification from Lama Magmar. He’s a Tibetan Lama and is the Buddhist chaplain at Harvard. So I was still getting exposed to all different faiths and religions. But here’s what happened – and this was a pitfall for me. I found all these New Age things, and I think they are wonderful when used appropriately, such as thinking good thoughts, staying positive in trials, and overcoming challenges. All of that is good. However, I started to believe that I was the center of my life. I genuinely started to believe that, yes, God is great. I’m glad He’s there, but I don’t actually need Him. I can manifest my life. I can do it all myself. Then, infertility and IVF brought me to my knees. I was doing all the things – all of the injections, all the acupuncture, all the positive thinking, all the exercise, all of the supplements and herbs and meditations…and yet I could not create and “manifest” this baby by myself. I couldn’t will her into being. That was the big turning point for me. I realized, wait a minute. There is something and someone who’s so much bigger than me, who cares about me, and my life is not as locked up and within my control as I was leading myself to believe. Maybe, just maybe, life was designed for me – for us – to need Christ. What does your family think of your baptism and commitment to the Church? Tony is very supportive, and he does all the things with us – Family Home Evening, family scripture study, family prayer. He comes to sacrament meeting when he’s not working or sleeping from working overnight – he’s a cardiologist. He loves the Lord. The fact that he participates and supports really means a lot. He’s coming from a family that has been Catholic for generations. I am my parents’ only child, and I am adopted. I know my biological mom, and she has two other children who are both younger than me. And then my biological dad, I have a younger half-brother from him. My parents are so great. They have moved with us whenever we’ve had to move for different medical training areas. They live 15 minutes away now. They’re very kind, very loving, very involved grandparents. They’ve been very supportive about the Church – they have come to the girls’ baby blessings, and they came to Isla’s baptism when she turned eight. My mom even played the piano for a piece that Isla and I sang for her baptism. They did leave religion entirely when I was ten, but they have always supported my own walk. My dad just retired from being vice president of operations for an HVAC company (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) that has contracts with Latter-day Saint temples to service their equipment. He’s been to the Salt Lake Temple visitor’s center a few times, and my mom even went with him once. How did you get to know your biological family? Does that play into your conversion to the Church, or was it independent from your religious seeking? They are connected. When I met my birth mom, I was 18, she was 38. She was 19 when I was born. I was 11 months old when she gave me up for adoption, which I hadn’t realized until I met her as an adult – I thought I was in the foster care system as a baby, but I was with her. I was only in the foster care system for maybe two months before my adoptive parents were able to take me home. There was a year probation period before her rights were fully suspended. My adoption was finalized when I was almost two. Ashli Carnicelli with Her Family When I met her, she told me, “I don’t know who your biological dad is, I think it might be this guy, but I don’t know.” I was absolutely horrified if I’m being honest. Up to that point, I had such a traditional life – my parents were high school sweethearts, they’ve been married since they were 18 years old, very religious and very devout and traditional. Even after they left religion, they still carried those values. So I found it very hard to swallow that part of my background was missing. Between ages 18 and 35 – when I joined the Church, that’s a long window of time – I was seeking a connection with God, and I was searching for my biological dad. My husband even got me a DNA test one year for Mother’s Day. Satan was really whispering a lot of lies to me, like, “You were born out of sin, so you’re not as good as other people. Your biological parents weren’t married when they conceived you. You don’t deserve to be here. Your worth has to be earned in the world by achievements. Your birth mom rejected you. And if she rejected you, no one can really ever deeply love you.” I’m talking really mean things, “You were an accident. You weren’t meant to be here.” That was a big one: you were an accident. During college, it was sinking in that I wasn’t going to know who my biological dad was, and it really bothered me. What if there’s some devastating health thing, and I want to have kids, and I don’t know about it? I want to know where I come from. My whole sense of identity was challenged. One time, I was attending the Catholic church and taking communion, and I was crying about this situation. All of a sudden, it was the Lord speaking through the Holy Ghost, and He said, “It doesn’t matter who made you, Ashli, because I made you.” I knew that what He was saying was true. A couple of months after I was baptized, in February 2018, I shared the story of what the Holy Ghost said in fast and testimony meeting. I shared that I know that family history is such an important part of our church. I know that the Lord will fill in the gaps for me, and I’m grateful that He gave me wonderful parents. I closed by saying that I’m also grateful that God has allowed me to become a mother myself.Two days later, I got an email from 23 And Me – a woman said that we matched as first cousins. “My dad has only one brother, and I think he’s your father.” I had literally just shared that testimony and the Lord filled in the gap. My biological dad had no idea I existed, but he remembered my birth mom. They were together only one night, and here I am. He was overjoyed. He told me, “I’ve been having dreams that I had a daughter. I kept having dreams about your birth mom. I didn’t understand why; now I know!” This was 100 percent because of the Lord. I was convinced I wasn’t going to know who he was, I wasn’t going to have those questions answered until I was on the other side of the veil. I truly had accepted that I wasn’t going to know. I have an inkling as to why the Lord revealed my whole biological side of the family to me – now I have all this temple work! A couple of weeks after I found my biological dad, my birth mom called me and said, “You’ll never believe this.” She was on ancestry.com and her whole family tree just lit up – she had found her biological dad, and all her siblings. So I’m going to the temple for ordinances for my family, my husband’s family, AND my biological family. I’ve had a few friends do ordinances, and oh my heck, the things that come through the mouths of those women – messages from my family. “Jesus Christ sent you here. We are aware of you. You came for a reason. You were sent here on purpose. The conditions of your birth were chosen by your Heavenly Parents. You’re not an accident.” It’s been so, so healing for me. One friend visited me and mentioned she was going to the temple that night and asked if I had any family names that needed to be done. I just handed her a card, I didn’t look at the name. After the session, she said, “Listen, I don’t know who this relative is to you, but when they talked about posterity, clear as day, I saw your face. And this woman said, tell her we are aware of her. Tell her that we know her, that we celebrated her coming, that we love her.” Her name was Mary Coyle, and she’s my biological mom’s biological dad’s mother, my biological great-grandma. I shared it with my birth mom because she had felt the same things – abandoned by her birth dad, that she was an accident. She carried that hurt, and I got to share that with her – “Your grandma knows that you were there. She knows I’m there. So she knows you’re there because I wouldn’t be here without you.” It was so healing. You have adoptive parents, you have biological parents, and you know them all. What a wonderful extended family you’ve gathered. With seeking your family and seeking religion and a relationship with God, how has all of this come together? Ashli Carnicelli with Her Daughters When I prayed as a little Catholic girl, I prayed to Heavenly Father, to Jesus Christ, and to Mary. I wasn’t sure if it was Mary I was connecting with, but I definitely felt something from a loving female. My little six-year-old self had a witness of a Heavenly Mother.When I was a new convert, I was in the Sunday School class for investigators and new people, and we sang, “O My Father.” I was sitting with one of the sister missionaries, and pointed to the lyrics and said, “Wait a minute, we have a doctrine that there’s a Heavenly Mother?” And she said, “Oh, yeah. We believe there’s a Heavenly Mother.” All the bells went off, and I practically leaped out of my chair. “I knew it!!!!! I knew it!!!!!” I always, always, always had a deep desire to please the Lord and to serve Him. Even amid leaving the Catholic church, coming back, and all of this spiritual discovery, I always had a deep desire to know what God wants me to do, how He wants me to live and be, and obey Him. Through obedience to my covenants, I have seen the power and the blessings of the sealing ordinance in the temple – the welding link between members of my family, my husband’s family, my biological family, and ultimately the human family. It’s all connected. We are each so important to Him. Each and every one of us matters to Him. After all of my searching, I know this for certain now. At A Glance Name: Ashli Elizabeth Carnicelli Age: 40 Location: Charleston, South Carolina Marital History: Married for 16 years this June Children: 4 daughters Occupation: Full time Mom, author, and nursing student Convert to the Church: 12/14/2017 Schools Attended: Bachelors of Music from Boston Conservatory at Berklee Languages Spoken At Home: English Favorite Hymn: Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing Website or Social Media You Would Like Featured: https://pearlsoflight.substack.com/ Interview Produced by Trina Caudle

Monica Packer worked hard at everything she did until perfection became an obsession. She hit rock bottom during college and again after she was married. She started an experiment to see what she could learn without making her goals a mandatory checklist and has embraced “progress over perfection.” Advisory: eating disorders, suicidal ideation Could you tell us about yourself growing up and how perfectionism became unhealthy? Monica Packer I’ve always loved learning and personal development, but a lot of us also know what it’s like when that goes too far. I became a stereotypical perfectionist around seventh grade, recognizing that good grades are a good thing. I overheard kids say what grade they got and other kids praising them, and thought, “That matters. That’s a sign of being a good person.” Perfectionism shifted as a teen to focus on appearance. Nobody pressured me or told me I had to hit a certain metric. I took all the little seeds of what I thought it meant to be a good person and turned them into a full garden of perfectionism. It was all with good intentions – I was just trying to be a good person, but it was taken to extremes. During high school, I hit all the achievements: spiritual, the physical body, school, extracurricular, leadership, everything. But when I started BYU, I went from being a high school stand-out to being a nobody on a huge university campus. I tried out for a few things I used to excel in but wasn’t accepted at the BYU-level. Before, the only way I knew how to measure myself was outcomes through playing the flute or dancing or acting or leadership, so I didn’t know who I was without those things. In college, my praiseworthy outcomes came through academics. I was almost a 4.0 student the entire time at BYU. The BYU time was also when years of disordered eating turned into full-blown eating disorders. To have my appearance prove my worth in my teens – again, with good intentions – I was very “disciplined” in what I ate, but I see now I was largely living a life of restriction and disordered eating. I hit rock bottom after studying abroad in London. I was the first of my family to leave the United States besides serving a mission, and I saw things my dad had been reading about his entire life and would have loved – history, art, music, dance. But the entire time, I was obsessing over what I could or couldn’t eat that day, or how much exercise I should do. Food went from something I could control to something that controlled me. It was there I had my first experiences with binging. In my mind, this was the “wrong” kind of eating disorder. I had anorexia off and on for years but they’d never get binging. I felt so much shame and despair. My life felt out of control so I went to get help. I was a peer mentor for Freshman Academy and had been to the counseling office with other students to help support them, so I knew that they typically took the intake form and said they would call to schedule an appointment. But with me, it was different. I handed the intake form over the desk and she asked me to take a seat while she reviewed it. Then she said, “Please come right in.” I’m glad she recognized an extreme need and started working with you immediately. Me, too. It got worse before it got better, in scary ways. I was doing all the things, but my shame became so all-encompassing that I almost took my own life. There are some streets near the campus with curves where drivers can’t see pedestrians, and I could just walk in front of a car. I stood there several times, trying to get the courage to do it. Thankfully, I didn’t. I did have a good therapist at BYU. One of the most profound things was he confirmed that yes, I had an eating disorder. Part of me didn’t believe it and thought it was a lack of self-control. The other thing he told me was I couldn’t fix it overnight. This honestly was a relief to hear. It did take several years before I saw real progress. In my pursuit of recovery, I went down another path. Before, I was hellbent on proving myself with outcomes I could create. Now, I was too scared to try anything. I worked really hard on recovery from the eating disorder, but everywhere else in my life, it was just about duty. I got married at age 21, and I could show up for my husband. We moved to Alameda, California (near Oakland), and I was a middle school teacher – I showed up for my work really well. I showed up for my church callings. But everything was about fulfilling responsibilities – for myself, there were no goals or personal ambitions. I became what I now know is the most common perfectionist: the underachieving perfectionist. The route is the same as the overachieving perfectionist: fear of failure, fear of not measuring up, because your worth and identity are tied to an outcome. Overachieving, you’re always on a hamster wheel, trying to achieve, achieve, achieve and you never get there. Underachieving, you stay stuck on the sidelines of your own life because you don’t believe you’re going to get anywhere, so why try. I also was terrified to be developing a faith crisis tied to my womanhood. I had kids and stopped working full-time outside the home – I was a stay-at-home parent. Again, I was showing up for my responsibilities with my kids, for my husband, for my church calling. But I was stuck in the same place – I felt despair, lost, depressed, resentful. That’s something I noticed – you were still meeting life milestones like getting married, having a job, having kids. Did people not recognize that you were experiencing difficulties? Monica Packer Perfectionism is a shield. And I held up that shield like it was my job – no one was allowed to see how bad it really was. My husband wanted to date me for a long time, but it was in the beginning of my recovery from the eating disorders, and I couldn’t. I was honest – I told him, “It’s not you,” and alluded to working through some things. I thought he could read between the lines. More than a year into being married, his sister saw something I wrote on a blog and asked him, “Did Monica used to have an eating disorder?” He responded no, and I realized I had never directly told him that. I never told a roommate. I never told a friend. I never told a parent. Only my therapist at BYU knew. It was the same problem later with the beginning of my faith crisis – I didn’t let people in. I was so terrified of being an apostate that I would not open my mouth and tell even my husband how bad it really was. That really impacted the beginning of our marriage. I presented a picture of, “This is who you are married to,” and held him at arm’s length. I did not want him to know the weak parts, the scary parts, the messy parts. You said your faith crisis was related to your womanhood. I can take a wild guess what that meant. Yep, motherhood was a big part! In my family, all the women had a baby within a year of getting married. When I got married, I felt sudden, looming pressure, “This is what’s next for you.” I knew I wanted children but I also knew it was not the right time yet. Having a baby right away was one of the ways to be a good woman. You don’t have to directly hear it to know you need to follow the script. I have five kids now, and I truly love being a mom. But then, I felt like my whole life would be changing diapers and washing dishes, and I felt despair whenever I thought about it. Then I felt ashamed about my despair. I wanted to get a Ph.D. in humanities and become a college professor, but I could not see a way to blend these two really important parts of myself. The biggest problem was I felt like I was a second-class citizen to God. He’s given me intellect and talent and ambition and passion. But I thought that if I were to use those gifts, I would be going against what God wants with having children. When I shared my concerns with a few people, they said positive things and tried to help me walk through it. But when I asked deeper questions about how it connected to my status as a woman in the Church there was a lot of fear that I was a feminist. I remember saying, “Don’t worry, I’m not a feminist.” Still, I loved reading female writers in the Church and during that phase of my life, blogs were popular. There was a publicized push for women to wear pants to church, and I was shocked that I innately saw their perspective and agreed with those women. I was also shocked to see the hate they received. Literal death threats! I found myself kneeling by the couch during my daughter’s naptime, sobbing and praying, “Please let me not be an apostate.” I think a lot of women can relate to the shock of realizing, “I am a feminist, and this competes against what I’m being told is right, what I think I’m supposed to do and be and believe.” I understand now that being a feminist does not compete with the gospel. I am a feminist because of what I believe about God and our faith, but it took a long time to get there. There are a lot of ways to interpret the phrase, “second-class citizen.” What did that mean to you? So many of my struggles with that have been internal, but they were not created internally. It was about reading the room in church settings and internalizing others’ expectations of women, of myself. Monica Packer with Her Family My husband is really awesome – he’s never been a person who comes home and says, “Where’s my dinner? What did you do all day?” But in other settings, it was so clear to me that to pursue my passions, talents, and gifts would completely contradict my role as a woman, which is to be a mother and a stay-at-home mom. It was expected and modeled for me. I couldn’t see that pursuing my talents and being a mother could complement each other. I knew God had blessed me with these talents and gifts, and I knew I wanted to be a mother. Seeing them as a contradiction was a conflict for a very long time. The other big struggle with womanhood was Heavenly Mother – my entire life, I wanted to connect with Her and know more about Her. Also, a big part of the despair was what Heavenly Mother represents for my future and my role as a woman being only motherhood. It hit me harder than it ever had before – that I was nothing, and essentially my job was to wash dishes and change diapers forever and ever. At that time, I knew that it wasn’t okay to even speak of Heavenly Mother so I wondered, am I destined for an eternity of being anonymous to my spiritual children? I thought that the answer was, “Yes, because this is your supportive role. This is where you’re supposed to find joy.” That was terrifying and heartbreaking to me because if that’s the case, that also represents my literal life now, how it plays out if I’m only supposed to be the silent creator. That was hard because I had to ask – do I mean anything to God? I was struggling to receive answers to prayer, no matter what I did. This lack of answers felt personal, like it was about my gender, about me directly. I concluded that if God’s a man and I’m a woman, that must be why He would not take time to answer my prayers – because I’m not worth it. That’s a heavy spiritual burden. How did things begin to shift for you? Honestly, it took years. I had to start logically. I gradually came to terms that yes, I am a feminist, because it makes sense to me that I am just as important to God as His male children. It makes sense to me that Heavenly Mother exists, and She’s not on the sidelines for all eternity, just having billions of eternal children and that’s Her only job. Who knows how that works, but that was a real fear for me. I made shifts externally by being more honest about my struggles and my thoughts. I began to do this after we moved from Alameda to Walnut Creek. Our first Sunday in our new ward was a “wear pants to church” day. I was too much of a rule follower to wear them then, but I did put my 15-month-old daughter in pants. That was my first little move. In that ward, I was met with total love, understanding, and nuance. I needed all three of those things. One of the first times I spoke up in Relief Society was about the nature of God – “I feel like I know the nature of God better when I think of Heavenly Mother’s hand where there’s beauty, there’s healing, there’s creativity.” As I shared that, a woman turned around and looked at me. I thought, “Oh, crap. I’ve just set myself up to be the ward apostate.” A few weeks later, I shared in a testimony that even in times of doubt, I believed we could be used by God for positive change. After that meeting, that woman from Relief Society approached me and said, “Tell me more about you. Tell me about your husband. How does he view the things that you think?” I didn’t find out until later, but it was Carol Lynn Pearson. Oh my gosh. I had no idea who she was. I didn’t know she was a gifted and well-known poet and writer and activist and actress. Before I learned all that, she’d often join me in the nursing lounge where I was feeding my babies to just chat with me. She ministered to me, honestly – she took time to see a young mom who was struggling. The conversations with Carol Lynn became a turning point for me not because they resolved anything, but I had someone to share my doubts and concerns without fear of judgment. She’s such a good listener – she didn’t preach. She was curious, she asked me questions, and she let me explore. The first few years in that ward were full of anger. I went from despair to resentment over my faith crises. It didn’t help that I was living out the spiritual contradictions I struggled with. I hated the idea that my only purpose was to raise children. But also, I didn’t want anything different. I wanted those kids. I wanted that husband. I wanted that life. A series of bad moments with my kids helped me recognize, “I am stuck, I am lost, and I do not like who I am.” I could tell I was showing up to my kids as a resentful woman, not my real self. I wanted things to change, but it was me who needed to change, not necessarily my situation. Somewhere in all the pain and confusion, the fear and perfectionism, I had lost a sense of who I am. I wanted to feel like myself again. About Progress with Monica Packer I was still too scared to have goals, but about six months before I turned thirty, I had an idea. I thought about all the things I’d said, “I wish I could do that. That looks fun. That sounds interesting,” but never did them. So what if I were to do them, and do them imperfectly. My coming birthday was a great motivator, so I wrote a list of “30 Before 30” things I wanted to try and experience. They weren’t goals, and it wasn’t about achievement or completion. It was about exploring, to bring back the pieces of myself I had lost along the way. Who am I? What do I still like? What do I want to do more of? I now call it a Do Something List – DSL. It’s about doing something that scares you, and doing something instead of nothing. I leaned into my passions and interests – cooking, interior design, art, dance … I went to an adult dance class for the first time in thirteen years. Dance was part of my life I had shut off completely when I didn’t make it into anything at BYU. I went on five new hikes. I went to San Francisco to window shop and go to a museum. I began to pick up the seeds of, “This is who you are and these are the seeds you can nourish. These are the parts of yourself that you absolutely need to bring to life, not just for yourself, but for those kids that you want to show up better for.” I’ve done a Do Something List for seven years and never completed a full list. I always alter them too. This was the first thing that showed me a way to develop myself outside the perfectionism model. It has become a grand experiment to see how I can grow outside of perfectionism. Is this possible? The answer has been YES. I’ve also gotten really into the science that this is the way to grow – it’s exponentially more than when you are in the all-or-nothing mode. I started a podcast and I coach women. My entire life has changed, but mostly internally. Very few things have changed circumstantially, but I show up to my life very differently. It completely changed my life. I began to speak up in other ways, too. I began to share more of my actual feelings with my husband. I was accepted by my stake even with my questions and was asked to speak or teach anyway. At that point, I didn’t even know if God was real, but people gave me a path forward with compassion and nuance. They made me feel that as messy as I was, I was enough. Where did you get the idea for the DSL? It didn’t come from anybody. I’d heard about “bucket lists” of things you want to do and experience, but this feels like a God-given idea. My DSLs provided me short periods of time and exploration for myself, they weren’t about checking things off. That was so new for me! I was having fun and learned to prioritize myself again. One result was that my confidence grew. I didn’t have to be “good” at things to enjoy them, and I began to apply that concept to other things in my life. I leaned into the “mediocre;” I learned it was okay to make mistakes as you worked on making progress. So, I ventured into personal development in a way I hadn’t in the past. I became a day planner, I started to do goals, I got into habit formation. I started to learn and develop outside of perfectionism. The biggest thing I learned is that growth in any area of your life takes time and is made of small steps. It’s messy and failure is allowed to be part of the process. With personal exploration and development, I was also healing spiritually. I recognized that God works through me developing myself and the divine in me. I’ve found a path to God by accepting my thinking, questioning mind, and by better accepting myself. When I was growing up, I thought that to be close to God, you have to be totally self-sacrificing, don’t think about your needs, your wants, anything; you find God and then you find yourself. The opposite has been true for me. I found myself first, and that’s how I found God. The more I have come to know who I am, developing who I am, the more I feel connected to God, the more I feel that I’ve been able to be an instrument for Him to others. Being myself gives me a life of purpose with my gifts, and helps me feel more connected to my Heavenly Parents. What is your current relationship with the Church and your faith? Monica Packer For me, it’s playing the longest game and making the biggest bet of my life. Making room for the human in myself has freed me up to make room for the human in the Church. I believe that the “true church” will be fully realized when Jesus is here, when He is at the head and humans aren’t in charge of anything. The truth to me is that God lets humans make mistakes, and that has freed me to stay in this particular faith. This is the church I want to be in. When I think big picture, there are so many pieces of the puzzle that we have that I don’t see reflected in other Christian faiths. There are pieces we could definitely work on – it would be remarkable to live up to our own doctrine of Heavenly Parents and have that reflected in how we structure the church, giving women more of a visible part. Sometimes, I stay because this is my community and my home. Other days, I stay because of the doctrine of Heavenly Mother, although I don’t know exactly what that looks like. I’m open to being surprised about everything. I’ve been teaching Gospel Doctrine the last few years, and I’ve loved seeing the frailties of humans and the flaws in everyone from Judas to Peter and Doubting Thomas, from Mary to Martha. Everyone is flawed and that gives me so much hope. It gives me encouragement to stay even when I get frustrated by the flaws in our faith. I had an experience in my Walnut Creek ward that validated it was even possible for me to stay as a nuanced member. I went to a temple recommend interview with a new counselor who I didn’t know well, and I told him, “I’m going to be really honest with you. I can’t answer a straight Yes or No to these questions. But I can tell you I want to believe. I want to have a testimony of that.” He sat there for a second, and then read the scripture in Alma 32 that said the seed of faith is enough. He said, “If that’s enough for God, that’s enough for me and these questions.” I got my recommend and came home feeling for the first time in a long time that it’s okay, that I’m okay. It’s okay that I don’t have answers. It’s okay that I am frustrated, and I have doubts. It’s okay that I get angry and mad and sad. I’m allowed to be here. I am just as valid as any member who has no hesitation to say direct “yes and no” to the temple recommend questions. I give myself permission to not know, to be frustrated, to have doubts. And I give myself permission to stick with it. Feeling doubt doesn’t mean I have to leave the Church. Staying doesn’t mean I can’t think and wonder and ask questions. I can do both. I feel like God’s biggest test for me is just: “Will you choose faith? Will you choose to try to believe?” That’s it. So I hold onto that. At A Glance Name: Monica Packer Age: 37 Location: Salt Lake City, Utah Marital History: Married Children: 5 Occupation: Podcaster and Coach Convert to the Church: n/a Schools Attended: Bachelors in English from BYU Languages Spoken At Home: English Favorite Hymn: Come Thou Fount (fingers crossed they'll bring it back into the new hymnal!) Website or Social Media You Would Like Featured: http://www.aboutprogress.com Instagram: @aboutprogress Interview Produced by Trina Caudle

Rebecca Cheney grew up with music and wanted to sing in the Tabernacle Choir for as long as she can remember. She shared her audition process and some of her experiences as a member of the Choir. Could you tell us about your growing-up years and how music factored into that? Rebecca Cheney I grew up in a military family – my dad was in the Army, so we moved a lot. I met my husband in Germany when we were teenagers because his dad was in the Army too. We got married when we were at BYU and had five boys. All five are married and we have three granddaughters. Music was always a part of my life. My mom and my grandma taught me to play the piano from when I was about seven. My mom went by a different name when she was our piano teacher – she was Mrs. Twiddleberry, so we would show her a little more respect during lessons, I guess. The year I was eight, my dad was stationed in Korea so we lived in Oregon next door to my grandparents. We recorded cassette tapes for my dad, and then he would record and send them back because long-distance phone calls were so expensive. We sang to him on the tapes, so we have recordings of us as little kids singing to our dad. My brother digitized them and I have the files now. There was always singing in our home, always music. Music was just always part of what we did – singing in Primary, performing in ward talent shows, singing in ward and stake choirs, and musicals and choirs at school. I took voice lessons during high school. At BYU, I majored in choral music education. So it was always a part of my life and I feel like it’s part of who I am. It’s just me. I don’t know who I would be without it. I did student teaching at the end of my degree, but other than that, I was a stay-at-home mom – that was what I wanted to do, and I was really blessed that I could do that for so long. I had a few piano students over the years, and I directed ward and stake choirs at different times. I also volunteered with the orchestra program at my kids’ elementary school. I taught all my kids piano lessons. Were you also Mrs. Twiddleberry? Rebecca Cheney with Her Family I wasn’t. I should have been – maybe it would have been better. I taught them under duress sometimes. They all participated in band and orchestra at school. We were always singing. I’ve always sung to my children, and some were in choir in junior high and high school. Some took voice lessons at different times. I made them go to each other’s concerts, which they didn’t appreciate, but it’s important to support each other. So we’ve been to lots and lots and lots of concerts over the years. Two of my sons were in the concert choir and Men’s Chorus at BYU, and I have a daughter-in-law majoring in vocal performance. Music is just who we are – it’s part of our identity. What brought you to the point of joining the Tabernacle Choir? You have to feel called to do it, I think, because it’s a huge time commitment. I always felt like I was supposed to be in the Tabernacle Choir but for a long time, I had a hard time believing it would ever happen. I definitely had imposter syndrome – I never felt like I had the ability or the talent. But the Lord puts people in your path at the right time. My youngest son was speech-delayed as a toddler, and I met a woman who worked through the schools to help identify preschool children who needed special services. I found out she was in the Choir and that changed everything for me. It took a long time and a lot of work, but that was the first step – I knew somebody in the Choir and we developed a friendship. We started small with voice coaching and she really helped me build up my confidence. She encouraged me to join a community choir, which I did around 2007, and sang with them for five or six years. The director of that choir was vocal faculty at Utah Valley University and he started teaching me voice lessons. I learned so much because it was something I wanted, and I was really focused on that goal. The experience of voice lessons and studying and practicing was very different from when I was a student at BYU – I was much more focused and dedicated, and I tried a lot harder. It was still three or four years before I felt ready to audition. That’s a lot before you even began the official audition. My first Music and the Spoken Word was in March 2013. April 2013 General Conference was my first conference, and I sang in two sessions. My first audition was in July 2010 and I auditioned three times. It’s been over ten years so the audition process is probably different now, but it was very intense. This is what I had to do: There was an application to fill out and my bishop had to sign it. The application asked things like, “What are you doing to sing right now? How are you developing your voice?” I had to record myself singing a hymn with no accompaniment. I touched the piano with the opening note, sang the hymn, and touched the note again at the end so they knew if I was in tune. I sent a cassette tape in 2010, which was already archaic by then. I got a letter back saying, “Thank you for auditioning, but no thanks.” The letter also had a checkbox list of things like sound production and vowel shape and technical vocal skills, and other skills to work on – mine said something about breath flow and breath support. It was hard to get a No but I never felt hopeless. When the timing is right for the Lord, then it will happen. I held on to that. A year later, 2011, I went through the same process – sent in the audition on another cassette, and got another No. In 2012, I decided to audition again. I was still singing in the community choir but hadn’t been taking voice lessons for a while, so I talked to the professor at UVU and we did some brush-up lessons. That year, I recorded myself on a digital recorder and made a CD. I did different takes of everything and then listened to figure out which ones to send in. Every time I auditioned, I made it such a matter of prayer. I wanted this so much and felt like it was the right thing. I made the third audition recording, put the CD in the envelope, addressed it, and was getting ready to go to the post office to mail it. I had a feeling, “You need to switch a couple of the files.” So I remade the disc and sent it off. I don’t know if it made a difference but it was meaningful to me.I got a letter saying, “We invite you to take the musical skills assessment exam,” which was the next phase of the audition. It was a three-hour exam on a Saturday morning in the Tabernacle. The first part was all listening with questions like, “Is this a minor chord? What is this interval? Look at a musical phrase on paper, and mark where it was different from what we were listening to.” I thought, “Okay, I can do this.” By the end, I was ready to crawl under the table and put up a white flag of surrender. The last piece had no music in front of us – they played a twelve-measure phrase that had really weird melodies and strange rhythms, then they played it a second time and we had to mark which measures were different, but with no sheet music. The second part of the test was written and was all music theory. I had studied and felt like I aced that part of the test, but the listening portion, I thought, “There’s no way.” The next day was the Brigham City Temple dedication, which was broadcast to church buildings around Utah. Before it started, they showed the Tabernacle Choir as the prelude music, and I turned to my husband and said, “Every person up there on the screen passed that test. So maybe there’s hope that I passed it too.” It took about a week to get the results and I passed it. Phase three was a face-to-face audition in October 2012. Being a soloist has never been my strength and I have terrible stage fright, so my husband gave me a priesthood blessing. I’d gone to the temple, and I went to Temple Square early to the north Visitor’s Center where the Christus statue was. I sat there and just prayed, and it helped me be more centered when I went to my audition. I was interviewed by the choir president and manager, asking things like, why did I want to be in the Choir, and making sure I understood the time commitment and expectations. Then I went to another room to sing for the directors, Mack Wilberg and Ryan Murphy. That day, Bonnie Goodliffe was the accompanist for the audition – I told her my hymn and the key, and she just played it with no music. People are amazing. Who do I think I am, going in there and thinking I could audition? But the first thing Brother Wilberg said was, “I want you to know that we’ve prayed for your success, so you can relax.” I don’t know why he said that to me, but he did, and it really helped. I sang my hymn and a lot of vocal exercises, and did a lot of sight reading – I sang a hymn I’d never seen before. Bonnie played all the other parts on the piano, and I had to sing the soprano line written on the page without hearing it. There were musical phrases with difficult intervals to see how I made the jumps, and how quickly I could learn the music. In the Choir, we have to be able to pick up a song and sing it after only a couple of times through. It took about three weeks before I got my letter in the mail, which was excruciating. I basically met the mailman at the door because I’d been waiting every day. It said, “Dear Sister Cheney, Congratulations.” That’s all I saw and I lost it. I was bawling, I almost fell to the floor. Daryn was there, and he picked me up. The kids were all downstairs probably thinking, “What in the world is happening to Mom?” I was invited to join Temple Square Chorale, and we met twice a week. The chorale is the training choir, and we also had a class to prepare us to be part of the Choir – we learned about vocal production, how the Choir works behind the scenes, got fitted for the wardrobe, all of that. After four months, I got a letter that said, “You are called to serve in the Tabernacle Choir.” We’re all set apart and the title of our calling is Musical Missionary. Wow! The Choir always sounds amazing, and now I know why! What’s your routine now? Rebecca Cheney Our rehearsal schedule is every Thursday night, and every Sunday morning is Music and the Spoken Word. We rehearse early on Sunday morning, do the broadcast, and most of the time we have another rehearsal after. We just stay in the seats and keep going. We recently performed Elijah with the Utah Symphony – it’s an oratorio by Mendelssohn. We work on that during the second rehearsal, or new pieces we’ve never sung on Music and the Spoken Word. I learn the music at home so we don’t have to spend time learning parts in the rehearsals. If you count the time I spend driving to and from Salt Lake, at Choir, and rehearsing at home, it’s 12 to 17 hours a week. If there’s a big concert coming up, we meet multiple days a week so it could be 30 to 40 hours. During the Christmas concert week, we are there every day except Monday. Luckily that’s only a few weeks a year because I don’t know how anybody could do that all the time. It’s a huge sacrifice but there are so many blessings. What is your favorite thing about the Choir? What’s a favorite piece of music? This is the hardest question to answer. The first thing that comes to mind is the friendships I’ve made. The people in the choir are just regular people that are amazing. I’ve met the most incredible people that I never would have crossed paths with any other way. The music we sing is so fabulous, some of the arrangements from Mack and Ryan. They bring music to life in a different way. A few years ago, we sang “Dear to the Heart of the Shepherd” in General Conference – that’s never been my favorite, but it was a new arrangement by Mack and it changed the whole song for me. It was just stunning. It’s such a privilege to sing their music with favorite hymns. The Christmas concert with the Sesame Street characters was my second Christmas and one of my favorite moments. It was so fun. We rehearsed with the guests, and Big Bird came walking out and I started bawling my eyes out. How did I get here – that’s Big Bird. It took me back to when we were eight years old and was such an out-of-body experience. That concert was so fun. Richard Elliott’s arrangement of “Let Us All Press On” is one of my favorites. “It is Well With My Soul,” arranged by Brother Wilberg. We always sing “Angels From the Realms of Glory” at the end of our Christmas concerts – the words are so powerful in the last verse. We sing one called “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” by Charles Wesley. Brother Wilberg did the musical setting and it’s stunning. We sing music that by its very nature brings the Spirit because we’re singing about the Atonement, or the peace the Savior can bring into our lives, or faith, things where the Spirit is always there. I have no doubt the Lord is part of this work. We’re a very important missionary function of the Church, and He is part of what we are meant to be doing. The Spirit is what makes some of these songs so powerful. Last year in a General Conference, we sang “Brightly Beams Our Father’s Mercy” – the last verse says, “Trim your feeble lamp, my brother, some poor sailor tempest tossed, trying now to make the harbor, in the darkness may be lost.” Singing that and testifying of the lower lights burning, thinking about the power of being light for somebody else – even our little tiny light makes a difference. There’s something about General Conference that is different from anything else we do. We always have the Spirit with us. The Spirit always comes. But in General Conference, it’s palpable. How do you sing when you’re ready to cry? I can’t. I cry. I don’t want to sound like this happens every week, but sometimes angels come and sing with us. There’s just no doubt. There have been times when everybody is bawling their eyes out, and you listen to the choir and the sound is incredible. We’re thinking, “Where’s that sound coming from? Because my voice doesn’t sound like that.” At Elder Richard G. Scott’s funeral, we sang “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” and when we got to the last verse, the volume of the number of people singing was twice as big as the rest of the song. You hear people talk about the rush of the Spirit and that’s what it felt like – it came from behind me and this huge wall of sound washed past me. That wasn’t just the people in the choir loft. That was a lot more than us testifying. It’s so amazing to me, and such a testimony that we’re doing the Lord’s work. Rebecca Cheney It’s been ten years and I still think, “How in the world did I get to do this?” It can be really hard when I’m in the trenches with a busy week, learning music and memorizing. But it’s like that with every calling, right? Mack always tells us, if we are prepared, then the Spirit can come. If I am prepared, if I have memorized my music, I am much more open to feeling and sharing the Spirit when I’m singing because I’m not wrapped up in the minutiae of what’s my next word? What’s the next line? When I’m prepared, I can really enjoy the process. Once I’ve got the nuts and bolts down, I can enjoy the experience of performing it. I don’t know what it is about music. There’s something celestial about it. It had to be part of our premortal existence. There’s something about it that drives messages into your heart. I can feel it sometimes in my whole body, and you feel that your spirit is being fed. Listening and absorbing rather than expending the effort to sing is the same idea of attending a concert – you’re not necessarily participating in the music yourself because you’re not performing it, but you’re still getting the lift that comes from good music. Within the experience of being in the Tabernacle Choir, how have you grown closer to our Heavenly Parents and the Savior? I’m a different person now than when I joined the Choir. There have been very difficult things in my personal life over the last ten years, and Choir is always a refuge, kind of like going to the temple. It’s a place I can go when I need a lift, and I’m going to feel something there.I found a couple of quotes that I want to share. Boyd K. Packer said, “A testimony is found in the bearing of it.” Because of the nature of what we do, week in and week out, I’m up there testifying of the truth of the gospel and bearing my testimony every single Sunday. That has strengthened me so much. I have learned how the Spirit speaks to me. President Nelson has said to learn how we Hear Him and really develop that skill. Choir has made all the difference. While on the break from the COVID pandemic, it was so difficult because I missed that connection. I get a connection straight to heaven. It’s not all the time but it does come. This quote is from J. Reuben Clark: “We get nearer to the Lord through music than perhaps through any other thing except prayer.” I think that’s why I get such stage fright – I’m sharing what’s in my heart. Singing is so personal. If I have a solo, my instrument is me, it’s my body. Playing the piano for people doesn’t bother me or make me nervous but singing feels like I’m expressing a part of my deepest self. That has brought me so much closer to the Savior, to both of our Heavenly Parents. There have been times when I’ve felt the influence of Heavenly Mother in what we’re singing, in a way that I wouldn’t feel any other way. It’s been such a blessing for my testimony. At A Glance Name: Rebecca Cheney Age: 51 Location: Orem, Utah Marital History: Married to Daryn for almost 31 years Children: 5 boys, all married to wonderful women. 3 granddaughters Occupation: Stay-at-home mom for 25 years, 1st grade Title 1 Aide for the past 5 years Convert to the Church: Raised in the Church Schools Attended: Bachelor of Music in Choral Music Education from BYU, Dec. 1994 Languages Spoken At Home: English Favorite Hymn: This is like picking a favorite child! Today it might be I Know That My Redeemer Lives (in the current hymnbook), Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing (from the old hymnbook), or It Is Well With My Soul (not in our hymnbook) Interview Produced by Trina Caudle

Esther Hi’ilani Candari is an artist and advocate who was raised to love global community and sharing resources with those in need. She finds fulfillment in connecting people with opportunities and expanding representation in visual art. What’s your bio? Esther Hi’ilani Candari I was born and raised in Hawaii. My dad is an immigrant from the Philippines, and he also has Chinese ancestry. My mom is European American, and she grew up all over the Pacific, so she’s definitely not your standard white American. It was a unique upbringing that exposed me to different cultures, a lot of different perspectives on the world. We traveled a lot and lived overseas when I was in high school. At a young age, I developed a deep love and fascination with different cultures and different ways of communicating ideas and expressing yourself, and an awareness of environments where this kind of variety was scarce. That awareness was brought into sharp contrast during my mission, in Utah, while working with immigrant and refugee populations. It was a wake-up call of how American the Church can be in the way that it’s administered. I’d experienced a very international church at the ground level but realized that while the individuals in the Church might be international, the approved materials often weren’t. So how do we reconcile that and help to create a global culture in a church that already has members all over the world? Do you have a specific example of this? The limitation on musical instruments in sacrament meeting was always ironic and funny to me. In Hawaii, everybody plays ukulele, everybody plays guitar, a lot of people sing. It’s a musically rich cultural environment. Piano is not the main instrument, and the organ is definitely not either. I’ve been to so many girls’ camps and firesides where we had guitar and ukulele worship songs, and it was extremely spiritual for me. It’s one of those funny things—in our church, the European perspective on devotional music was imposed on the Pacific culture that had been Christian for a long time and had its own traditions and its own ways of worshiping. Things like this aren’t usually malicious but stem from a lack of understanding of what religious practice can look like while still maintaining the same doctrines. The updates in the new general handbook have loosened this a lot. What are some traditions from your heritage that you practice that emphasize different parts of the world? I grew up with more Chinese cultural practices than Filipino in many ways. Chinese culture has a lot of influence in Hawaii, and more things were preserved and accessible than for my Filipino roots. Growing up, we always celebrated Chinese New Year, which has a huge list of foods you’re supposed to eat. It was one of my favorite holidays because we’d have a big multi-course meal with all my cousins. If I was lucky, people would give me a red packet—little red envelopes that adults give to children with cash in it. You could get some good spending money that week. My childhood perspective was that I got basically a double Christmas every year—big, big celebrations with memorable food and gifts. I’ve tried to keep that tradition. I’m the only person of color on my husband’s side of the family, and I’ve handed out red packets to my nieces and nephews a few times, and they’ve given me weird looks. Being born and raised in Hawaii, people assume that I’m Polynesian and that has caused some confusion with people accusing me of pretending I’m a different race. I was born there. I spent the majority of my life there, so people equate that with being Hawaiian. There’s not a word in American English to differentiate between being from Hawaii and being indigenous Hawaiian, so it can be confusing. People don’t understand how to talk about me because it’s a unique racial and cultural circumstance. The overarching approach to life and the day-to-day cultural practices I was raised with are generally Polynesian. That affects the way I perceive the world, the way I relate to people, the things that I prioritize, the symbols that I have affinity to. I’ve had to figure out how to strike a balance in my professional life, to pay homage to things that are meaningful to me in a way that is respectful and aware of the complicated relationship I have with it being an indigenous culture I don’t have blood ties to. A broad Polynesian theme that’s big for me is being communal. The idea that it’s your responsibility to share resources with those that need it. It’s very rude in Polynesian culture to eat in front of someone else. If somebody comes to the house, you immediately offer them food. If you’re out eating lunch in the park and a friend stops by, you offer them half of your lunch. When everybody’s doing that, it’s sustainable—you’ll always be taken care of because you take care of other people. This ties into the gospel mentality of how we should approach the world, being service-minded and consecrating our work to the betterment of the community. What was your art education, and how does art play into your global perspectives? Both of my parents are very creative—they met in the art program at BYU Hawaii. In high school, I thought it wasn’t cool to do what my parents did, so I planned on studying marine biology. I thought, “That’s much more serious than being an artist.” While taking a class during high school at the community college, I had an early-life crisis. I realized that scientists mostly spend their time in labs, writing boring reports. I had to ask myself, “Is this what I want to do for four years of college and potentially for a career? What do I enjoy enough to dedicate myself to make the most out of my education?” It was creating things. I love building stuff. Growing up, I made rabbit hutches for pets, tree forts with my brothers, and little home renovations with my mom. I love working with my hands. I love coming up with creative solutions, making things beautiful and practical at the same time. Sculpture fulfills all of those things—it’s a hands-on art form, and I could tap into some skills I’d already developed. So, I started college pursuing a degree in three-dimensional art. Sketch by Esther Hi’ilani Candari Then, I served my mission. When I came back, they had discontinued the sculpture program at BYUH, so I had another early life crisis—do I switch schools or switch majors? I prayed and cried a lot and felt strongly that I should switch to painting. I had never painted before, other than some basic watercolor projects in high school. I was a fish out of water but felt strongly that was what I was supposed to be doing. By my senior year of undergrad, I kind of felt like I knew what I was doing and that it was going to be okay. But it took a year and a half to even begin getting there. I still have days when I think, “I have no idea what I’m doing.” Painting was something I never would have picked of my own accord, which is the story of God in my life. They know I’m stubborn, and I get dragged kicking and screaming, and I ended up really enjoying it. I can look back and laugh at it now, but at the time, it felt like the world was shifting. My bachelor’s is in painting, and I double minor in sculpture and photography. I did a residency at the New York Academy of Art, checked the box as an art student in New York for as long as I could handle it. New York is not my speed, but it was a good experience for the summer—I made great connections, and learned a ton, and spent so much time with museums. I did my graduate degree at Liberty University, a big Baptist school in Virginia, which was a fascinating experience. I don’t know if I’d make the same decision if I could go back, but I’m grateful for the things that I learned from being there. During the first summer of graduate school, I did an internship with Joseph Brickey and helped him with the Rome Visitors Center mural. It’s the landscape behind the Christus statue. Sadly, I didn’t get to go to Rome because it was painted in Utah. I spent a summer in a very hot warehouse in Orem, but I can say that a painting I helped with is in Rome. Every time they use it in church photos, I go, “oh, I painted that tree.” My husband and I met online my first year of grad school on a little app called Mutual. He was doing a PhD at BYU, and I was obviously in Virginia. We flew back and forth to visit each other for about six months before we got married, and he moved to Virginia with me. He took a sabbatical from his program because he could do that, and I couldn’t because I was on scholarship. My last semester of grad school was spring 2020, and when I finished school, we moved to Utah. I never would have picked to move to Utah. I served my mission here, I thought, been there, done that. I’m not the biggest fan of the weather, not the biggest fan of the culture. But it’s where I’ve needed to be to accomplish what I have. I’m really grateful that I’m here now, even though it was not how I envisioned my life ten years ago. Are you involved with the Instagram account called Meetinghouse Mosaic, working for diversity in Latter-day Saint art? Tangentially so, I function as an unofficial advisor consultant for them. I’m not officially part of the organization, but I do work very closely with them. I’m very involved with helping organize their February 2024 show of diverse images of Christ. Am I Not Hannah by Esther Hi’ilani Candari Visualization is a huge part of conceptualization of anything religious, especially a deity. Our doctrine as Latter-day Saints is that we are all alike unto God, all races are created equal, gender is created equal. But if we’re not depicting that, it’s hard for people to fully internalize. That doctrine has not been taught accurately through portions of LDS history, so we have a lot of work to undo the harm. In the past, it was taught that black skin was lesser and white skin was more divine. Many well-meaning people in the church don’t even realize that was taught. They’re younger, or they were never exposed to it, or they were lucky enough to not be in congregations that focused on that false doctrine, so they don’t recognize how it subconsciously permeates our culture and how many people of color have internalized some of those ideas regarding their own divine nature, their own worth, their perception of even just their beauty. I think everyone deserves to see beauty in themselves. There’s great power in beauty. Aesthetics are a huge part of our spirituality. That’s something I see a lot as an artist. While we live in a church that preaches the fleeting nature of mortality, we also live in a church that invests millions of dollars into making temples absolutely beautiful places. Clearly, there is some degree of understanding of the connection between aesthetics and spirituality. Understanding how that functions for people on an individual level is really important, but I think it has been underserved in our public, communal consciousness. What did you study during graduate school? We’ve talked about the importance of race in art representation, but I feel equally strongly about gender representation in religious work. I focused on integrating academic theological, sociological, and historic research into paintings. I want to help people reframe how they literally visualize the role of women in our religious spaces and narratives. We often put them in boxes with how we talk about and paint them in our culture, because humans are creatures of habit. When we see something painted one way, or hear a story told one way, we assume that’s the only way to paint or tell that story. In our church, we aren’t always the most academic with our approach to especially biblical studies for various reasons, so people aren’t given a lot of opportunity to question preconceived narratives. It’s been a little bit heartbreaking sometimes, but also exciting to be speaking at a fireside and take a complicated story like Bathsheba, or an under-told story like Huldah or Deborah, and pull it into the light and pick it apart in a way that helps women to see the empowering narratives within the stories, and wrestle with the complexities in a way that is not denigrating to women and ultimately points to Christ. I’ve found so many women hungry for this, even women who appear to be completely satisfied with their understanding of scripture or their participation in church. There’s often an unrecognized or unspoken hunger to better connect with femininity in the narratives, and in the theology we’re teaching and practicing. How do you paint a story to shake things up and introduce a new perspective? My MFA thesis focused on stories of infertility in Judeo-Christian religions and how those stories are told both narratively and visually. My secondary research was current data on the experiences of infertile women in modern religious communities—how many women experience infertility and compounding factors for mental health in those circumstances. I also looked at the theological evolution of how infertility has been taught, especially in Christian circles, the explanations surrounding both fertility and infertility in those traditions, and how they affect modern-day narratives even in Latter-day Saint culture. As Grains of Sand Sarah and Hagar by Esther Hi’ilani Candari I think a lot of people don’t realize how much of our theology we inherited and take for granted. It continues to be refined, and purified, and restored, but there’s still a lot that we got as a hand-me-down from the Protestant Reformation, such as the idea that women who have lots of children are blessed. In my research, I came across a quote from Martin Luther. Most people have an idealized view of Martin Luther, and I believe he was a person who did amazing things for the history of Christianity. But like anyone, he had some views that we definitely don’t agree with in our modern church. One of his theological views was that women are the source of original sin and are therefore responsible to atone for that original sin through childbirth. If a woman dies giving birth, it is an atonement for her being a woman and the source of original sin. When I share that in firesides, it’s a shocker line, but it’s a good wake-up call for people to realize that one of the main fathers of modern Christianity was actively teaching things like that. And even though we don’t teach that directly, those ideas and ideals still permeate our culture. I also did some primary research with a survey of Judeo-Christian women who experienced infertility, asking about their experience in their religious community and how they did or didn’t connect with art. I specifically asked about the narratives—stories told in their Sunday schools and women’s groups, and if art either supports their experience positively or adds to the pain of being infertile in pro-natalist communities. A strong majority felt they had never seen art they could connect with. That correlated with another set of primary data that I collected—databases of some major art museums and online art databases, such as Deseret Book, that categorize paintings of women in the Old Testament who experienced infertility: Hannah, Sarah, and Rachel, and Elizabeth in the New Testament for good measure. I looked at what part of their lives the paintings were about: having a child, not about experiencing infertility. That reflected the data from the women that I interviewed—they felt that the full focus was on the solution to infertility of having a child. The missing piece is understanding and finding meaning in the experience of infertility and finding value in themselves in spite of it, or even through it. So, I painted a series of three paintings depicting that time of Sarah, Rachel, and Hannah’s lives—when they were experiencing infertility. I explored the complexity and pain of their lives in a way that, based on the data I collected, was almost never touched on both in spoken narratives and in the painted narratives and communities surrounding these stories. What was it like for Sarah to be promised by God that she would have a child, and then spend years watching Hagar birth and raise that promised child? What was like for Rachel and Leah and the constant “the grass is greener on the other side” dynamic they had? For Hannah, I painted the scene at the temple feast when it came into focus that she was one of two wives, and she was childless. Her husband went up to her and said, “Well, I love you, and aren’t I as good as ten sons?” … the typical loving husband who completely misses the point and doesn’t fully conceptualize the female experience in this pro-natalist culture. We all do that to some extent, fertile women to infertile women, in many ways. I was trying to bring to light these aspects of the stories that are prevalent in the scriptures but are uncomfortable. We don’t talk about them. We don’t paint about them. I’ve talked to women who see these paintings and read my research, and their response is, “I’ve experienced this thing as a woman with infertility, but I’ve never felt like there was a sacred space for me to talk about or to experience these things within my religion.” What are you doing now in Utah? Of the Barren and Fruitful Rachael and Leah by Esther Hi’ilani Candari My technical title is Director of Programming at Writ & Vision, an art gallery and bookshop in Provo. We’re a small company, there are three of us who run it, and we’re all part-time. We have areas that we focus on and overlap as needed, as people are traveling or sick or whatever. I’m mostly focused on developing community relationships, finding opportunities to get the gallery out to conferences, or partner with other organizations. We’ve discovered that we appeal to a niche market, and it’s not efficient to market through traditional means. The best way to connect with our potential audience is to partner with other organizations that are trying to reach the same audience, so we cross-pollinate each other. We’ve done things with the Arch-hive, Dialogue, and BCC Press. Right now, we’re doing a ton of stuff with Faith Matters. I also on the board for Faith Matters, so it’s a nice crossover to provide access to the art world for Faith Matters, and a lot of opportunity for the gallery through them. We function kind of like a nonprofit, and in some ways, that’s why we’ve been able to stay afloat in a market that is not easy. We care about the community, and the community cares back. It’s hard to describe my job because I’ve kind of created my own. A friend said he describes himself as an “orchestrator” and that’s how I feel too. I’m connecting people with people, and connecting opportunities with people, and connecting resources with people, trying to get all the right things in the same space at the same time to have the best outcomes. Sometimes that’s glamorous, and sometimes it’s not, but it’s really fulfilling. I recognize that without those connecting links, the opportunities would never materialize for authors and artists who wouldn’t otherwise have access to platforms. It’s fulfilling to see a young artist, or female artists, or artists of color sell a piece in the gallery for the first time, knowing that they wouldn’t have been able to get into one of the other galleries. Galleries are weird—you have to have experience to get experience. We’re the gallery that tries to give people experience, and we have no hard feelings if they move on to a bigger, more prestigious gallery. We’ve done our job because we know they couldn’t have gotten there without us. What I’m hearing through our conversation is that you’re taking all of these different pieces and connecting them together. How do you then connect all of these pieces into your faith and into your relationship with God? Painting by Esther Hi’ilani Candari The reason I do these things is because of my faith. It’s not about connecting secular practices back to my faith. My faith informs the more secular aspects of my life—the reason I care so much about social justice, about representation in the arts is because I believe to the very roots of my soul that every human is valuable, that every culture is valuable, and everybody benefits from understanding that they are a child of God. They are made in the image of God. They have inherent value, inherent beauty because of that. If I see any lack in that understanding, I feel like it’s my responsibility as a person of faith to help spread that truth. My research and art are missionary work—I am striving to teach the pure doctrine of the eternal plan and help God’s children through what I’m doing. Some things I do might seem like they don’t connect. But at the end of the day, everything always connects back, even when I’m stripping floors and repainting them at the gallery, so we have more and better space to showcase art. The art helps people to connect with eternal truths. Even when we’re showing art that seems secular, the pure experience of experiencing beauty and the creation of another soul, there is a glimpse of God in that. I think there is great significance that one of the first terms used for God is Creator. God is first and foremost a creator. When humans exercise their creative capacities, it is a shadow of the Divine. When we honor that and share with each other, we are honoring and recognizing the divine in each other. At A Glance Name: Esther Hi’ilani Candari Age: 29 Location: American Fork, Utah Marital History: Married Children: 2 dogs Occupation: Artist and educator Convert to the Church: No Schools Attended: BYUH, NYAA, New York Academy Languages Spoken At Home: English Favorite Hymn: Be thou my vision Website or Social Media You Would Like Featured: https://www.instagram.com/hiilanifinearts/?hl=en Interview Produced by Trina Caudle

Marci McPhee retired to care for her mother, who passed away sooner than expected. She consulted with the Lord about what to do next and has felt called to a new location every couple of years to provide community service and to learn. Haz clic aquí para leer la entrevista original en español. What’s the short bio version of who you are? I was born in Germany on a US military base while my dad was in the Army. First grade in Panama, then San Antonio, Texas from second grade on. Because of that experience living abroad, my parents were adventurous travelers and we kids were the same. Wanderlust is in my blood. Marci McPhee I joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when I was 16. I found myself at BYU and graduated in two and a half years. I passed my last final two days before my oldest son was born, and then was a full-time mom in the Boston area with four kids. I later got a part-time secretary job at Brandeis University and retired from there 29 years later as the Director of Campus Programs for the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life. It’s quite a mouthful with an impossible acronym to boot. Within that time, I took a year of leave to volunteer in 2009-10 for World Teach, teaching English to high school students in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. I retired from Brandeis in 2018 because my 93-year-old mom needed me. She moved in with my brother and sister-in-law in San Antonio, and I also moved in to take care of her. She planned to last seven years and make it to 100, but she lasted seven months and had her third and final stroke. I thought, Nice bait and switch, Mom. What am I doing in Texas living with my brother and sister-in-law? I lived there for four and a half years until I felt called to Louisiana, where I am now. How did you choose the Marshall Islands to volunteer overseas? I realized that when I travel, I’m skimming the surface of the culture and the people. My motto, as I’ve contemplated travel, is: go far, stay long, look deep. The idea of World Teach in the Marshalls was really appealing to me because I felt that I could learn more and contribute better if I went for a longer period of time. The seed of the idea to go to the Marshall Islands was planted in the back of my mind a full two decades earlier. When the kids were little, my first husband was invited to apply for a job in the Marshall Islands as a civilian contractor at the US military base on Kwajalein. He decided not to apply. It was way outside his comfort zone, but not mine. Roi Namur Beach At Brandeis, decades later, I was running a program that supported undergraduate students in summer internships worldwide. I went to a conference and learned about World Teach. The program has since folded, but it was like an international Teach for America. They had locations in various countries, and one was the Marshall Islands. It caught my eye and I felt like the Spirit said, “This one’s for you.” This was similar to the program I ran at Brandeis, so I read the preparation materials I had written, this time for myself. It was like I had done all this research and written a manual for my future self, and my students field-tested my preparation materials. I did what I taught my students to do. What were some of your teaching experiences there? I wanted to learn and also to give. I put those in equal proportions because it wasn’t all about me learning from the people, but neither was it about me giving to the people exclusively because that’s the whole “white savior” nonsense. They have as much to teach me as I have to teach them. I taught five sections of 10th and 11th grade students. I have a bachelor’s degree in social work with a minor in child development, and I have church teaching experience, but I didn’t have any professional teaching experience. The first thing I learned was that teaching is hard work. We had a month of orientation about making lesson plans, creating exams, classroom management, and teaching ideas, as well as Marshallese language and culture. My assignment was in a regular public school, which included students with special needs and Individual Education Plans. Some students were nearly fluent in English; other students probably didn’t understand a word I said all year. It was an incredible learning curve for me. One of my favorite things as a classroom English teacher was to give them a journal writing assignment every day. It was language practice for them, but it was also for me to learn. I assigned questions like, “What is this Marshallese holiday? What does it mean to you?” “Tell me about the relationship between men and women in Marshallese society—I see it is a patriarchy but matrilineal; how does that work?” Because they were older teens, they could explain things to me. Marci McPhee Teaching in the Classroom I assigned them to write about the Bikini Atoll nuclear testing. It’s a very grim chapter in US-Marshallese relations. After World War II, the US wanted to learn more about the nuclear weapons they had just unleashed, and they chose the Marshall Islands to do their testing (as well as some tests in Nevada). Bikini Atoll was the westernmost island chain in the Marshalls, the farthest away from trade routes. So the US evacuated the island residents, and pretty much obliterated their homeland. Between 1946 and 1958, 67 nuclear bomb tests were conducted on Bikini—the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs detonated every day for 12 years. The nuclear waste is still dissipating, and entire islands and large sections of coral reefs are just gone. I wanted to understand what my students knew and how they felt about it. Their responses included things like: “It was the Americans attacking the Marshallese, trying to destroy us.” Others said that the Americans did nuclear testing but told them not to worry because they had “the cure things.” It was very eye-opening to hear how this sounded from their point of view. I was also curious to know—what did they understand about the threat of climate change? Some of these low-lying islands are basically glorified sandbars. The entire country’s land mass is 70 square miles total, about the size of Washington DC, broken up into some 1200 individual islands, some of which are microscopic and uninhabited, scattered over a third of a million miles of ocean. They don’t call it Micronesia for nothing. The Marshallese population was about 54,000 at that time (even fewer now)—they could all fit in Foxboro Stadium for a Patriots game with space left over. With global warming and rising oceans, the islands could one day be gone. I read a New York Times headline: “If a country goes underwater, is it still a country?” The article continued: do they still have a seat at the United Nations? Do they still have fishing rights? One of the main sources of income for the Marshall Islands is selling fishing rights and ship titles to international ships. But even before islands go underwater, the salty seawater infiltrates the land and makes it uninhabitable. Crops don’t grow, the breadfruit and the trees die. One of my students had a pretty good grasp of the situation, but the solution she wrote in her journal was, “So let’s recycle!” I thought, Oh, honey, even if you recycled everything your little fingers ever touched … But she meant it. That was her solution to global warming. Oh my goodness, I thought she was being sarcastic. “We’re gonna solve all the world’s problems if we recycle three more milk jugs.” She was dead serious. The biggest thing that I learned was astonishing generosity. The American mindset is individualistic, but the Marshall Islands are very communal. Once I walked into a store, and I liked the music that was playing so I asked where I could get a copy of the music. They went to the CD player and popped it out, and said, “Here, it’s yours.” I said, “Thank you, what do I owe you?” “Nothing.” I thought they’re a store; their business is selling things. But they wouldn’t take money for the CD. I lived in Kwajalein Atoll on the high school campus in faculty housing on Gugeegue, several islands down the causeway from the main island Ebeye. My students took the school bus every day from Ebeye to Gugeegue. Every Sunday, I went from Gugeegue to Ebeye to go to church. It’s about a 20 minute ride on the crushed coral causeway that puts car tires at risk, or an hour walk. I was going to walk. The first time I went to church, they were surprised to see me but probably thought I would figure out that the US military base had an LDS branch, and I’d go there with the other white people. The second Sunday, they were really shocked to see me—like hasn’t she figured out there’s another ward? The third Sunday, I was getting ready for church and heard a knock on my door. One of my students, who was LDS, was standing there and he said, “We’re your ride.” My ride? I got in the car but wondered if it was a taxi, or his uncle, or what. If it was a taxi, well, my WorldTeach stipend wouldn’t stretch to cover a taxi every week. When we got to church, the driver just waved me away and the student said, “No, it’s okay.” I went into the church wondering, what just happened? I asked the Branch President and he said the same thing: “Welcome to our islands.” It turned out that they had taken up a collection for me. Here are these Marshallese Saints, some living in homes with dirt floors, taking up a collection for the white English teacher to take a taxi to church. I wanted to be a gracious recipient, but I didn’t come to drain their wallets. So I arranged to get a ride with the Catholics because their church started at the same time as ours but lasted one hour instead of three. Then I lied about having a ride home and walked the hour back to my apartment. That began my lifetime habit of walking an hour a day. It was just me and the lagoon and the seagulls and the hymns on my iPod, and it was a beautiful thing. That’s the level of generosity—they took up a collection to pay for a taxi for me. I love how you’re taking the initiative to move somewhere to serve and learn. You’re not following a prescribed program or waiting for someone to tell you what to do—you’re leaning into personal revelation and being creative. When you were in San Antonio, were you looking for service opportunities there? How did you decide in Texas to go to Louisiana? Let’s back up to Boston. At the change in the missionary age in 2012, the Mission President came to the Boston stake leaders and said, “What am I going to do with an influx of missionaries? Knocking on doors does not work in Boston.” The stake Relief Society President said, “Give them to me; I will put them to work doing service in the community.” A new position was created—the Relief Society Humanitarian Service Coordinator, and I was called to that position. I worked with stake leaders to put those missionaries to work in the community. When I moved to San Antonio, I was called as the Just Serve Specialist. In both cities and callings, I worked with community organizations to find service opportunities for our missionaries and members, and to connect people to them. In San Antonio, I volunteered with the Center for Refugee Services. The refugees we served, largely from Afghanistan and Iraq, had supported our military overseas. They were the translators and heavy machine repairmen and such, who helped our servicemen and women. When they signed on to do those jobs, we promised that we would take care of them and get them out of the country when we left. So it’s the US making good on promises made to these people who put their lives at risk for our military. Four Boys in Roi Namur It was heartbreaking to see the resistance to these refugees, because of the Mexico-Texas border craziness. That’s its own humanitarian crisis, but that isn’t even what we’re talking about here. Supporting the Afghan families was really delicious work. They came to the Center for Refugee Services for support in finding a job, applying for a green card, getting sanitary supplies for the women and girls and diapers for the babies. I loved it all, but my favorite part was when a family would come in with mail they didn’t understand—it sounded so official and threatening but it was junk mail. They were taking English classes but they didn’t know enough yet, so they brought it to the Center and we’d tell them to throw it away, it means nothing. Or they had letters from their landlords, and they didn’t know how to read it and respond. Some were being taken advantage of in their apartment complex situations, and we helped them address that with the authorities. Another great initiative in San Antonio was with folks who had been vetted at the border. They were legal asylum seekers from Mexico and other Central American countries, allowed into the US by the proper authorities with the proper documentation, coming through San Antonio on their way to their sponsor families throughout the US. I helped to staff a migrant facility—we gave them food and diapers, and helped them find their way to the next place, navigating the bus station or airport. Their bus or flight was often the next day, so a local church opened their doors for overnight guests. We had cots and sleeping bags in classrooms, and their function hall sometimes had hundreds of migrants overnight until they could catch their bus or plane the next day. That was holy work—helping those folks find their way and take care of their families, giving them food, and being a welcoming face. That’s fantastic. What came next? So there I was in San Antonio. Mom had passed away. When she died, people asked if I’d go back to Boston. To what? I sold my car. I sold my condo. I quit my job. I gave away everything I owned. Everything was in a container on its way to a Syrian refugee camp. All I had was my books and papers and clothes. If I went back to Boston, I’d have to start all over. I thought, how do I want to spend the rest of my life? I was in my 60s. Both my mother and my grandmother died at age 94 so I figured I had a long way to go, another lifetime. I took some time after my mom died just to clear my head. Then I said, I think I’m ready for another international volunteer experience. That year in the Marshall Islands was so difficult and simultaneously so rewarding and so mind-expanding. I was ready to do that again but instead of doing it through a program, I felt comfortable doing it myself and working with individuals that I know. I feel drawn to Africa, so I worked with a Ghanaian former grad student in my office at Brandeis who set things up for me to stay in his family compound and volunteer at his high school. I was set to go in August 2020—I had my shots, I had my plane ticket. And then COVID. Ghana was closed by land, sea, and air. Nobody was getting in and very few people were getting out. Marci McPhee That’s when my new career in writing and editing started to take off, much to my astonishment. Rewinding back to Boston again, when I got back from the Marshall Islands, I was called as Stake Primary President. My counselors and I started a blog—this was in 2010, when blogs were really big. We did it for two reasons: one, to provide on-demand training for ward Primary presidencies who were in different stages. Two, because one of my counselors is a firm believer in sign language for kids’ songs, as a way to help them learn the music and keep those little fingers busy. So she posted videos of song sign language. I said to my counselors, “I think we’re writing a book, chapter by chapter.” After a few years, we looked at what we had, and recruited some folks to fill the holes. I sent it to multiple publishers and landed on Walnut Springs Press. I was floored that, wow, this is really happening. That led to a book about Girls’ Camp, and I contributed essays to several collection books by Linda Hoffman Kimball. Next, Evan Smith in Boston contacted me in 2020 to help with a book about his experience with LGBTQ issues within the Church. We had a lot of time on our hands because of the quarantine, and we knocked it out in a few months. Through him, I met other people, and my client list snowballed from there. It’s a legitimate income that helps support my very minimalist lifestyle and outrageous travel. But Ghana was always in the back of my mind. The fall of 2021 was no better for going to Ghana. In the fall of 2022, I still was uneasy about it when a friend said, “What are you waiting for? You could do the same thing in the US.” I realized I could indeed do the same thing in the US. Just go someplace and try to do some good. I pulled out my mental map—“Okay, God, where are we going?” I had two criteria: near a temple, and someplace warm. I did 43 New England winters and I was done shoveling snow and trying not to slip on ice. At about that time, folks in my San Antonio stake were asked to help clean up New Orleans after Hurricane Ida. They left one Thursday and drove all night, mucked out hurricane-damaged homes on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, drove back on Sunday night, and were back to work on Monday. If those guys could go to Louisiana for a weekend, I could go for a year. There’s a temple in Baton Rouge, and I live walking distance from it. My plan was to serve in the temple one day a week, volunteer in the community one day a week, and explore Baton Rouge and New Orleans one day a week. That leaves three days for my writing and editing work, which I can do from anywhere. I asked former co-workers at Brandeis if they knew anyone in Baton Rouge, and one person said, “Yeah, my identical twin sister.” She and I are volunteering at a community gathering place, connecting the people in the neighborhood to different resources. One year has turned into two years here because it takes a while to figure out the right players – how to move things along, figure out the culture and what the community needs, and how to make it work. It’s the same idea around church service—going where I feel led. I’ve been studying Spanish for a long time and I’m close to getting sorta good at it, at last. A Spanish-speaking branch shares a parking lot with the temple, so that’s where I attend church. I have no calling and no ministering route. I think they think of me as a missionary, and I’m in and out of town a lot, so they let me do my thing. I have three families that I check on, and I consider it my unofficial called-of-God ministering assignment. They fell into my lap and God said, “Take care of these people.” It’s a beautiful thing. I’m exploring the idea of another volunteer year in Africa in 2024-25, and Panama is in my future, also. People say, “Why don’t you put in your mission papers like everybody else?” It’s self-funded either way so I may as well go where I feel God is calling me. And I’ve spent too many years in bad marriages to want to go on a blind date with a female companion for a year. I like my space. Plus, I’m still working. I wouldn’t be able to be a missionary only a couple of days a week and keep working as an editor. How many times has President Nelson said that we need to gain personal revelation? We don’t need to surrender to the Church all the time by letting them pick our mission. We can receive personal revelation and forge our own path. If somebody feels their path is to go where the Church wants them to operate, that’s great. But that does not have to be the case all the time. I feel so good about just going where God calls me. What do you hope other people get from your stories? I saw a painting of a monk standing on a mountaintop that was big enough for his feet and no bigger, and he’s looking up toward heaven. I used to think that was the goal of life—to arrive at the mountaintop, just you and God. That isn’t it. The goal is to get down in there with the rest of your brothers and sisters. Just as Jesus told Peter: once we are converted, strengthen our brethren (and sistren). I have developed a relationship with my Heavenly Parents, and I completely trust Them to cover my mistakes through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, and to guide me and heal me. Now my job is to look outward and see who needs my help and God’s help. I aspire to a life of carrying to others the healing that has so generously blessed my life, and going where God sends me. I feel so blessed to have learned from and to contribute in some small measure to the beautiful open-hearted Saints in the Marshall Islands, and in Boston, Texas, and Louisiana. And in Africa next year if that’s where the Lord takes me. He’s changed His mind before. I have my plan and He’s taking me down a road. Sometimes it’s, “That’s as far as you need and now we’re gonna go this other way.” It is such a blessing to walk with God, to wake up in the morning and feel like I’m being sent on errands. I love being God’s errand woman. It’s a blessing to learn and grow and help other people learn and grow and heal. I am in a place of unmistakable privilege to have the flexibility and means to do these things, after two financially disastrous divorces. I liquidated everything and live minimally, and have a completely unexpected income that’s portable. My plan is to continue to go wherever God calls me and do whatever I’m called to do until my last breath. At A Glance Name: Marci McPhee Age: 70 Location: Currently Baton Rouge, Louisiana Marital History: Twice divorced from temple marriages (with a cancellation of sealing between) Children: 6 Occupation: Currently writer and editor to Steve Young, David and Richard Ostler, and Fatimah Salleh, among others Convert to the Church: Yes, age 16 (1970) Schools Attended: BS in social work from BYU Languages Spoken At Home: English and sorta Spanish Favorite Hymn: Varies with my need/mood – at this very moment in time, “For All the Saints,” because of this line: “And hearts are brave again, and arms are strong.” Website or Social Media You Would Like Featured: http://marcimcpheewriter.com Interview Produced by Trina Caudle

Alice (Allie) Bradford Brown grew up in Provo, Utah as the daughter of a BYU professor and a homemaker, and the granddaughter of a Latter-day Saint feminist icon. But stereotypes have not been her path as she forges her own way through life. Allie is also the Director of Fundraising for the LDS Women Project. What’s the 30,000-foot level summary of who you are? Allie Bradford Brown I grew up mostly in Provo, Utah, as the child of a BYU professor and a stay-at-home mom, in the heart of Mormondom. That obviously shaped me, but I have a lot of friends who grew up the exact same way and turned out differently. When you grow up surrounded by other Latter-day Saints, you kind of know what your peers are “supposed” to believe and do, and there’s social pressure to behave in certain ways. Assuming everyone believes the same way just because they’re all members of the Church can lead to unhealthy judgment and hypocrisy, and I was certainly guilty of that. I eventually learned it’s not actually true that all LDS people believe the same way—there are a lot of varied beliefs and perspectives even within Provo, Utah. My parents are both conservative members—not politically, but in terms of obedience and respect for authority. I inherited that, too. It was always easy for me to obey and follow the standards and more importantly, to have faith in Christ and believe in the gospel. Those things came naturally to me and were not a struggle. I also fit in socially and had lots of friends in my ward, so of course that made everything about Church easier. I went to BYU and became even more immersed in Latter-day Saint culture. I loved it. I really thrived there. It was a great academic fit, and I felt that I really belonged. I studied sociology. BYU’s sociology department is probably one of the more conservative sociology programs in the US, but also one of the most liberal majors at BYU. So I got a lot of world-opening, eye-opening education. I learned about racism, that it still exists—I don’t remember anyone talking about that until then. I learned to grapple with issues of gender and authority. I took Sociology of Gender, and part of our study included the Family Proclamation, the history of the Relief Society, and the authority that women used to have in the Church that has been rescinded, like laying on of hands for healing blessings. We discussed sexuality and where that fits in both the gospel and in a fair and equal society. Some people might find it ironic that BYU was my introduction to a lot of those topics, but they were discussed in a balanced and fair way that was not negative toward the Church, but open to ways that things could be better. It made me not afraid of topics like that. Allie Bradford Brown I was 19 when they lowered the mission age from 21 to 19 for women. I’d always wanted to go, so I finished my sophomore year and left for my mission in May 2013 to Cape Verde. I had never heard of that country. My mission call was a printed letter with a little booklet with information and the mission map. The map was mostly gray with some white spots—mostly water and an archipelago of ten islands, nine of which are inhabited. So my mission map was mostly ocean! No one in my family could have pointed to it on a globe. People call it the Hawaii of Africa—it’s a few hundred miles off the west coast of Senegal in the Atlantic Ocean, with its own time zone. They only started sending Sisters there a handful of years before I arrived. When I read in the scriptures that the Lord’s love extends even to the “isles of the sea,” it means something different and more sacred to me now. Cape Verde is so remote. It’s the tiniest, most inconsequential place on the earth, and I got to go there as a missionary. I love what that taught me about the love of our Heavenly Parents—They are going to bother with even that little island nation of half a million people. They are worth investing in with missionary work, building chapels, and they even dedicated a temple there in 2022. That was a miracle. I returned from my mission in November 2014 and got engaged to Zach six weeks later, which I never thought I would do! We started dating at the end of our senior year of high school and kept in touch during college when he went to Duke University, and during our missions. By the time I came back, we said, “What’s stopping us?” So we got engaged that winter and were married in May 2015. I graduated from BYU that August, and moved to Durham, North Carolina, a few days later, where Zach was finishing his undergraduate degree at Duke. We loved our years in North Carolina and we would have been so happy to just stay there. Zach finished college at Duke, and medical school at the University of North Carolina (UNC). I did a master’s degree in Public Administration at UNC and our first baby was born in 2018, then our second in 2021. We moved to Birmingham, Alabama in 2022 for Zach to do his pediatrics residency at the University of Alabama-Birmingham (UAB) Children’s Hospital, and here we are. Baby boy number three will be born any day now (August 2024).I never, never would have seen myself living in Alabama, but as soon as we found out that Zach matched at the UAB for residency, people started coming out of the woodwork to tell us how much they love Birmingham. It has lived up to the hype! It’s a very family-friendly place. People are super nice here. We don’t know what’s next for us, but we feel very blessed to be here for this season. Your grandmother was one of the Latter-day Saint feminist icons of the 1970s and 80s, Mary Lythgoe Bradford. So your father grew up with a working mom, but you also indicated that he’s respectful of ecclesiastical authority, which specifically discouraged working mothers in your grandmother’s lifetime. How did this mix of perspectives affect you? Allie Bradford Brown with Her Husband and grandmother, Mary Lythgoe Bradford My grandfather passed away before I was born, but he was a bishop for many years and very much by-the-handbook. I think my dad took after his dad in that way. As the story goes, when my grandma was the editor of Dialogue, her workspace was in the basement of their house and my grandpa was doing bishopric work from the upstairs of their house. They joked that it was the Celestial Kingdom and the Terrestrial Kingdom. He was a Republican and she was a Democrat, too. They just got along and made it work because they loved each other. So my dad did grow up with a working mom and I never heard that he had issues with that. I don’t think anyone in our family did. I think it taught him the importance of education. She had a master’s degree when many women didn’t. My dad got a PhD, his sister had a Master’s, his brother has a law degree. Education, books, and critical thinking were very important in their family and that’s what really stuck with my dad that he passed on to us. I was a little surprised when I was about to get engaged—I thought my dad would be so pleased that I was a returned missionary about to get married in the temple, checking all the boxes, and I was only 21. We had a frank conversation—he was worried that I was sacrificing my education to get married. (I did drop my minor and hurried to finish the classes I needed to graduate from BYU so I could move to North Carolina with Zach.) I did not expect that from my dad, but he wanted to make sure I wasn’t rushing into marriage when I could be investing more in my education. His concern seemed to come from the perspective that as soon as I got married, my education would be done. Getting married was the right thing to do and the time was right, and I did get a master’s degree a couple years later. My mom was a stay-at-home mom. As far as I could tell, she loved it and thrived there, and I always thought that’s what I would do, too. But when I had my first baby and the time came to make those decisions for my own life, being a stay-at-home mom was incredibly difficult for me, and I decided to keep working part-time. So I was really lucky to be raised with both examples and taught that either way is okay. My grandmother was mostly retired in my lifetime, but she always kept her feminist, independent identity and wore it proudly. She continued writing books all her life and published her first novel the year she turned 90. It really blessed me to know the circles she ran in. A lot of her best friends were the “alternative” or “critical thinking” Sunstone-Dialogue-Exponent II voices of Mormonism. She wrote the biography of Lowell Bennion so he was a household name. I met Eugene England a couple of times as a child at family gatherings, and I knew he was like an uncle to my dad. It was a huge honor to connect with Carol Lynn Pearson later in life because of her friendship with my grandmother. Nama, as we called her, was always visiting friends and attending symposiums and things when she came to stay with us in Utah. I think I would have otherwise been a lot more judgmental and cautious about groups that think critically and make Mormonism their own. It became important to me as I got older and started having questions and doubts that I wanted to resolve. I knew I could work through questions, even publicly, stand up for what’s in my conscience, and still be a faithful member of the Church and a good person. This led me to join the LDS Women Project Editorial Board, and work for a couple of years with my mother-in-law and sister-in-law on an Instagram account @Brave.Like.Eve that was both faith-promoting and an outlet for thinking deeply about gospel topics. What did you do to further develop your education and volunteer work after BYU? When I first moved to Durham, I had a bachelor’s degree in sociology that I do not regret… but it was worthless. I was in a new state with no connections and the kind of degree that takes you everywhere and nowhere, so I started doing temp work and volunteering at a GED prep program (high school equivalency for teenagers and adults who did not finish high school). I learned that they needed someone to fill their AmeriCorps position, which is a year of service dedicated to a nonprofit organization. I did AmeriCorps for two years and in my second year, I started to get excited about nonprofit management—the effectiveness of nonprofit organizations more than the direct service. Allie Bradford Brown with Her Family I found the Masters of Public Administration at UNC—they have an online format with the same curriculum and teachers as the in-person classes on campus, and I could do it in the evenings from home. That worked out really well because it was Zach’s last year at Duke, and we didn’t know where we were going for medical school. We also wanted to start our family. I was pregnant with our first son during my first year of graduate school. I remember throwing up while taking an exam for Law For Nonprofits. Awful. In my last semester, I took a grant writing class and the heavens opened—this was it. I was pregnant with our second child and knew working full-time in nonprofits would not make sense because of daycare costs. It sounded more stressful than it would be worth, and I wanted part-time flexible work to also be with our kids a lot. Grant writing checked that box because I could do it on a freelance basis and stay in control of my schedule and workload. It was a great mental outlet for me and helped our family financially—a win-win! I wanted to work, I wanted to do something with my brain, I needed a break from my children sometimes. It has been a really good balance. In late 2021, I took a part-time staff position at a really great organization called Student U that works with students in Durham Public Schools from sixth grade through college graduation. It gave me more consistent work than freelancing, and I was able to do it all from home. It uses my skills, it gives me something to feel accomplished and fulfilled by outside of motherhood. When we moved to Birmingham, they let me be fully remote so I took the job with me and I still love doing it. I wouldn’t trade it, I’m happy with it. But there is a catch—I’m not a stay-at-home mom, I’m also not a working mom. So it’s hard to fit in sometimes. Because I do have to work, I’m somewhat outside the mom group at church that gets together often, but we show up sometimes and they are some incredible moms that I love spending time with. But my life is not totally relatable to full-time moms, and not totally relatable to moms who work full-time. I’m navigating it. But I need the balance of both worlds. What does it mean to you to be a Latter-day Saint woman? I think being a Latter-day Saint woman means living the gospel in whatever way your gifts and talents push you. As a child, I might have described one certain way to live the gospel, a lot of black and white, yes or no. I still believe there are things that are firm and important, and there are commandments that loving Heavenly Parents have given us because They know it will make our mortal life happier and more enriching. Within that, there’s a lot of wiggle room to choose different paths. It’s an amazing thing. Being a stay-at-home mom is a beautiful way to nurture God’s children. Working or volunteering in the outside world is also a beautiful way to nurture God’s children, because the world has problems and issues that need to be solved, and I believe that we need women’s full participation in a variety of fields to get there. Latter-day Saint women can serve as a light and an example in the workplace, in school, and volunteering in ways that we cannot access if we’re home all day. When we think about fulfilling the measure of our creation, we’re each created differently and uniquely, and part of our job on Earth is to explore how we fulfill that. Being a Latter-day Saint woman can look as many different ways as there are women. As long as we are maintaining a covenant relationship with Jesus Christ, we can’t go wrong. What are you doing to build your relationship with our Heavenly Parents? Allie Bradford Brown with Two of Her Children It depends on the day and the month and the year. I’ve been trying to go to the temple every time we have ward temple night once a month, because they offer babysitting. I went to the temple probably ten times last year, which is pretty good for a mom with toddlers. The temple has been complicated and hard for me in some ways, but every time I go and sit through it, as I’m leaving, I feel like it was right. The Spirit was there. So I try to go back regularly to be reminded of that. The other thing I’m doing is listening. I have a regular feed of podcasts and conference talks that bring me closer to Christ and our Heavenly Parents. I have that in the background as I’m doing dishes or folding laundry. Sometimes that’s the best I can do for scripture study, but it makes me feel connected back to Them. I’ve noticed a difference when I let a long time pass and I don’t have that connection—that’s when my questions and concerns and doubts start to feel stronger, especially if I spend too much time on social media. But if I keep the uplifting, faith-affirming content in my brain along with all the rest of it, I really do feel that the gospel is true and living it is worthwhile. I particularly love Mandy Green’s Reflecting Light and the Faith Matters podcasts. They cover such diverse topics that help me learn new lenses to see the gospel through. Sometimes they answer questions I didn’t even have—it’s always interesting and inspiring to hear someone else thinking through things and sharing faith-affirming experiences or research. Any final thoughts? About the LDS Women Project—I read Neylan McBaine’s book, Women at Church, and I was so impressed by it. I’m so grateful that someone had written it and thought about women’s issues in that way. I saw in the book that she had founded this project, and that’s how I learned about it. I was excited to get involved, too, because I think it’s so important to have a faith-affirming place where women can gather and learn from each other and our different experiences. It can be hard to be a woman in the Church if you don’t know that other people are also grappling with women’s issues. It’s easy to say, “This isn’t for me, this isn’t working.” But I love the way the LDS Women Project lets women voice their own version of being an LDS woman and I hope that the effect is that all LDS women feel seen and know that part of the genius design of the gospel is that there’s always a sisterhood we can rely on. At A Glance Name: Allie Bradford Brown Age: 31 Location: Birmingham, Alabama Marital History: Married since 2015 Children: Three boys ages 5, and 3, and due in August 2024 Occupation: Part-time grant writer & full-time mom Convert to the Church: No Schools Attended: B.S. in Sociology (Brigham Young University), Master’s in Public Administration (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) Languages Spoken At Home: English Favorite Hymn: Lord, I Will Follow Thee Interview Produced by Trina Caudle

Barbara Katende is a Latter-day Saint in Uganda and shared her personal history and testimony with the LDS Women Project. I am Nalweyiso Barbara Katende Ojera, born in Kampala, Uganda to Jonathan Katende Bakiranze and Nakibuuka Lovinsa Katende on 10th December 1973. In the family hierarchy, I am the last born to my mother whose first marriage had failed before she met my father to whom I became the firstborn. This unique position made me a darling to both of my parents. My father was a teacher by profession and guided my early educational pursuit with loving strictness. On the other hand, my mother was a businesswoman who dealt in second-hand clothes, predictably therefore, you can imagine how smartly dressed I always was and I learned the virtue of neatness in my early years. Nalweyiso Barbara Katende Ojera (left) with a Friend As the case is with most African converts into religion, I automatically belonged to the Anglican Church together with my parents. Life was bliss, but when I turned 16, my father was poisoned and he passed on. I had gone to the village home for a school holiday 62 miles from the capital, Kampala, when the tragic news was announced on radio. My young mind could not comprehend fully the news and that drove me to return all the way to Kampala on a bus without realizing I didn’t have my shoes and was barefoot, in an attempt to find facts for myself that he had actually died. We never learned who was responsible for my father’s death, or why. I missed my father so dearly and wish he could see me grow into an adult and become the responsible woman I am. Being a teacher himself, my father ensured I went to Bat Valley Primary School, one of the best at the time, and I proceeded for secondary education at Light College, an Adventist school from 1987- 1990, that greatly influenced my belief. I became religiously very active, including being a Choir member. In Uganda Certificate of Education final exams in 1990, I was the best student and earned a scholarship from the school, which I turned down due to a strong desire to change schools. Instead, I went to Kitante Hill secondary school in Kampala for my Advanced level education, completed in 1993, and joined Light Bureau of Accountancy where I pursued a Diploma in Accountancy, a profession I had always longed to pursue. This readily prepared me for the job market and I worked part-time in Standard Chartered Bank headquarters before joining Police Children School as an assistant Bursar. In January 1996, I rented an apartment in a housing estate in Kibuye. I took notice of a young man, James, who was visiting his cousin there when he displayed a keen interest in the children in the estate, coupled with his great sense of humor. I enquired about him from the cousin who told me he worked in the bank, where interestingly the school where I worked held an account. He also noticed me because we had the same interest in loving children. I was touched by how he related to them and that’s how we started interacting. It didn’t take long before we started dating and the rest is history. Nalweyiso Barbara Katende Ojera with Her Family At one period, we rented a two-room house in Makindye near the Makindye Branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Every evening, James sat outside on the verandah reading his books and noticed two smartly dressed young men pass by and gleefully wave to him. By and by, he took interest and invited them over. They turned out to be missionaries from the Church, and James, true to form, engaged them in hearty discussions. The visits continued and when I was invited to join the discussions, I roundly refused without even knowing what I was missing. At the time, I was attending a Pentecostal church and I loved it there, while James went to the Catholic Church. To accord me respect, James and ‘his missionaries’ (as I used to refer to them) shifted their discussions to the Church premises. After some time, James announced to me that he was going to be baptized. On the appointed day, I packed what he would need for his baptism and he joyfully left to receive the ordinance. Shortly, he came back looking so disappointed. “What’s the problem? Were you baptized? Why are you looking so sad?” I rained questions at him. He calmly entered the house, took a seat, and said, “No. I have been denied baptism on account of cohabitating with you.” I couldn’t help but sympathize with him, and eventually allowed the missionaries to teach me if only to make James feel good. In the end, I got a personal testimony, and we were baptized together on 1st November 2003. We became very dedicated members of the Church and my first calling was a teacher for Youth Class, and this helped me to search more in the scriptures for fear of being challenged by the youth. I realized how much Heavenly Father had always been on our side and regretted that I had wasted a lot of time. I endeavored to always live by and renewed my covenant every Sabbath. In 2004, I went to Namibia where I stayed for four years; when there, I didn’t have the opportunity to attend church since the location where I was staying had no Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints. When I came back to Uganda in 2008, the Relief Society sisters of Makindye Branch warmly welcomed me and indeed I felt at home. I was called to serve as a 2nd Counselor in the Young Women, a responsibility I embraced with enthusiasm. I was later to serve as a secretary to the Stake Primary Presidency, and 1st Counselor to the Stake Relief Society Presidency and was released when Kampala Stake was divided into North and South Stakes. I was recently released as a Relief Society counselor and I am eagerly waiting for the next calling. Nalweyiso Barbara Katende Ojera Wedding Photo To pave way for our wedding, James had to comply with our cultural norms of traditional marriage known as kwanjula, a colorful and joyous ceremony in which the man comes to the woman’s parents’ home with an escort of friends and relatives. They come in a convoy to meet the parents of the woman and when they arrive, there are lots of tents. The man’s group sits on one side, and the woman’s side sits on another. The parents come and greet the men and entertain them. The men are welcomed into the woman’s home and thereafter the parents consent to having him as a son too. In Buganda (the central region of Uganda), bride price is not apportioned but the men bring gifts in appreciation to the girl’s parents for nurturing her. In my case, lots of gifts were brought including a cow, goats, a water tank, clothing, and many others. After the men have been accepted, the party starts—lots of food, music, and merrymaking activities. This was done at my parents’ home on 19th December 2009. Thereafter, we got wedded at the Church’s Kololo Stake Center on 11th September 2010. One year later, a most treasured event happened in our lives when we were blessed to travel to the Johannesburg Temple in South Africa with our three children (we had a fourth child after) and were sealed. We performed temple work for our departed parents and grandparents as well. During my sojourn in Namibia, I observed social workers attending to the needs of vulnerable people, including myself as a foreigner. This touched me so profoundly and I developed a strong desire to become a social worker and help put a smile on people’s faces. In 2010, I enrolled for a degree course in Social Works and Social Administration, paid for by my loving husband alongside competing demands, and I graduated from Kampala International University with First-Class Honors in 2013. In one of the field visits during our study program, one elderly person, Kulabako, hugely touched me by her dedication toiling to look after her grandchildren, provide for and sustain them. On this particular visit, I realized they had no food and other basic needs, and even though I was a student myself, I offered to buy her some food. To my chagrin, she roundly refused but instead requested that if I could raise 50,000 shillings ($13 US dollars), she would be able to start a small-scale charcoal business that would sustain them beyond the food offer. I promptly mobilized the money from my friends and we handed it to her. When we next visited, she had successfully established the business and expressed much appreciation. OCEAN School Supplies We visited many other older persons who complained of isolation, and the children they live with, and were motivated to form an organization to cater for the needs of these vulnerable people. Eventually, we established and registered AVEC International (Assistance Vulnerability Elderly and Children) as a non-governmental organization. The establishment and work with AVEC International have fulfilled the yearning I craved to always do good and serve Heavenly Father’s people, and put a smile on their faces, which triggers me to strive to do more. In keeping with the organization’s mission to transform the lives of the people both socially and economically, we encourage, counsel, share, and teach the vulnerable groups to be self-reliant. In this wise, we have been able to positively change lives, and we attribute all these to the loving care our Heavenly Father has for His children. When AVEC was ready to expand, we wanted to open another office location. Because of logistics, we started a second organization, called the OBEMA Center for Elderly and Children (OCEAN). Obema means “great and brave.” Our humble work is limited by our small outreach capacity so far, but we cherish the opportunity to reach out where we can. I am currently the Executive Director and Officer in charge of the children, two positions. Our office is in Maganjo, and we have a Facebook presence. My family, husband, and children, fully understand my passion and are quite supportive of my work even if it does not offer me any reasonable pay, for which I am extremely grateful. I testify that if we mirror the profound love our Heavenly Father bestowed upon us and extend it to others, the world will be a better place for all as we prepare to go back and live with Him for time and eternity. AT A GLANCE Name: Nalweyiso Barbara Katende Ojera Age: 50 Location: Kawanda, Wakiso District, Uganda Marital History: Married to James Ojera Latigo, sealed in the Johannesburg Temple in 2012 Children: Four children, three boys and one girl Occupation: Social Worker, currently Executive Director/Officer in charge of OVC (orphans and vulnerable children) Convert to the Church: baptized 3rd November, 2003 Schools Attended: Kampala International University, B.A. social work and social administration Languages Spoken At Home: English, Luganda, Luo (Acholi) Favorite Hymn: I Know That My Redeemer Lives Interview Produced by Trina Caudle

Wendy Gonzalez shares her family’s story of emigrating from Venezuela to the United States. Haz clic aquí para leer la entrevista original en español. I was born in Naguanagua, Venezuela. I was raised for seven years in my grandmother’s house with my aunts and uncles as brothers and sisters. My mom then met my stepfather, they married, and my brothers and sisters were born. I met my husband, Jaime, when I was 16, and when I was 18 I moved out with him. After a year, Nathy was born. Things were becoming difficult in Naguanagua, so we moved in with Jaime’s mom. We lived there for three years, during which time Emmanuel was born and we were married. Meanwhile, we studied at the university and worked. Jaime was teaching history at a high school and at the university. I studied business administration and got a job with the mayor’s office working for some of the councilors. The situation was getting worse, and 99% of the people continued to be kind. But we began to see irregularities, problems in the government. Jaime resigned because of concerns he had, and they ended up firing me as well. It was difficult because at that time we were seeing shortages. There was a group in each neighborhood in charge of making a list of people whose turn it was to go shopping. When we lost our jobs, they also removed us from that list. We had no way to get food. People began to be more afraid of police and other officials than gangs. We decided to emigrate, but we could only get two hundred dollars together so Jaime went alone to Ecuador. One day, a couple of missionaries saw him sitting in the street looking sad and brought him to the church. They talked to him, spent time with them and after some weeks he told me that he liked the Church and the way they treated him. He called to tell me he was getting baptized. With the help of some members in Ecuador, we joined Jaime in Ecuador, a trip through Colombia that consisted in a series of miracles for us. There, I also met the missionaries. Every Monday we did something with them. Natalia and I also decided to be baptized. Wendy Gonzalez We worked for a year in Ecuador, both of us. But at that time a lot of Venezuelans were coming, and some of them were not behaving well and no one wanted to hire us anymore. We decided to go to Peru. After working there for a while, we received the news that the border to the United States was open to Venezuelans seeking asylum. We meditated on this and I told Jaime that I had the conviction that God would bring us to that point. We gathered all the money that we had and made our way to Colombia. From there, we began to pay and pay and pay. A lot of bad people had figured out that immigrants had to pass through that jungle. We bought everything we needed for cooking, but it was stolen from us and we were left with tuna fish and candy. We burned everything we had to stay warm except for our identification and diplomas. We saw bodies—one tarp with an entire family dead. Another time, a woman died giving birth and the baby died. On the third day, we heard wild animals at night and Jaime said, “We’re not getting out of here!” I told him, “I trust in the Lord.” I felt that we could. I knew that the Lord would help us and He would get us out of there. We kept the children from seeing too much. They robbed us, they treated us poorly, but nothing really bad happened to us. For every group that robbed us, there was also a group that shared their wet bread with us. We met a lot of Haitians and Cubans that showed us how to follow clothing that had been hung to mark the way. It was dangerous. Jaime bought a machete and at the end of the trip, he couldn’t unclench his fist because he never opened his hand to let go of the machete—only with therapy could he open his hand again. It took us seven days. You only take this trip out of necessity. We finally got to a refuge in Panama and the solders took down all of our information. Again, the Church and others helped us to move from Panama to Costa Rica where they said they’d alert someone that we were coming. The adrenaline from crossing the jungle was lowering and we all got sick. Emmanuel had to be hospitalized. From bishop to bishop, we passed through Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala. But crossing the border to Mexico was complicated. A boy took us on his motorcycle. He had to first take the two children and leave them in a certain spot in Mexico and return for Jaime and me. Trusting my kids to a stranger was the only way to move forward. We didn’t have another option. We couldn’t be in Venezuela. I had to talk to the Lord and finally He convinced me that nothing would happen. Wendy Gonzalez and Her Family Over the border in Mexico, we waited for three months. We couldn’t move through the country while we were waiting for our papers in Mexico, but no one wanted to hire us. Again we trusted in the brothers and sisters of the Church. One of the bishops had buildings that he rented and he offered me work cleaning. There, I met a tenant who had a restaurant. He was impressed with the work I did and offered me a job. We have such a deep love for Humberto. We worked for two months for him. We then got in contact with Hayden Anderson, who had baptized Jaime when he was a missionary. He offered to help us once we arrived in the United States. At that moment, the immigration in Mexico called us to tell us that we could go and pick up our humanitarian visas and continue the trip. From there, we went to Mexico City and on to the border. Just crossing the river remained. We met a boy who said he would help us find a place to cross. It was like something out of a spy movie. He left us at a stoplight and told us to run into the river. We got in the river, and in the middle the agents helped us to get out. From there, they took us to detention. That was the 11th of May. The next day was Mother’s Day, and I told the patrol officer that they had given me the Mother’s Day gift of being together with my family in the United States. We spent three days there while they reviewed our paperwork so that we could leave there for San Antonio and then on to Salt Lake City where Hayden was waiting for us. We met his mom and his family. We found work, got help from the Cache Refugee and Immigrant Connection, and members of the Church gave us clothes and furniture. Hayden’s mom, Judy, gifted us a piano a piano because Emmanuel had begun to play by ear—when he was little, he liked to draw lines on the table and pretend to “play.” Now he really can play. And my Natalia, who would play soccer in the dust with the boys wearing her school uniform skirt is now playing for her high school team. Wendy Gonzalez We had good experiences learning about the church in Ecuador, but we really learned about the gospel through our trip. We were surprised when we saw that everyone was making a spider’s web that involved members of the Church. The trip, for me, was like the Lord was proving my faith and everything that I’d said in Peru when I said I trusted the Lord. When we arrived here it was like He said to me, “Yes, you trusted me,” and He opened the door. When our stake president was interviewing us to go through the temple and be sealed together as a family, he talked about the importance of the temple recommend, and what it means for us to know that we are worthy to go into the temple. We understand the importance of documents and passports. Jaime likes to hold up his temple recommend now and say that this is the only “passport” he needs. At A Glance Name: Wendy Gonzalez Age: 37 Location: Logan, Utah Marital History: married since 2005 Children: 2 kids Convert to the Church: August 2016 Education: My education was in Venezuela Languages Spoken at Home: Spanish Favorite Hymn: Let Zion in Her Beauty Rise Interview Produced by Jenny Willmore