In her profound story of personal healing and renewal through her relationship with the Lord, HDH describes a 30-year process of recovering from sexual assault when she was ten years old. Can you talk about your experience at the YMCA when you were a little girl? I had just turned ten, and I was in 5th grade. The YMCA in my town was having a lock-in for Halloween. I had never been to a lock-in before. I lived in a part of the country where there were lots of working moms. My mom stayed home and I was always kind of jealous of the kids who would get on the day care bus after school and would go off and, I thought, have a great time. They all went to lock-ins, and they were always involved with lots of community activities, and I wished I could participate. So when the YMCA was having this lock-in, I begged my mom to go. She said, “Sure.” I could draw you a diagram of the exact layout of the space, almost 30 years later. There was an activity room that was done up as a haunted house; there was spaghetti for brains and grapes for eyeballs, that sort of thing, each in its own space, separated from the others by curtains. I had never been in any kind of haunted house. It was dark, the music was blaring, I couldn’t see anything. There were these curtain-like screens and things hidden behind them. There were strobe lights. All the little girls kind of lined up because they were scared, and I was the last in line. Everybody was paying attention to what they were doing and not paying attention to anything else. The whole purpose of the activity was to terrify children. In retrospect, I can see it’s the perfect place for a crime because it’s just so well hidden. So, I was the last one in this little line – easy pickings – and whoever he was grabbed me. I had no idea if he was 18 or 65. I have no idea who he was. He grabbed me and took me behind a screen and raped me. I didn’t understand what was happening, and I fought him really hard. When it was over, I remember going into the locker room, and everybody was getting their stuff and going out to the next activity. There was laughing and kids running around, and I was just sitting on a bench like a statue. I don’t even know if I was thinking anything. I was numb and watching this excitement go on around me. I had this sort of feeling of “Don’t you see? There’s something wrong here. Is it not wrong with you? Because it’s wrong with me.” I remember they all went to the next activity, and I sat on that bench in the locker room for a long time. Maybe a couple of hours. When it was time to sleep in the gym, I remember it being vitally important to me that I had a space up against a wall. I sat up against that brick wall all night and watched everybody sleep on the gym floor. HDH When my mom came the next day to pick me up, the very first thing I told her when I got in the car was that a man had taken me behind a screen and sat on my lap. I hadn’t had the maturation talk at school yet, and I had no idea what happened to me but I knew it was horrifying. I don’t know if she didn’t believe me, or if she thought it couldn’t have been what she thought it was, or if she was paralyzed by fear. I have no idea what her reaction was based on, but my parents did nothing. There was no response. It was never spoken of in my family, never again mentioned or alluded to. It was totally ignored. As an adult who’s been through therapy, I can see that a child who doesn’t know what has just happened, but knows that it’s bad, goes to the people she trusts most in the world, wanting to know, “Should I be worried about this?” When they do nothing, that tells the child, in this case me, what happened isn’t interesting, what happened isn’t important – which is at direct odds with what your spirit knows. So then it creates conflict. You’re always conflicted because you feel like what happened is important. But wait, it’s not important. But wait, I know it’s important. I had nightmares for years. In the early 80s, when this happened, there was a Kal-Kan cat food commercial on TV. I remember there was a little round can of cat food, and there was a long, blue vitamin pill. You could see the vitamin pill above the can, and then it went “schoomph,” and penetrated the can. I dreamt about the Kal-Kan vitamin for 8 years. It all happened in this terrifying, very slow motion way that’s also too fast. I don’t know how to describe it other than that. It’s like you’re locked in and you can’t get out. It’s like a silent scream. That went on for years. Eventually, I just forgot that all of it had happened. You hear in the news about forgotten memories or retrieved memories. I can’t speak of anybody else’s experience, but I know for me, that the memory wasn’t gone. I hadn’t really lost the memory, but because nobody talked about it, it was just kind of involuntarily put away. How did that experience affect you as an adult? I was a BYU student in the early 90s, and I had that horrible, semi-typical experience where I was 20 years old, and everybody I knew was engaged. I had never had any desire to serve a mission, but I had this thought, “Okay, I don’t want to serve a mission, but I don’t want to decide that on my own. Maybe I’ll talk to God about it. He’ll tell me that I don’t need to go, and that will be that.” I prayed about it, but not really earnestly, and I had one of the strongest spiritual impressions I’ve ever had. I don’t know that I necessarily heard an actual voice, but I felt like I was being shouted at, “Go on a mission!” And I thought, “Oh man, I shouldn’t have asked.” So I put in my papers, and I got a call. I was fine until I received my endowments. I had not had a temple prep class. I grew up in a part of the country where there wasn’t a temple nearby, so I never saw my parents go to the temple. I went to the temple having no idea what to expect. The woman who sold me my new temple garments gave me garments that were about ten sizes too big. That felt kind of like a costume, to say nothing of temple clothing. There was a locker room as well as a dark room with a closed door. And there was a curtain. The initiatory was awful for me. In hindsight, it was like a perfect storm of subconscious trauma. There were any number of ways that the experience freaked me out. I didn’t know why I was upset; I just sat there and thought, “Get me out of here!” The only reason I didn’t leave was because my parents were there, and I knew it would embarrass them if I left. That’s a horrible reason to make a covenant with God, but there was a lot of pressure. The next day, I had a body-racking stomachache that lasted for six years. I was terribly ill on my mission. They weren’t even sure they were going to let me leave the MTC. I had no idea what was wrong. They thought I had Giardia or anthrax or an ulcer. They tested me for cancer. I had MRIs. They could never find anything wrong, but I was desperately, desperately ill. When I did get to go on my mission, I worked really hard. I really tried hard. I didn’t think of myself as emotionally ill – I didn’t feel that way at all – but just physically sick. I didn’t think I had any emotional issues to deal with. Eventually, they sent me home from the mission early. I’m confident that a mission was something God wanted me to do because He wanted me to deal with my emotional pain. He wanted to shove it in my face and force me to see it and address it and heal from it. He wanted me to deal with it well in advance of getting married and having children. Did you find any spiritual comfort during this time when you were so ill? After I came home from my mission, I stayed at my parent’s house. I went to the temple all the time – three times a week. I prayed and read my scriptures constantly and was just trying to find comfort and answers and direction. I knew it had been God who commanded me to serve a mission – it hadn’t been my idea at all – and so I then also knew that it was no surprise to Him that I was sick and unable to serve. It was terribly difficult to understand and reconcile. So many questions, so much beseeching. On one fall day – a beautiful, crisp fall day – I was getting some groceries out of the trunk of the car for my mother. I was standing on the driveway, and there was this tree right next to the driveway. I could hear really loudly what sounded like applause. Not just one person applauding but 30,000 people applauding – roaring applause. I thought, “What is that?” My parents lived on a cul-de-sac away from other people, so there were really only a couple of choices of where the noise could be coming from. I looked around, and there were no windows open. There was nobody around. There weren’t any cars around. My attention was drawn to this tree. It was waving in the wind and making this rustling noise. It sounded exactly like applause. I thought, “Wow, there’s a wind.” I looked around and nothing else was moving. There wasn’t a wind at all, everything was totally still like before a storm, but this tree was waving, and it sounded like applause. The best way I can describe it is to say that the applause was in the tree. I just stood there for two minutes and soaked it up. I realize I sound crazy when I say, “A tree applauded me, and God was speaking to me through this applauding tree,” but that tree absolutely applauded me. The Spirit was incredibly powerful and sweet and testified to me that I was hearing exactly what I thought I was hearing. I took so much comfort in that. I just stood there and allowed it to wash over me. I went into the house, and wrote it in my journal. God told me through the tree that He was pleased with me. It was the most holy and profound communication with God I’ve ever had. HDH and Her Family A year later, to the day, I was at church. My calling was in the copy center. I had to be there early on Sunday mornings to make copies for meetings, but nobody ever came. I was using the time to read copies of articles from the previous week. There was an article lying on the table called “Lighten Up!” I believe it was a chapter from a book called Lighten Up! by Chieko Okazaki. I was reading this article, and I got to the part where she quotes Isaiah 55:8-12: “For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater.” It’s not for nothing – everything done in obedience and righteousness accomplishes God’s purposes. The scripture passage then says to go forth with peace and that, “The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” I cherished that. I felt that seen and heard. I felt that God was using hardship to teach me, even though I didn’t know what He was going to teach me, that it would be revealed bit by bit, and to keep trusting Him. I felt comforted that He saw me. Also, that I was good in His sight. That He would move nature to comfort my heart. During all of this, I had still put that YMCA experience away mentally. Did your memory of being sexually assaulted ever resurface? It did. In my late 20s, I had worked in the top global PR firm and then another mid-size firm. Working in these firms was like cloak-and-dagger intrigue. The politics and stress of it was enormous. I didn’t eat or sleep for years. I didn’t own a pair of jeans because I had no place to wear them; I worked seven days a week. My boss at that time was the kind of boss who threw things and screamed at people and slammed doors. We were all expected to do brilliant communications work. The new CEO ran the business into the ground, and we all lost our jobs. I remember going home and praying, “Lord, I have a great resume, I’m marketable, and I can find a job, but I don’t want another job like this. I want the right job.” Whenever you say things like that to God, it never works out exactly the way you think it will. It took six months for me to find the right job at the right firm, and that was definitely the hand of the Lord. During those six months, I moved to my former hometown, where I’d lived when I was ten, and lived with my beloved grandmother. A sweet aunt said to a friend of hers who owned a little boutique, “This gal has style. She’s looking for a little ‘something to do’ job. Can she work at your boutique?” and the friend said, “Sure.” So I worked at this little boutique 20 hours a week. I had been working 70-80 hours a week for years, so to work 20 hours a week in a little boutique was like silence. Mentally, the noise in my head silenced for the first time in years. What came up in that silence was, “Oh yeah, remember that time you were raped at the YMCA?” I rolled it around in my mouth, so to speak, and got the feel for it and thought, “Yeah, I do remember that.” It wasn’t necessarily this memory retrieval thing where the memory was gone and then it came back. It was more that I had a lot of noise in my head, and that I had been told my experience didn’t matter. Then the noise in my head cleared because I had this really quiet six months. It wasn’t this momentous event where I thought, “Oh, it’s a memory!” It was just that I was surrounded by people and shops and restaurants and schools and street signs that all took me back to when I was growing up. It took about six months, and the Lord found me a PR job with a mid-sized firm. I had been at this new firm for about a year, and I got an additional client. It was the YMCA system in the large city I was living in. I told the CEO, “You’ve got to give this client to somebody else,” but he wanted me to keep the YMCA on my client roster. I knew that I had to deal with it, so I found a counselor. What role did therapy play in your healing process? I found a counselor through LDS Family Services, and she was a godsend. She was brilliant, and she was perfect for me. She pointed some things out to me that I hadn’t ever noticed. When I would talk about what happened when I was 10, I would hold my breath. I had never noticed it. My body was tense. We talked about that. We worked through it. I felt immediately that my therapy sessions were holy; The Spirit was very present there. I looked forward to it every week. I felt like the therapy itself had a kind of sacred stamp on it. I always felt the Spirit there. I learned a lot about God there. I learned that the Lord loves his children and that He loves me. I learned that He’s able to keep the evil of the world at bay but that’s not His job. He can do it, and sometimes He does, but He didn’t that time. I learned that there was more for me in having the experience than there was in not. I felt peace whispered to me in therapy. I learned more about what it means to have a relationship with the Lord in therapy than I ever did in church. I learned that just as there are people in the world who will hurt you, there are people in the world who devote their lives to helping, and they can do that through the Spirit. I remember one session and my counselor said, “the Spirit is testifying to me that the Lord knew this would happen and has created pathways for you to use it and to make good from it.” He sees the ugliness and that there’s goodness to be had there, goodness to be made – we can be made holy from hardship and, with God, these difficulties can be the making of us. I remember how thick the Spirit was. I guess the feeling that I had was that He knew everything, and that He approved of all of the healthy and not-so-healthy ways that I had dealt with it. He approved of the non-healthy ways that I dealt with it because I did the best I could; I didn’t understand. And, totally without judgment, He offered health once I did understand. Many years ago when my niece was a little girl, two or three, she had heard somebody say the phrase, “Soaking wet.” So she extrapolated that and said that she was “soaking warm.” She thought “soaking” was a descriptor that could be applied to many kinds of words. We were charmed by that and delighted at her mistake. I feel like the pain of life and the mistakes we make because of it are, to the Lord, kind of like the mistakes of an adorable child. We take the inferences from the world that we’re given and from the experiences that we’re given and from the family dynamics that we’re given, and we learn to behave. We live in a fallen world, so what we’re presented with, often, is wrong. What we’re presented with is often dysfunctional or hurtful or damaging, and it’s not good. We shouldn’t seek after or be satisfied with dysfunction or abuse, obviously, but I feel that for those of us who are trying to make good and are seeking improvement, the Lord views us like an adorable child who is working with what life’s given us and extrapolated it and gotten it wrong. That’s what I mean when I say He approved of me – I’ve always felt that His affection for me is greater than His concern over my mistakes. My patriarchal blessing says that if I realize the past is behind me and the future cannot be touched at the present time, and if I focus on the present and how to behave right now, that it will be natural for me to live in full fulfillment of what was planned for me in eternity. It’s a formula for changing dysfunction and overcoming abuse. It’s a formula for faithfully going forward with new steps. The choice is now, every day, to get it right, to be faithful, to be functional, and to remember that, although bad things do happen and they’re serious, God sees them more fully than we do and provides a way for us to use challenges to create beauty. At A Glance Name: HDH Location: Western United States Age: 38 Marital status: Married Children: Two school-aged daughters Occupation: Talk show producer Schools Attended: BYU Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: “Be Still My Soul” Interview by Krisanne Hastings.

Janice was born into a Christian Palestinian family, but didn’t gain a deep appreciation for her heritage until she was a young adult. Now, as the Curator of Education for the Arab American National Museum in Michigan, Janice has daily opportunities to educate others about her culture. Balancing her Arab identity with her spiritual life as a Mormon, however, has been a challenging and isolating journey, even with the Lord’s continual presence in her life. You were born in the United States but you come from Arab heritage. Would you describe to me your family’s background? I was born and raised in Michigan to Palestinian immigrants. My father and mother are both from a town called Ramallah, which is in the West Bank of Palestine. Their families knew of each other but they didn’t meet each other until 1967 in Michigan. My parents came to the United States at different times; my father came in 1961 to go to school. My mom came to Michigan as a refugee after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. My mom has six sisters and no brothers and my dad’s family heard about this other Ramallah family that had seven daughters, and so there was a little strategy in getting the two of them together. They were engaged a few weeks later and married a few months later and they were married for 42 years until my dad passed away. They had four children in Michigan; I’m the third of four. Growing up was difficult because we had to live this Arab-American identity. We grew up in a predominantly white suburb. The Detroit area is known for having a large Arab population – it has the largest concentration of Arabs in the United States – but we were in a slightly different area that was not so diverse when I was growing up there in the 1980s. We stood out and we got teased. I remember classmates would ask me questions I didn’t even know how to answer. I was Arab, but I didn’t really know what that meant. Janice Freij and Her Mom My dad would talk a lot about politics; you can’t be a Palestinian and not talk a lot about politics. So he would explain the full Arab-Israeli conflict. I feel like he did a good job in versing us in the political aspect of what it means to be Arab. But we never talked about our culture. We just lived it. We ate the food, they spoke the language (I responded in English), we would go to Arabic weddings and dance to Arabic music, but for the longest time I resented being Arab because it made me different than everybody else. Also, I associated my culture with strictness. I couldn’t do a lot of things that other people could do because I was Arab. We weren’t allowed to date, we couldn’t have sleepovers, I had a very strict curfew, and my parents would say these rules existed because of our culture. “Arab girls don’t do these things,” is what they’d tell me. Those are things that are usually associated with more conservative religious traditions. How was religion presented in your home? Was it synonymous with your culture or separate? It was synonymous, but my parents weren’t actually that religious. When I was growing up we did go to church, but it was more for cultural reasons. If you’re a Palestinian Christian from Ramallah, you’re Orthodox. There are some exceptions, but most are Orthodox. There was an Orthodox church built in the suburb where we lived, and so we would go to the church every Sunday, but it was more like a family reunion. It was a place where my parents could catch up with their own friends and family from back in Ramallah because pretty much after 1967 everybody left the town, and most of them went to Michigan. The priest would speak in Arabic. I do remember discussions about how we were from the same place that Christ was from, but in terms of the rules, it wasn’t about being Christian for them, it was about being Arab. You had a Christian foundation. What role did Islam play in your upbringing as an Arab? I became acquainted with Islam later as I got older. When I was growing up, my family had their own prejudices and stereotypes about Muslims. My community has a large Muslim population and we would go to the Muslim markets and restaurants, but I distinctly remember my family saying things like, “Don’t spend too much time there. Just go get what you need and then leave, because that’s where the Muslims hang out.” So because of that prejudice, I just assumed that Muslims were so different from me. And then, when I was 21, I started working for ACCESS, which is the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services and that’s the parent organization of the museum I work at now. That was the first time I was fully exposed to Islam and Muslims. I was hired to be an educational outreach coordinator, which meant that I was in charge of teaching people about Arab culture and Islam. I realized I didn’t know anything! I’d been living in my own Palestinian Christian bubble. I had to go through a crash course in Islam, and at that time I realized how many similarities there are between Christian Arabs and Muslim Arabs. For example, some of the rituals associated with funerals and deaths are very similar. It was eye opening for me, and it made me question why there was so much prejudice when there were so many similarities. Would you tell me about how you learned about Mormonism? As I mentioned, we went to church mostly for cultural reasons, and then we just stopped going altogether. I had some Presbyterian neighbors I’d go to church with sometimes. I liked that their church was so down to earth; the Orthodox church I had grown up going to was so ritualistic and strict. I liked going to these Presbyterian churches because everyone was so open and friendly. But it wasn’t something I really wanted to do every Sunday; it was just a place I went to now and then. Then, when I was in my final years of high school, I decided I didn’t believe in God anymore. I was a bitter teenager and I thought, How can there be a God when there are so many horrible things that happen in the world and so many bad things have happened in my life? That was the path I was on. Janice Freij When I was a senior in high school, I befriended two brothers who were LDS but not active, and they told me a little about the Church because I was curious. Fast forwarding a bit, my brother ended up working with one of them at a fast food restaurant. My brother is five years older than I am, and he was kind of on an opposite journey from the one I was on. He was looking for truth, he was looking for a religion, and he was working with those LDS guys and was asking a lot of questions. He eventually had to quit that job and take over my dad’s shoe repair business in a mall because my dad had a massive stroke and couldn’t work anymore. My brother was in the shoe repair and two missionaries came in to get their shoes fixed. My brother told them he had two friends who were LDS and they were telling him about the faith. From there, my brother started taking the discussions and he got baptized. I remember not being interested at all in the religion, but I do remember that when my brother would tell me about Christ and how he was trying to follow His example, I remember being really touched. I remember thinking, I don’t really know that much about Christianity! I don’t know that much about Jesus. I know the basic Bible stories I learned in Sunday School as a little girl, but I don’t know the details. I decided that I would start reading the Bible and learning and praying and see where that would take me. I was very intimidated by the Bible, so my brother gave me a book like Reading the Bible for Dummies or something and the book suggested reading the First Book of John first for seven days in a row and writing down how you felt as you read. I followed that challenge and I remember feeling peaceful, and that was the first time as a young adult that I felt what I now know is the Spirit, telling me that the Lord loved me and He was there. I really liked that, but I didn’t think I needed to join a church. One night, my brother and I had a long, deep discussion. I was actually humble enough to ask him questions about the faith, and so my brother was answering those questions and the Spirit made it very, very clear to me that the Church was true. Talk about a lightening bolt experience… This was definitely one of those. It was a clear answer and I could not stop crying. That was a Saturday night; the next morning I called the missionaries and told them I wanted to be baptized! They were shocked, of course. I served a mission myself so now looking back I think, Wow, that was amazing! But I just knew right then and there that I wanted to be a part of it. I went to church that day, had my first discussion that night, and was baptized two weeks later. Those two boys I told you about who first introduced my brother to the Church? They have four younger siblings and they and their parents took me in, and are now my “adopted Mormon family.” You were eighteen. How did that change your relationship with your family? Janice Freij There was conflict. My family had been disappointed with some of the decisions my brother had made previously, and so when he joined the Church, they just brushed it off as another weird thing he was doing. They really didn’t take it seriously. But then when I joined they were pretty upset and worried for me. While I was having my first discussion with the elders and my brother, my parents called me to talk with them. I just knew it wasn’t going to be good so as I walked down the stairs I just said a silent prayer and said, “Please help me help my parents understand why I am doing this.” When we first started talking, they were upset about the missionaries being there and they didn’t understand what I was doing. But within minutes, miraculously, their hearts completely softened and they said, “We respect your decision.” It was amazing. I’m so glad I had that experience because it taught me early on that God does answer prayers and He really is aware of our situations. Joining wasn’t that hard, but there were two things that were hard: First, my brother fell away from the Church almost immediately after I joined for a variety of reasons. It’s made it a very lonely journey for me. The second thing that was hard was that my family was totally against my serving a mission. Getting ready to go on a mission was one of the hardest challenges I’ve gone through. I never thought I wanted to serve a mission, but the Spirit made it clear that I needed to. Again, a lightening bolt experience. I think Heavenly Father must realize I’m pretty stubborn so that’s why I get these lightening bolt things. I was naïve: I thought that because it was so clear to me that I needed to serve, it was going to be an easy journey. I knew the mission itself would be difficult, but in terms of preparation, I thought that would be easy. I told my parents the night I decided to go, thinking they’d just be supportive. They were extremely angry. Culturally, even though I had lived on my own – which is something that many Arabs don’t do until they get married – there was still this understanding that a woman should not leave her family or even the country. I think a big part of it for my mom was safety, because 9/11 had recently happened. My mom was extremely worried that someone would hurt me or discriminate against me. There was anti-Muslim activity at the time, but most people don’t make the distinction between Muslim Arabs and Christian Arabs, even when I was an LDS missionary. I remember her saying, “What if you get sent to New York City?” It was ten months between when I decided to go and when I actually left in 2002. So it was a really long time of opposition. It wasn’t just my family; it was friends, even LDS friends. I was 25, so I got a lot of, “Why would you go on a mission? You should focus on getting married or finishing school.” The disapproval came from everywhere. One time, I was talking to a friend who shared a scripture in Matthew 10:37-39 about honoring your mother and father but not choosing them over the Lord. I remember reading that scripture and the Spirit confirmed to me that everything would be okay if I just continued on the path that I was on. I remember also lying on my floor one day in tears, writing in my journal, thinking, I don’t know if I can do this. Maybe I should just not go because it would be so much easier. But again, the Spirit gave me a hug and comforted me. It was hard up until the day I left. When I got my mission call, which was to New Zealand, I knew that was inspired because it’s one of the safest countries in the world. As soon as I told my parents that’s where I was going, they were much more supportive. It was such a blessing. And then being in New Zealand was amazing, too. I had never met Polynesian people before and I hadn’t realized how rich the culture is, how many similarities there are between their heritage and my heritage. It made me realize how many connections there are all across the world between different faiths and cultures. I did have some friends who were extremely supportive, including my adoptive Mormon family. The mom actually flew out with me to the Missionary Training Center and was my escort when I got endowed in the temple. If I hadn’t had that family and a few others friends, it would have been even harder to do what I did. When I was on my mission, I didn’t get too many letters from my dad because he was still angry with me. And my mom has a sixth-grade education so my mom didn’t know how to email or anything, but my sister would send me packages and letters. Janice Freij Where did your interest in educating others about your cultural heritage come from, especially since it had been a challenge for you to embrace it as a youth? I had gone to school and worked on and off before my mission, but when I was on my mission my companion told me about BYU and their Middle Eastern Studies Program and the Jerusalem Center… Another lightening bolt experience told me that it was something I really needed to consider. And so I finished my degree at BYU in Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic, which gave me the chance to study in Jerusalem and live in Egypt–which was the first time I lived in an Arab country. Right before I joined the Church, I became more interested in my heritage, specifically in the language. I hated the fact that I couldn’t speak Arabic. I didn’t make a huge endeavor at that time to study, but then I got my patriarchal blessing six months after joining the Church. My patriarchal blessing talks in depth about my mortal heritage and how I need to appreciate it and understand how it relates to the gospel. It also tells me I can’t take it lightly and that many challenges will come because of my heritage. I prayed and I read my blessing and I asked for guidance regarding a career path. The Lord made it very, very clear that I needed to go into something related to my heritage. I didn’t understand my feelings at first, but then I realized I needed to understand my heritage academically and learn as much as I could about it. After I graduated, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with my degree. I had worked for ACCESS (the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services) before my mission, but I didn’t wanted to move back to Michigan again after school. But then I got a call from a woman I had worked with previously at ACCESS who told me that there was a new museum that was going to be opening. That piqued my interest, but I still wasn’t convinced I should go back to Michigan. Finally, I went home for a wedding in 2007 and I happened to sit at a table with the woman who was in charge of the entire organization. She told me about a development position that was opening up, where I’d be raising funds specifically for the new museum. I told her I would really have to think about it because I didn’t want to move back to Michigan. This decision wasn’t as “lightening bolt” as the other decisions, but I eventually felt peace about it and I moved back to Michigan. I eventually moved into a position in the education department in 2009, and I absolutely loved it. Eventually I was promoted to curator of education, so now I run the department here. The passion for the work I do and the work we do as an institution continues to grow because it’s just so needed. There’s so much ignorance about Arabs and Islam. Every time I give a lecture or presentation, I just feel like I’m really making a difference. I still don’t know ultimately if this is what the Lord had in mind for me when He wanted me to go into Middle Eastern Studies. I honestly feel that one of the major reasons He wanted me to was so that I could do my genealogy. I couldn’t read Arabic before, and now I can, and I have a huge book of my family tree that now I can translate. So it’s really exciting. Janice Freij What’s the main thing you try to communicate in your teaching about Arabs? That we’re not monolithic. That we’re not all the same. That’s one of the main things that I discuss and that’s what I train my educators to discuss as well: we are not all the same. That is such a common stereotype. There are 22 Arab countries, over 300 million Arabs in the world. There are so many Arab Americans; we don’t have exact numbers because we’re not included on the US Census – that’s a whole other issue – but there are a lot of Arab Americans. We’re very diverse in every way. The other main message is, We’re not all terrorists. As funny as that sounds, a lot of people have to be reminded of that. People might not think that all Arabs are terrorists, but they might think they support terrorism, or support violence or are Anti-American…. I try to convey that the stereotypes you hear on the news or in movies aren’t true. They may be true for a small handful of Arabs and/or Muslims, but they are not true for the majority. How does that perspective inform your identity as a Mormon? We, of course, have some of those challenges, so you get stereotypes from both your heritage and your religion. I feel like being Mormon has really helped me to understand what my Muslim brothers and sisters go through. Both Mormons and Arabs are very misunderstood groups of people, and there are a lot of similarities between our faiths. One of those similarities is people think we’re heretics. Instead of reading the Koran or the Book of Mormon, they read anti books about the Church or anti books about Islam. There have been many people in recent years who, when I defend Muslims or get angry about anti-Muslim rhetoric, say, “I don’t get it: You’re Christian, why do you care so much?” And honestly, one reason I care so much is I know exactly how they feel. Because people don’t make the distinction between Christian Arabs and Muslim Arabs, I’ve been the victim of discriminatory comments and actions myself. There are certain aspects of Islam that I might not fully understand, but I have such a deep appreciation for how Muslims live their religion. I do feel that the culture in which I was raised actually prepared me for being a member of the Church. A lot of the values that were instilled in me as a child were the values the Church preaches: family, chastity, modesty, all those sorts of things. But there are many challenges that come from belonging to two very misunderstood cultural groups: having to defend who I am as an Arab and having to defend who I am as a Mormon. The biggest challenge has been just feeling so alone. There aren’t very many Arabs who are LDS. Being so passionate about my cultural brothers and sisters, who don’t understand me spiritually, and then being passionate about my spiritual brothers and sisters, who don’t understand me culturally, is very lonely. I love that Mormons are very interested in my heritage, but I also feel tired of being so different. I wish I didn’t have to explain myself over and over again. I feel isolated. But in saying that, I’m doing something about it: I’m starting an Arab-LDS web-based association to connect Arab LDS people. I have been in contact with some general authorities who work in the Middle East, and I’ve been told by them that the number of members who are Arab is in the hundreds. So it’s not many! If you think about the fact that there are 14 million members of the Church in the world, a couple hundred is nothing. But I really feel that my becoming a member of the Church when I did was not a coincidence, and I do feel that I’m supposed to be playing some sort of role in uniting Arab people who are LDS. We’re hoping to launch the association by the end of the year. Despite the challenges I have had as an LDS Arab, I am so grateful to be in this unique position and I wouldn’t have it any other way. My goal is to stay as strong as possible to ensure that I fulfill everything Heavenly Father has in store for me, whatever that may be. At A Glance Name: Janice Freij Location: Ann Arbor, MI Age: 35 Marital status: Single Occupation: Curator of Education, Arab American National Museum Convert To Church: 5/28/1995 Schools Attended: Wayne State University, Brigham Young University Languages Spoken at Home: Arabic, English Favorite Hymn: “Abide With Me” On The Web: http://mormonchannel.org/why-i-believe/36 (myinterview on the Mormon Channel’s Why I Believe program) Interview by Neylan McBaine. Portraits by Liz Hansen.

Sandra Turley lived the dream of many aspiring performers when she was cast in the role of Cosette in Les Miserables on Broadway at the age of 21. She recounts her journey to the stage and how the gospel influenced her decisions regarding career and family. Now “happily retired,” she has taken on new roles, becoming a mother after lengthy infertility struggles, recently releasing a CD of Broadway hits, and inspiring young women around the United States as a professional speaker. How and when did you discover your talent for singing? Honestly, I feel that it was just born in me. I grew up in a really musical family, so by the time we could all talk, we were singing. When I was six or seven I realized I truly enjoyed it, and singing was more than just a thing to do. My parents put us in a little music company in California, where we were living at the time, and I remember being up on stage with theater kids my age, feeling the music so deeply inside of me, and thinking, “This is so amazing! I’m communicating through the movement and the music.” Later my family moved to Connecticut and occasionally my parents would drive us down to New York City to see Broadway shows. The first show I saw was Les Miserables, when I was thirteen. I sat in the audience with my mom, and by the curtain call I was crying with everybody else because it’s such a touching and deeply life-changing story. I looked up at everyone taking their bows and thought, “I am going to do that someday.” I started formal vocal training in junior high and took lessons from a crazy, wild, and totally awesome teacher. But even before that, I learned from my mom, who is a naturally beautiful singer and has a very healthy voice. I just sang the way she sang, which gave me a great head start. Once I started real voice lessons, we were able to move quickly. That being said, my voice teacher emphasized mostly classical training. After years of me resisting and him forcing me to sing opera arias, one day it just clicked that I could do it, that I could sing the way I had heard in recordings, and it opened up my voice to a different level that I certainly would never ever have reached without training with him. When I was a teenager I didn’t fully understand what my Broadway goal entailed. Throughout my junior high and high school years, I learned more and more about musical theater by auditioning for anything that was around our little area and performing in various plays, plugging away. I had a very healthy upbringing; it was never unbalanced. So I was a cheerleader, I was in student government, I was a pretty good student, and theater was another fun, exciting passion of mine. (In reality, boys were probably more my passion than anything else!) One amazing thing is that my mom was never a stage mom. She supported me in all that I did, but she was not pushy. I think if my mom knew then everything she knows now about musical theater and Broadway, there’s no way in the world she would have let me go into theater, because the business is so crass and difficult. But we didn’t know, so I started doing more and more shows and my parents were always supportive. I just loved the medium, loved the stories, and loved the communicative nature of music–how it can really touch people’s lives and how it touched mine. A lot of people showed encouragement for my talent, and others not so much. But by the time I was ready for college I still felt an inborn desire to continue singing and pursuing musical theater in particular. How did you decide where to continue your training? I started to research colleges and looked up BYU to see if they had a musical theater program. I knew I probably wanted to go to BYU, but being from the East Coast, and since none of my friends were going that far away for school, I looked first at NYU and Julliard. I quickly realized those weren’t going to be the places for me–for my spirit, at least. In addition to receiving great training, I really wanted to be in an environment where people believed as I did, especially with such a tricky major as theater, because that can get pretty risqué anywhere. I found out that BYU has a music dance theater program and I sent in an audition tape of myself singing and dancing. They accepted me into the program, which I didn’t even realize was quite as cool as it was. I got there and saw how small the freshman class was and how tight-knit that community was, since many of the kids had been to camps together and already took voice lessons from college teachers. I felt really excited to be a part of that group, but it was also the first time I realized that there are a lot of other great performers out there, and perhaps I’m really not so special. I was surrounded by immense talent, and my self-esteem took a pretty hard knock. Sandra Turley How did you cope with the self-doubt you felt when you got to BYU? There are two aspects to that. First, I had to cope with self-doubt as a musical theater major. I highly considered changing my major by my sophomore year. I auditioned for the BYU Young Ambassadors and different shows on campus and never made it. This made me question, “Am I actually talented and is this something I should pursue?” But that’s the nature of theater, and I’m very glad that I didn’t give up right off the bat. Just because you go to one audition or 100 and nobody likes you, it doesn’t mean that at the 101st audition you won’t get hired. It matters who you’re auditioning for on that day, if you are the right person, the right flavor, the right color in the right moment. So I continued auditioning for different companies that came through Utah. Disney visited the BYU campus and immediately after my sophomore year they invited me to move to Orlando for a year to be the Little Mermaid in their singing production at Disney World. So when I was nineteen I moved to Orlando to work, and my eyes were opened when I saw how people were pursuing the business. That’s when I realized that I could do this and there is a path to get to Broadway. Second, I had to cope with some spiritual self-doubt at BYU. Because I grew up in Connecticut where there were very few Latter-day Saints, my testimony was born out of the fact that I was unique and had to choose on my own whether I was going to follow the LDS Church and be different than everybody else around me. I took great strength in being different. Contrast that with living in Utah, where many people are LDS. For some people it’s easier to be in an environment where everybody has the gospel. But for my personality, it was the opposite. Living in Connecticut brought me so much closer to the gospel because I really had to dig deep and choose for myself. At fourteen years old I knelt down at the side of my bed and prayed, “I’ve heard my parents say this my whole life, I’ve been taught all these things, and is it really true even though nobody else around me seems to think it is?” I received a sure and strong answer to that prayer that the principles of the gospel I had been taught were indeed true, and from there my testimony grew. So I say all that to get to the point that when I eventually went to Utah, it was the first time that my testimony also got shaken. All of a sudden I was the same as everybody else, not just because of my faith, but also because I looked like everybody else, and I went to my classes and I sang like everybody else and I danced like everyone else. I had to come to grips with, “I’m not different anymore. I’m the same as everyone else and is that okay?” It was a journey for a couple years and I honestly can’t say I overcame it completely. I never questioned the Church, but it made me dig deeper and figure out again what I really believe. I have found over the years that I love being different, but I also love being the same. I know they’re such opposite thoughts to have at once, but I love that we have a gospel that brings us together and unites us, no matter where we live. It doesn’t really matter whether there’s one of us or ten million of us. If we have knowledge of our Savior that brings us together, that’s a really unique and special thing. Will you walk me through how you got from performing at Disney World at nineteen to getting to Broadway? I took a year off of school to perform at Disney World. One of the most amazing things that happened during my time in Orlando happened my very first Sunday there. I went to a singles ward and saw a really cute guy sitting in the back row of the chapel, but he was sitting next to two missionaries so I thought he was an investigator and figured I’d never see him again. By the end of church he had introduced himself as Josh, and by the end of that week he had scouted down my number from some friends and we went out on our very first date. I got home from that first date and bawled my eyes out, just sobbed because I thought, “Oh shoot, I just met my husband.” I knew it, and it was not at all anything I was thinking of or looking for or planning on at nineteen. It really caught me off guard, but we spent every single day together after that. He grew up in Orlando and was home for the summer doing an internship before returning back to BYU. He knew just as quickly as I did that we were meant to be. So while I moved to Orlando to pursue this theater dream and to be a mermaid, it quickly took a back seat to our beautifully romantic courtship. I have the fondest memories of being in Orlando and enjoying getting to know Josh and growing up and learning that there was going to be another huge phase of my life and our life together. We got married in the Salt Lake City Temple in March of 1999 and went back to Florida for a few months to finish up my contract with Disney World. Sandra Turley and Her Family That fall we moved back to Utah to finish at BYU. While I was still going to school, the touring company of Les Miserables came to Salt Lake and held an open audition for the show. There were so many people there that first day. Again, your self-esteem shakes when you walk into the hallway and so many people look like you and sing like you. But there was something that felt magical to me. I had the confidence from having been hired before, so I went in knowing that I was a little bit different. Also, most girls my age and type were there to audition for the role of Eponine, whereas I knew that I should audition for Cosette, which was actually a spiritual experience for me. Everybody wants to be Eponine because you see the show and you fall in love with this character who is in love with someone who doesn’t love her. It’s so tragic and tangible because we’ve all been there, so we want to be her and we want to sing her song. But as I started to practice at home before the audition, I really felt like I needed to sing the Cosette songs. It was a pure and true thought, a prompting that I followed, and a real game changer for my life. Had I not gone in there auditioning for the role I was supposed to get, I wouldn’t have gotten it. They called me back the second day for the role of Cosette and I sang for them, and they were wonderful. The audition went great, they were smiling, and by the end they asked to take my picture and said goodbye, with no hint whether I was going to be hired or if they were just being polite. At that point in my life, I was twenty, married for ten months, and had dreamed about Broadway, always with good intentions. I never pursued it because I wanted to be famous, to have people hear me and know me. I just really enjoyed the art of it, and that’s how it’s always been. And yet, at that age, going in and auditioning for Les Mis, being prepared, and then going home, I felt, “I am so blessed with the experiences that I’ve had, and if nothing else ever comes my way, no other big singing opportunity of worldly importance, it doesn’t really matter because I can sing forever. My voice is always here.” The phrase constantly popped into my head, “I will be perfectly content and very happy to sing with the angels in heaven, and I don’t really need anything else here to make me feel better about the talent I’ve been given.” I got to that great place of peace and acceptance, which brings confidence and security, which in turn probably allowed me to have a really good audition. Five weeks later, the Les Mis casting director called and offered me a job in New York City and told me that I had two weeks to move from Provo and start a whole new life. Everything fell into place. My husband’s job was great. He’d only been at his first post-college job for four days when I got the offer for Les Mis. When he told his boss , who was LDS, his boss asked how long we’d been married and then said we should go and they’d transfer his job to the New York office. We needed 48 hours to pray and make sure it was the right thing. We felt a great sense of peace and I heard the answer, “Yes, yes, yes. Go and enjoy it.” What are the challenges associated with a Broadway or performing career? I spent three and a half years on Broadway. I was the understudy for Cosette for a year and then got the job when they fired the girl playing the lead. Sometimes I got tired of it because it’s like the movie Groundhog Day, where it’s the same thing every day. But the themes and the stories of Les Mis are so universal that every day I found myself thinking on the themes of justice, mercy, life after death, and the Atonement, and I felt honored to be a part of the show every night. For many actors, the sex and drugs in the theater world are hard to deal with. They were not a challenge or even interesting to me. Interpersonal relationships were more of a challenge for me because I’m a people lover and a people pleaser. There are such a variety of personalities and lifestyles, with people quickly judging or labeling and assuming you can or can’t be friends. I worked so hard to have good friendships with everyone at the theater, but often, the simple fact that I was Mormon made friendship impossible. Relationships evolved through the years, some getting better, some getting worse. But it was these relationships and people’s opinions that affected me the very most. I learned that you should never label someone as merely one thing. We’re all so much more than that. You say you’re “happily retired.” What made you decide to leave the stage? It was an easy decision for me to “retire” from Broadway. After about two and a half years of marriage, we felt like we should start a family. While I wanted to stay on stage as long as possible, in essence I had mentally retired and knew that as soon as we had our first child I would be done with professional theater. But we were surprised to find that children did not come easily. I chose to undergo in vitro fertilization and had lots of drugs, tests, and shots. I would often get home from a show at midnight and then be up at 5:00 the next morning to catch the subway to be at the doctor’s for treatments. Eventually Les Mis closed and I did retire, hoping that motherhood would be coming soon. After finishing the show, I spent a few more years being a professional infertility patient and never attempted to audition for another show. My experience in Les Mis was so beautiful; I didn’t want any other show to taint the wonderful opportunity and memory that was Broadway for me. Tell us about the transition into your role as a mother? Working on Broadway was fun, but the next phase has been the most defining for me and my husband. Since IVF had been unsuccessful, we put in our papers to adopt a child and quickly got a call saying a birth mom had selected us to be parents to her child. We took our tiny baby girl home and were showered with baby things, since we didn’t have anything prior to that! We named her Eden. We spent the next few weeks in bliss, with our arms full with this perfectly gorgeous baby. Then our caseworker called and said something had come up with the birth mom, but that it would probably work out – not to worry. In New York they have a rule where the birth mom can change her mind up to 45 days after she gives up the baby. On day 42 we had to take Eden back to her birth mom. We thought it would be our Abraham experience, that we’d get to keep Eden in the end, just as Abraham got to keep Isaac and did not have to sacrifice him. But it didn’t work out that way. We talked endlessly and cried together, but in the end it didn’t work out how we thought. I’d never felt such anguish or pain or that type of loss. I prayed for peace and charity, and we were both blessed by the Atonement. I’ve never felt as close to the Savior as at that time. My husband and I became closer because we were having the same spiritual experience at the same time. We were both going through counseling and the grieving process, although we were at different stages of grief and different times. We talked and communicated a ton, and were intensely open about spiritual promptings and prayers. We clung to each other and grew together. A couple of months after Eden was gone, we prayed for Heavenly Father to be able to fix whatever was wrong with my body and that I would become pregnant. We exercised our faith in His ability to heal, even more than we had previously. The experience of having and then losing Eden gave us the testimonies we needed to raise our children the way we wanted to, to create a family of depth, and to have the marriage we wanted. Of course we wish we still had our sweet Eden, but we wouldn’t change anything that occurred because of the lessons we learned. Miraculously, we ended up having three children in three and a half years and I am now pregnant with our fourth. Even though I’m glad to be on this side of the trial, I’m glad we were entrusted with such a difficult test. So much of who we are, my husband and I, is defined by that most difficult of trials of losing our first sweet daughter. There are moments now, as a mother of soon-to-be four children, that I feel like, “I prayed so hard for these children to get here, but could we just slow down a bit? Does there have to be so much screaming?” Motherhood hit me like a ton of bricks and sometimes I feel like a failure. It’s not easy. I feel like I’m on a roller coaster as a mom and as a human being. I had preconceived notions of the kind of mom I’d be, but reality hit quickly and hard. There are things that I can say that I’m good at and other things I didn’t think I would struggle with as much…such as patience! Sandra Turley How do you balance work and family, deciding which events to perform at now? Two years ago I had a spiritual prompting to pursue my next creative venture and record an album. It’s an offering I knew I was supposed to give. Les Mis was a precursor that Heavenly Father gave to use me as a voice to share the Spirit and the gospel with others. I feel so strongly that Heavenly Father gave me that credit so that others would listen to me, and I feel like I’m supposed to give the offering of my time and talents to do something for Him. It’s a work in progress, trying to balance everything. We started the process one and a half years ago with recording the album, but I still find myself not sure. I’ve called some friends who work and have kids to see how they manage things, and I’ve been praying and going with my gut on what to say yes to and what to pass on. The word that keeps coming to my mind as I try to find balance in my roles is “compartmentalize.” Kid time is kid time; work time is work time. When I do this successfully, I’m able to get more done in a shorter amount of time. How do you and your husband balance family responsibilities with your performing? Everyone helps out. Most of my events are on weekends, so my husband can be with the kids. I often return home to find that they’ve watched all the movies I said not to and eaten lots of sugar, but they are all so happy and they’ve had a chance to spend super fun time with their dad. When things get hectic, I have to remember where it all came from. How do you maintain your talent while managing three kids and a household, other responsibilities? We sing all day long in our house. Music is part of us. I’ve been blessed with a naturally healthy voice that’s fairly easy to maintain and I count that as a great blessing, especially in these busy years raising so many little children. I don’t have a lot of time to practice, but when I do practice, my children quickly run into the music room to listen and sing with me. The kids’ renditions of my songs are far more entertaining than my own! Why did you decide to do Time Out for Girls vs. Time Out for Women? What’s your message to young women or women in general? I’ve always loved young women and still feel like a teenager in many ways. I understand young women and feel that we have an honest relationship, that they’ll listen to me and hear the message I have to share. I have found that the young women go into my events to listen to a Broadway star, but come out thinking about their relationship with their Heavenly Father, which is all that I could ever hope for. The message that I feel prompted to share with them is about fulfilling the measure of your creation and how innately creative each one of us is. We’ve all been created by Heavenly Father and we then in turn have a chance to create. It’s up to us to talk to Him and ask Him to help us see what He wants us to offer to the world. When I’m speaking to a group, I preface each song with an explanation of what’s happening in the story and then connect it to spiritual and doctrinal concepts. In essence, I am teaching familiar and simple gospel doctrine in a different language – the language of Broadway stories and music. This language communicates strongly to me and I see how quickly it touches many of the youths’ hearts as well. I strongly believe that people need to hear the gospel in their own language, whatever that may be, and I’m offering them a different way to hear and feel the Spirit. What advice would you give to those wanting to pursue a career on the stage? You have to have a rock solid testimony, which will allow you make the right decisions when faced with difficult situations. You can’t say that you’ll get your testimony once you start performing. It has to already be there or else you, your spirit, won’t survive. Performing beats down on your soul and asks you to question everything about who you are. If there is anything else you want to do and you can live without performing, then pursue that. However, if you can’t live without performing, then you HAVE to pursue it. What do you foresee for yourself in the future? I see my CD and speaking to the girls as a time and offering right now. It’s not a job. It’s fun, an honor. I will perform for the rest of my life, whether it’s twice a month or once every ten years. As a mother, I want to continue to foster a home with the music and stories that I love and where we help each child develop their individual talents. I’m excited for the day when my kids “get it” and they get their own testimony of the things that my husband and I have been teaching them about the Savior and the Atonement. That is the absolute best future I can foresee. At A Glance Name: Sandra Turley Location: North Potomac, MD Age: 33 Marital status: Happily married Children: 6 year old daughter, 4 year old son, 2 1/2 year old daughter Occupation: mom, singer/performer/speaker Schools Attended: BYU Languages Spoken at Home: English and British (we do a lot of funny accents and my oldest daughter is certain that speaking in a British accent is a different language) Favorite Hymn: “I Know That My Redeemer Lives” On The Web: www.sandraturley.com Interview by Nollie Haws.

Since her childhood days in Alberta, Canada, Dana Allison has been an advocate for women, and now she has dedicated her life to saving other lives: those of new mothers in underdeveloped countries. The 32-year-old executive director of Women’s World Health Initiative shares her experiences starting a nonprofit, transitioning to married life in England, and her hopes for women everywhere. How did your upbringing shape your opinions about women and different cultures? I grew up in a household where nothing—housework, occupations or abilities—was categorized by gender. So I never understood the idea that “this is what men do” and “this is what women do.” I was really grateful for that. My parents encouraged me and my siblings to do whatever we could to make the most difference. Marriage was always implicit, but it was never used to stop or think twice about the field we chose. Something else I appreciate about my parents: They never described individuals by their physical features. They wouldn’t refer to someone as “fat” or “black” or “Indian.” Instead, they’d say, “the man in the red hat” or “the woman in the blue dress.” Because of that, I wasn’t really aware of those differences. We grew up in a small northern Alberta town where there was one Indian family and almost everyone else was white. We were friends with them. We had them over to our house, and I didn’t realize they were different. I think that’s what definitions do—they put people into boxes and limit their potential. The gospel teaches that we’re all children of God. Our potential is eternal. The arbitrary settings we put on others are limiting. I resent that. My mom was sensitive to things said about women, and so I also became sensitive at a young age to what was said and advertised about women. I began to feel this inner fight because my life was defined by much more than just my physical attributes or sexuality. In fact, I was an ugly, fat girl. My life and success was never defined by the way I looked—I was always depending on my intellect or humor or confidence or personality. As I got older, I felt compelled to combat sexual exploitation of girls and women in pornography, advertising and, especially, the sex trade because of its awful effects on women and society. Since I can remember, I have had a deep compassion for individuals in vulnerable circumstances. Do you remember, in the 1980s, there was that huge famine in Ethiopia and they showed all of those commercials of the fat-bellied children with flies? My mom tells the story that when I was about five, I was watching one of those “Save the Children” or “World Vision” commercials, and I was crying, asking her what I could do to help. I was very disturbed by the fact that people were suffering. It is just a part of me. It’s a part of my soul. Dana Allison What happened after you left home? I went to the University of Chicago. I loved the liberal arts education; I really learned how to think rather than what to think. I wrote my thesis about single African-American women in the welfare system. During the latter part of my college years, I became intellectually inactive in the church. It was an excuse not to live right, and I knew that. So, after graduation, I moved back to Canada and prepared to serve a full-time mission. I was called to the Salt Lake Temple Square Mission. After my mission, I went to Taiwan to study Mandarin Chinese, and eventually to the University of Utah for medical school. When did the idea of Women’s World Health Initiative (WWHI) first come about? I’ve always been interested in international work. During medical school, I worked in the Mae La refugee camp, along the Burma-Thailand border. The camp was home to about 50,000 refugees—I had never seen that kind of daily human suffering. At first, I had what some call “white man’s guilt.” Every night I would go home depressed, thinking I had too much. I expressed these feelings to the regional director of the UN Refugee Agency, and he told me, “You didn’t choose where you were born, but you choose what you do with the resources you’ve been born with.” I felt the Spirit tell me I could do something to help, but I still didn’t know exactly how. Dana Allison During my time in the refugee camp, I saw how once women entered the sex trade, it was too late, they were forced into an addiction to drugs or too psychologically injured from being raped multiple times a day. They came from rural, impoverished, uneducated areas. Many were orphaned. I started to see a common thread: If the mother is there, the child isn’t orphaned. If the mother is there, the economic input increases in the family. If the mother is there, the education, health and nutrition of the family improves. That’s when I decided that if you really want to help, you focus on keeping the mother alive and well. A few months later, I went to a global health conference where I heard Dr. Youssoupha Ndiaye speak about maternal mortality in his rural village in Saraya, Senegal. It was then that I knew how to help. I had a strong impression that I was supposed to help prevent maternal mortality in rural Senegal. I could not sit by and watch while mothers died giving birth. I began researching nonprofits but couldn’t find anything that I thought worked in an economically sustainable way. Someone who believed in the cause gave me some initial funding and, in 2008, I started WWHI. WWHI combines the gospel’s welfare philosophy of teaching a man to fish and the understanding that we’re all children of God. I knew that these women were capable and smart, they just didn’t have the same opportunities as I did. WWHI believes strong, healthy mothers are the heart of robust communities and countries. Our vision is that women and girls in developing countries have positive, healthy experiences with pregnancy and childbirth. That they know their options, can make their own choices and access quality care. By saving mothers, families are preserved and communities thrive. Dana Allison What’s helped you stay motivated in your nonprofit work? When there are budgetary constraints or other challenges that come with nonprofit work, I go back to those moments when I felt the Spirit. I regain hope through memory of the Spirit, and that’s when a door opens. Sometimes we feel prompted to do something—something scary—and we take the first steps. And then when something doesn’t seem to work out, we so easily say, “Well, this must not be what God wanted because it isn’t working out.” Maybe that’s true sometimes, but I actually don’t believe that. When God offers something great, he requires something great in return. You have to respond in a manner that requires the Atonement. I certainly couldn’t have conjured the idea of WWHI by myself. In addition to your work at WWHI, you recently got married. Tell me about your new family. I met my husband on LDSSingles.com. I bought a one-month membership for $14.95—it was the best $14.95 I’ve ever spent. Shortly after I married him, I also became a full-time mother to his three children. Becoming a mother of three instantaneously has been a big transition. It requires later nights and earlier mornings in order to accommodate my work and home life. I’ve realized there are some things I have to give up, and focus on what’s most important, both in work and in the family. Like starting this nonprofit, when things get hard, I remind myself of the moments I felt guided by the Spirit. Is there anything else you’d like to add? If I could give one message to women, it’s this: Don’t limit yourselves. Don’t let the world devalue the greatness inside of you. And don’t judge each other for choosing different paths. Whether a woman chooses to stay at home or work or do both—it’s irrelevant. What matters is that she can choose, and her choices are as equally valid as anyone else’s. At A Glance Name: Dana Allison Location: Lidlington, Bedfordshire, United Kingdom Age: 32 Marital status: Married Children: Stepmother to three Occupation: Founder and Executive Director, Women’s World Health Initiative Schools Attended: University of Chicago, University of Utah School of Medicine Languages Spoken at Home: English (proper English now!) Favorite Hymn: “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” On The Web: www.wwhi.org Interview by Kathryn Peterson.

Currently the president of Brigham Young University’s Understanding Same Gender Attraction club, Bridey Jensen has spent her college years coming to terms with the fact that she is gay. Although she’s suffered through years of struggle and depression, Bridey now feels more confident and loved by God than she ever has before. Growing up, how did you come to terms with your sexuality within the context of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? I was born into the Church–both my parents and grandparents are members, and I have Mormon pioneer ancestors. I didn’t start understanding what I was feeling until I was about fourteen or fifteen years old. When I was thirteen, we had a missionary fireside for the youth. We asked the missionaries about some of the issues that nonmembers have with the Church. Somebody asked, “I have a friend who is a homosexual. What does the Church say in regards to that? Where in the scriptures can I send them?” I think the missionary was kind of joking in his response, but he didn’t answer with very much tact. He said, “Just tell them that they’re an abomination because that’s what the scriptures say.” I left the fireside that night thinking that that was the Church’s stance on homosexuality. Growing up, I felt that I really stood out. The group of girls in my Young Women’s class were really into boys. They would do the weirdest things all of the time for boys. I understood that girls were supposed to like guys, but I didn’t get it. I went to my mom and told her that I wasn’t like these girls, and I didn’t understand why. It frustrated me because I felt like I didn’t fit in. My mom told me that I would like boys one day. So, I thought that one day it would be okay. In high school I started to have romantic feelings for women. I had a hyperawareness of women–more so than any of my friends. I wondered what it would be like to kiss certain women, and I would think, “She’s really beautiful.” Then I would think, “I’m not supposed to be thinking that!” I can’t describe how much I hated that I felt that way. I tried to hide it. I didn’t have the words to describe what I felt. At one point I was the Young Women’s Laurel class president, and all of the moms would come up to me and tell me how much they loved me. I would always thank them while thinking, “You wouldn’t be saying that if you knew what I was.” Bridey Colleen Jensen I thought the only place I would be accepted was what I understood at the time to be the “gay scene” or “gay lifestyle,” which I thought consisted of bars, drinking, drugs, and promiscuity. Because of this, I thought, “I can’t be gay. I’m not like that. I don’t want that kind of life.” It really scared me. By the time I was seventeen years old, I still hadn’t told a single person about my sexuality. I was terrified to even pray about it. During my senior year in high school, I started to push away from the Church; I thought that would be easier on myself and on my family. I kept attending church, but internally I disconnected myself from spiritual things. I would go to church but I didn’t want to be there. When my friends would go out and party, I would go with them. My parents didn’t know what was going on inside of me. We fought almost every night, and I would just scream, “You don’t understand!” The first person I came out to was my best friend in high school. I told her that I was sexually attracted to women. She told me to stop. She started asking me a lot of questions and concluded that I had homosexual feelings because I had a weak testimony of the Church. What was your experience like when you started college at Brigham Young University (BYU)? I came to BYU feeling really scared that I would be found out. I decided I wouldn’t go to church and wouldn’t talk to people. Nobody would know me there. I mentally prepared myself to be alone and friendless. I thought I could go through life like that, and nobody would hate me because of my sexuality. As a freshman, I had one of the bubbliest roommates. One day she found me crying before church started–I didn’t want to go. She asked me what was wrong, and I told her, “I think I’m gay. I don’t always feel like going to church, and that’s really hard for me. I don’t know what to do.” She said, “I love you. I don’t know what to do, but I love you.” She suggested I go talk to the bishop. When I went to talk to the bishop, I told him I was scared and that I thought I might be gay. I told him I was afraid that I would be kicked out of BYU. My bishop said, “That’s not true. If you haven’t acted on it in any way, then you’re fine. You’re just like anybody else here at BYU who hasn’t acted on their feelings.” That was the first time that I realized I could still be a good Mormon and have this trial in my life. I hit a lot of roadblocks throughout the rest of my time at BYU. I kept trying to go to church but I would get really discouraged when I didn’t feel the Spirit or when I realized I didn’t have a strong testimony about something. A year or so after I talked with my bishop, I got so depressed I could barely get out of bed. I hated myself. I would pray, “God, please take this away from me. Please change me. If I read my scriptures every day, if I pray every day, if I fast every day, if I go to the temple as much as I can…what will it take for You to take this away?” I decided I didn’t want to be alone anymore. I obviously couldn’t stand in the middle of Brigham Square and shout, “I’m gay, and I’m lonely and suicidal! Someone talk to me!” I searched everywhere on the internet; I don’t think I did my homework for three or four weeks. I found a group called Understanding Same Gender Attraction (USGA) on an obscure blog post. That post led me to several links until I found USGA again on BYU’s 100-hour board. Someone had written on the board, saying, “I’m a lesbian but I’ve also been a member of the Church my whole life. I don’t want to be alone. Is there a place for me here at BYU?” My friend Brandon, who was the president of USGA at the time, responded, “We just started this group and it meets at this time and on this day and in this place. You should come!” I read this and thought, “I’m not alone.” I went to the USGA meeting, and there were about twelve people there. It was a breakthrough moment for me. I didn’t even talk the entire first meeting. I just sat there and listened. The members of the group were saying things that I had felt; I thought I was the only one who had felt those things. It was amazing to not feel alone anymore. Afterwards, I ran home and said to my roommate, “I found them!” I just sat there and cried because I wasn’t alone anymore. Eventually, Brandon and I started talking to sociology classes on campus about being gay and Mormon at BYU. The first time was absolutely terrifying. Afterwards everyone was very accepting. A girl from my freshman dorm was there and said, “I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.” We ended up visiting six or seven classes every semester. Can you tell me more about your involvement with USGA? USGA was started by Brandon and a small group of his friends, and I am now the acting president. The club is for BYU students but it’s not sponsored by BYU. We have our meetings on campus and the administration is okay with that. The club is available for students who want to talk about being gay and Mormon. We wish more straight students would come as it’s not just a support group. We say, “If you have questions, come ask us. If you have relatives that are dealing with this, come talk to us. Use us as a resource.” We try to talk about the issues we don’t understand. We always bring in some sort of spiritual component. I think what makes us different is the fact that we all want to stay in the Church and believe that God needs to be with us, God needs to lead us. One day we talked about revelation and faith, and it turned into a testimony meeting. People talked about the moment they realized that things were going to be okay. Many had stopped asking God, “Please make me straight,” and instead asked, “God, what do you want me to do?” They felt peace. In one way or another they had a confirmation that God is okay with them exactly the way they are. How do people generally react when they find out you’re attracted to women? I don’t expect a lot of people to feel perfectly fine about my homosexuality. I don’t expect people to be okay with it immediately. Everyone has to go through their own process. Generally, though, people have exceeded my expectations. I did have trouble with some roommates at BYU. I was featured in a book called Gay Mormons? by Brent Kirby that goes a little bit more into my personal life. Before I moved in, my roommates Googled my name and read my section of the book. One of my roommates kind of flipped out. She wouldn’t come home if I was there. She tried to move out. She reported me to the landlord, BYU Housing, and the Honor Code Office. None of the roommates liked it when my friends came over and openly talked about homosexuality. I felt depressed and considered suicide. I always feared that people would hate me or hate this part of me that I didn’t even ask for. I thought, “The only way my roommates will stop hating me is if I stop being gay. But I’ve tried that before, and it doesn’t work. The only way to stop being gay is to kill myself.” In my mind, that was a legitimate path. It was horrible. You are so confident now! How have you arrived at a place in your life where you don’t let that kind of negativity affect you? Getting involved in USGA really helped me. Seeing how much I was making a difference in other people’s lives helped me get my energy back. Some things had to change inside of me. I don’t feel afraid of telling people now. I’m okay with who I am, and I’m okay with how I feel. It’s this newfound freedom. That’s taken me the better part of a decade to figure out. I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t imagine feeling any other way, as if some part of me would be gone. Going through this has shaped me so much. I can’t imagine it being different. I still struggle with some things: I still feel like I don’t have a place at church. I don’t know how I fit in there. I know I want a family; I don’t how to explain that. I’m 23 years old so I don’t think I need to explain everything right now. What would you like to see change in regards to how we as Mormons approach homosexuality? I love the Church. I love the gospel, and I love what it represents. I love Christ and the fact that we have someone to follow. When I go to church I don’t always see that. I often don’t feel like there’s a place for me. I don’t feel that being gay should be a shameful thing. I would love to see a change in the way people talk about homosexuality in the Church, including the way people treat it and the way they act. It shouldn’t be a shameful thing for someone to say, “I’m dealing with this in my life. I’m dealing with the fact that I’m gay, and I don’t know how that fits in with the plan that the Church has.” It’s a struggle feeling like you don’t have a space in the Church or in God’s plan because of who you are internally. That is a lonely, lonely place to be. I’m trying to change this culture of shame in part through USGA. Let’s get over our judgments and realize that we’re here to go through hard things so that we can become like our Heavenly Father, and we’re here together so that we can help each other through those hard things. We are all children of God, and we should embrace and support each other no matter what. At A Glance Name: Bridey Colleen Jensen Location: Provo, UT Age: 23 Marital status: Single Occupation: Statistician and full time Student at BYU Schools Attended: BYU Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: “I Stand All Amazed” Interview by Krisanne Hastings.

You grew up in a polygamous home in Salt Lake City. Would you tell us about your home environment growing up? When I was born, my dad had 3 wives. He married 3 more women when I was 8. There were about 20 children living at home at any one time. In total my dad has 47 children born to 5 women. I was never lonely, and it was a lot of fun having all those brothers and sisters because I had my best friends living and playing with me. Our home was a kind of fortress. We didn’t really associate or interact with anyone outside of our family and didn’t go into public a lot except to go to the grocery store or something like that. We didn’t go to school: education was not part of our experience. No one in my family went past the 6th grade. My dad may have graduated high school, but I don’t know a lot about my parents’ education because it just wasn’t emphasized. The girls would stay home to cook and clean. They would usually get married somewhere between the ages of 18-20 through an arranged marriage. When the boys were in their teens they would get jobs in construction or working in a warehouse to help support the family. My family had some financial struggles with all those mouths to feed, but I wasn’t ever very aware of it. Everyone helped out and did their part, and some of the Moms worked to help pay the bills. We were good at being frugal, and there was always enough. Clothing was another distinct part of my upbringing. The girls always wore long-sleeved dresses that covered our collar bones and also had to completely cover our arms and legs. We also didn’t wear makeup or jewelry and always wore our hair done up. Was your family ever in danger of legal trouble for living polygamously? Not really. Some of my ancestors were. My grandparents had to hide from the law, and my great grandparents served time in prison for practicing plural marriage. But today the law has taken a step back and there isn’t as much prosecuting of people who live polygamously. We did have to be careful about not being in school. If someone came to the house during school hours we all had to hide and pretend we weren’t there. So there were efforts to hide your family’s lifestyle from the outside world? Yes. We had sort of a secret life. We were never supposed to acknowledge that we were from a polygamous family. The times that we did go in public people would often come up and ask us if we were polygamists, usually in a way that was quite rude; it was pretty obvious that we were from a polygamous family because of the way we dressed and the fact that there were so many of us. We had rehearsed answers to give in these situations. For example, if someone asked us how many mothers we had, we would deflect the question by saying, “Why? Did you lose one?” Or if someone asked my sisters and me if we were polygamous, we would respond that we weren’t because we weren’t even married. People usually didn’t know how to respond when we said those kinds of things. If they ever asked us how many brothers and sisters we had or any other question that was harder to get out of, we just said that we didn’t know. So you understood at least somewhat that your family was different. What sort of awareness did you have as a child about your family circumstances? Did you think you were unusual? Actually I felt that our family was normal, and everyone else was different. I remember wondering when we went in the house and closed the door if other people in the outside world continued to exist. I thought other people were just props in my world: there had to be cars on the street, and there had to be someone at the checkout counter, but other than that I wasn’t sure if any people on the outside really had lives. So the reason I didn’t think my family was unusual is that I had almost no awareness of the outside world. How was Mormonism presented and taught to you as a child? In many ways it was similar to the mainstream Mormon Church. We believed that Joseph Smith restored the true church, but that later the church abandoned some of its core principles and was no longer living the fullness of the gospel. We thought it was our calling to live polygamy until Heavenly Father put the church back in order. We also believed that the Book of Mormon was true. The second chapter of the book of Jacob talks about polygamy, and my Dad used that passage to teach us that when the Lord commands that we live it, we do, but we must live it righteously. In Jacob’s time the people were wicked and not living it correctly, but we believed polygamy was sanctioned for us in our time. What led you to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Growing up I’d had questions from reading the scriptures. I wondered about temples and also about missionary work, for example, but the answers I’d get from my family about these things never really satisfied me. When I was 12 I prayed about my questions, and I remember feeling peace and like the answer was to just trust my parents. I know now that for that point in my life that was the only thing I could do. It wasn’t until later that I would be more mature and ready to know the truth and act on it. When I was 21 and living in Bluffdale, Utah, a good friend invited me to take some institute classes. (I later learned that she had felt strongly prompted to approach me even though we had previously been complete strangers.) I was really bored and didn’t have anything better to do with my time, so I accepted. I took those institute classes for a year. We studied a lesson on the 17 Evidences of the True Church. Going to those classes raised a lot of concerns for me, (many of the same concerns from when I was younger) specifically about church history. One thing that struck me was that within days of the restoration of the church, Joseph Smith sent out missionaries to teach people about it. From that day on, the Church has always had missionaries. I realized that the spreading of the gospel through missionary work has always been a vital part of the true church, both in modern times and in Christ’s day. The same thing is true of temple work: Joseph Smith received revelations about bringing the temple ordinances back to the earth because they’ve always been an integral aspect of the gospel. So I had this strange and uncomfortable realization that if what my parents had taught me was correct, then the mainstream Church had gone astray over 100 years ago, and we were the only ones living it correctly. And yet we hadn’t sent out a single missionary or built a single temple in that time, so it didn’t make sense. Reflecting on these things, there was a panic moment when I began to wonder if everything I’ve ever been taught to believe wasn’t true. I would become agitated and start shaking from fear at the thought. My dad was basically the prophet of our church, and the possibility that what I’d learned my whole life might be false terrified me. After the lesson on the 17 Evidences, my institute teacher convinced me to take the missionary lessons to answer some of my questions. I accepted, but I wasn’t really open to their message. I had the mindset of trying to prove the missionaries wrong. They taught me at the Institute building so we could keep it a secret from my family although I eventually did tell them. A few weeks into the discussions I told the missionaries I wanted to stop meeting with them, but I continued to attend Institute. And I still prayed and thought a lot about the Church. This went on for about a year. I had become very close with the Andersons, an LDS family that lived down the road from us. I often went to their house at night to join them in their family scripture study and prayer. At this point I was seriously trying to figure out what I should do concerning the Mormon Church. One night we were reading Mosiah chapter 18. I remember thinking that somehow the answer about my future with the Church was somewhere in that chapter. I was particularly struck by verse 10, which talks about having baptism be the desire of our hearts. So I went home and thought about what we’d read. The next day at Institute we read the exact same chapter. My teacher had us go around and each read a verse. When we got to my turn I read verse 10 again. But then I took notice when the next person read verse 11, which talks about people clapping their hands for joy because of their desire to be baptized. Driving home that night I realized that I would do that: I was so excited at the idea of getting baptized that I would clap my hands for joy. It was a huge revelation to me; the thought that I could be happy to be a member of the Church. The next day at Institute I realized again that I did want to be baptized but still had some things holding me back. I was afraid of so many things, like my family’s reaction and also the huge life changes that would inevitably come. But mostly I was just afraid that it was wrong. If what my family had taught me was true and I left it, I was sure I would go to hell. My dad and every other person I’d grown up with believed in their plural marriage, and the fact that I might not believe it not was huge. My eternal salvation was hanging on my decision of whether or not to be baptized, and I felt like I was stepping over a cliff. So I prayed to Heavenly Father and told Him that I needed to know He would be there for me through all of these concerns. At that moment, the institute choir was singing Rob Gardner’s “My Kindness Shall Not Depart From Me.” It was as though someone had turned the volume up, and I remember hearing the line, “So hold on thy way, for I shall be with thee and mine angels shall encircle thee, doubt not what thou knowest.” I started crying because I knew that my prayer was answered. After that I found my institute teacher and told him what had happened. He helped me see that I was finally ready to be baptized. So later that night I went over to the Andersons and, after having prayer and scripture study, asked Brother Anderson if he would baptize me. I was baptized in May 2004. How did your family react to your decision to be baptized, and what is your relationship like with them now? My dad was a little emotional and upset. He had said things like, “You better be sure that you’re doing it for the right reasons.” My mom was pretty harsh. At first she told me that I wouldn’t be allowed to be with my sisters anymore. In the long run, though both my parents ended up being pretty understanding. My family has even been to church a few times and activities with me, like when I graduated from Institute for example. So their attitude about it has softened over time. I’m still very close to many of my siblings, though my being a member has made it so I’m not as close to all of them. I often go home to see my family. So I feel like I’ve been able to maintain a good relationship with them. Converting to the LDS faith can be a big change for anyone, but it especially was so for you. Can you explain about the changes you experienced? There were so many changes. When I was baptized in 2004 I thought the only thing that would be different would be where I went to church and that I would obviously have another kind of marriage. I convinced myself that I wouldn’t change. But little by little I’ve had to change my whole life. When someone joins the church they aren’t necessarily expected to drop all their cultural traditions. But sometimes culture can get in the way. My experience was such that the religion and the culture were so intertwined that I couldn’t let go of one without the other. So in a sense, when I chose to join the Church, I chose to be a part of the LDS culture. So what were specific ways that your life changed? Living on my own was a huge change. When I was baptized the Church required that I move out of my family’s house. I was 22 and had never lived away from home. No one I knew had either, so this was a very new and strange concept for me. Over the years I had saved up $900 through teaching piano lessons. I found the cheapest apartment I could in Provo and lived off that money while I attended Utah Valley University. Later I got offered a position working at a hotel and theater in Branson, Missouri for a summer. That was my first real job, so that was another change. Dating was another challenge. I had grown up expecting an arranged marriage and was told to not talk or associate with boys at all. So going from that mindset to having to date and put myself out there was difficult. My mom taught me that if you don’t talk to boys or have any romantic experience or fall in love, you will have your whole heart to give to your husband. But I’ve come to learn that keeping your heart locked up in a box and never feeling any pain doesn’t keep it anymore complete or pure than if you go through the refining process of having your heart broken and then grow stronger. If you’ve never been vulnerable before then all you have to give to your husband is inexperience. Changing the way I dressed was really scary. I didn’t change until over a year after I joined the church since it wasn’t a doctrinal requirement. During that first year I initially didn’t think there was a problem because the Church taught modesty, and I was simply dressing more modestly. But it left me with some internal struggle because, if I wasn’t supposed to change the way I dressed, that meant that on some level everyone else in the church was wrong. I thought that I was living the higher standard. In my mind I didn’t think women in the Church were bad if they wore short sleeves, but I felt like it would be wrong if I did it. I felt very confused by these different standards of modesty. I had this inner turmoil because I didn’t know what I would teach my daughters about it. Also I wondered how practically I could keep my own unique dress standards and find someone to marry. My institute teacher forced me to further examine these questions. He told me that I should begin to dress like other women in the Church and give up my ultra-conservative clothing. At first I was a little taken back because I thought it was just a cultural thing and that I didn’t have to change my clothes to be a Mormon. And to some extent I still believe that I don’t have to look like everyone else to live the gospel. But the thing was that it wasn’t just cultural in my mind. I would look at women with nail polish and think they were evil. I thought to myself, “I am a part of a Church that allows this wickedness.” But my teacher helped me understand that I was the living the traditions of my fathers, and that as long as I did that it would stop my progression in the church. I realized that he was right, and that I needed to stop making myself an exception. So I learned to let go of my conservative clothing. Looking back I’m very grateful that my teacher talked to me about those things. So all in all it has been really hard to give up 100% of my old life. It has been a long process over the last 8 years, and there are still things that I’m having to change. All of these things that I do differently now that I’m a member have continually challenged my testimony and tested my faith. I’m not sure I would have joined if I had known there would be so many changes. But I’m glad I did. What do you think about the ways that polygamy is discussed within the Church? Well, when someone says something about polygamy in church I of course pay close attention. Occasionally something is said that I know is incorrect, but I usually don’t say anything because I don’t want to make a scene. I think the Church tries to downplay it because it’s so easy to sensationalize it. There is more to our LDS history of polygamy than what most people know, but I understand why we don’t get into it very much because it can be confusing for people and it’s not relevant. The truth is that most church members don’t understand polygamy. What are your thoughts on the doctrine of polygamy? I still feel that polygamy is very sacred when lived correctly. Polygamy is a celestial principle that was revealed to Joseph Smith. We know that it will be lived to some extent in the celestial kingdom. I don’t believe that everyone who lives there will practice it, but some will. The Church’s teachings never say that it is not a true principle, just that it’s not a principle that we’re currently living. The leaders of the Church are very clear that it is not something that should be lived now. But in times where the Lord commanded it, it was correct. So I still have a lot of respect for polygamy and believe that it is very sacred. What do you think of media portrayals of modern polygamy through shows like “Sister Wives” and “Big Love”? I have mixed feelings on those shows. First, I often think they are fascinating. We’re used to watching portrayals of other people, but it’s very interesting to see how people portray us. It’s like how many members of the Church are interested to see a Mormon character on television. It’s funny to watch others portray something that they don’t understand. Sometimes they are so off that it’s comical. But every once in awhile, they get something right. Mostly though, I’m offended because all the shows I’ve seen like that are trying to take advantage of the sensationalism of polygamy just to get on television. I grew up to believe that plural marriage was a sacred, religious principle, so I feel like they are mocking and degrading something very spiritual to get attention and be in the spotlight. Does the fact that you grew up in a polygamous home make other people uncomfortable? Yes. In dating it can be especially challenging. Although I’m not embarrassed or ashamed of my past, it’s not something that I want to bring up on a first date. And yet not talking about it implies I have something to hide. For most people, it’s a negative thing, but it’s not for me. Growing up in a polygamous home is too much a part of where I came from to answer all the first date questions without explaining it, so it can be hard. Sometimes I like to have fun and sort of freak people out about it when they think they know all about polygamy. Like recently I was talking to this guy about it. He didn’t know that I grew up that way. I egged him on and got him to tell me everything he knew (or thought he knew) about it. Then I sprang it on him that I had grown up in a polygamous home. It was fun to watch him squirm. So I can definitely have a sense of humor about it. The reverse is also true: the fact that I am a member sometimes makes my family uncomfortable in social situations. For example, a few months ago I went to St. George with my mom and some other women from her community for a business trip. There was a man we met there who had questions about the Church. He was asking these polygamous women about what Mormons believed. These women were trying to pass themselves off as members of the mainstream church and brush their polygamy under the rug so they wouldn’t have to talk about it. Some of the answers they were giving were not exactly correct, so I had to chime in and give the right answer. For example, when he asked if Mormons drink coffee, they would say, “Some do, some don’t. It’s more of a suggestion.” I felt the need to step in and say, “Actually, no, it’s not a suggestion. Mormons don’t drink coffee.” At one point, the man asked, “Is everyone here Mormon? Are you all members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?” The women all replied yes. Again I had to cut in and say that they were not, and that I was only one present who was. It was somewhat of an uncomfortable situation because all these women thought I was being condescending. I wasn’t meaning to be, but I felt strongly that it was important to express the truth about the church. If you believe your religion, you have to stand up for it. It can be difficult to do, but our leaders have put a huge emphasis on clarifying misconceptions about the Church, and I want to follow that counsel. Looking back I’m sure we left that man pretty confused, but I would rather that than leave him with false information about the church. What’s in your future? I just graduated with my Associates Degree in Communications and I’m working on getting my Bachelors. That is unheard of for anyone from my home community. I’m also writing a book about my experiences. And obviously I want to have my own family. Do you know of others who grew up in a polygamous home but then left to join the Church? I know quite a few actually. They usually leave the polygamous lifestyle and then later find the Church. I have connected with them some over the years. We never have had an official support group for former polygamists. Maybe we should. That’s part of the reason I wrote the book: to reach out to anyone else who might have had a similar experience because I felt so alone. Thankfully I’ve been blessed with good friends over the year who’ve supported me and helped me make some of the transitions. You’ve mentioned that you would have had an arranged marriage if you had continued to live your family’s lifestyle. Is it a relief that you won’t be in a polygamous marriage, or are there things you wish you had from that life? I’m 100% grateful for where I am now. Two years ago I wouldn’t have been able to say that. I felt conflicted because I knew if I hadn’t joined the Church I would already be married, having children, and with all the good friends I grew up with. At the time I felt robbed of that experience. But I don’t feel that way anymore. Even though I’m 30 and unmarried I wouldn’t trade being a member of the true Church because of all the blessings and knowledge that come with having the gospel in my life. Things haven’t gone exactly how I’ve planned or wanted, but still I’m glad to be where I am at this point. At A Glance Name: Vilate Nielsen Location: Provo, UT Age: 30 Marital status: Single Convert: May 2004 Schools Attended: Utah Valley University Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: “Lead Kindly LIght” On The Web: http://acowintheocean.wordpress.com/ Interview by Katherine Wilkinson.

As the 19-year-old daughter of a Communist leader, Rostya defected from Czechoslovakia in 1969 after the country was invaded. Although raised atheist, a powerful conversion experience while living in Brazil has led Rostya to a lifetime of dedicated service to the church abroad, culminating now in her position as Director of National Director for Public Affairs for Czech Republic. From Prague, Rostya vibrantly describes her life of faith and revolution. You left Czechoslovakia in 1969 after it was invaded by the Russians. How did you manage to defect? I was born in a mountainous region of Czech Republic… and my father was a colonel in the air force. He was in the Communist Party. He always wanted to fly and the Communists gave him a way to live his dream. In 1968 when I was yelling at him and telling him he was the cause of the turmoil in my country, he said he would have sold his soul to the devil to fly and that’s exactly what he did. My parents were very in to each other and my sisters and I were sort of accidents of their love. My father was tough on us. My name is a boy’s name. He wanted a son and he treated me like a son. He was a ski jumper and a very daring man, so I did skiing and gymnastics and figure skating. I was basically raised by my grandmother and grandfather cause my parents traveled so much. Because of my grandmother, I am who I am. They had a factory that they lost to the Communists and then their only daughter married a Communist… That is a story that runs right through the Czech society. I had a very happy childhood: everything was paid for by the state, all my sports, my textbooks, everything. We had a cabin in the forest where we spent two months every summer mushrooming. I go mushroom hunting to this day because I love it so much. Rostya Gordon-Smith and Her Husband, Simon at Their Home in Prague But in 1968, the Russians invaded the Czech Republic and I was right in the middle of it. It was like a curtain opened and I saw a different world. Up until that point I had been sheltered because my father was such a big deal that I did not have to comply. No one questioned my loyalty. But when the Russians invaded I was 19, and I had to make a decision to join the Communist Youth or not. I realized that I couldn’t live there anymore. What did you see behind that curtain that convinced you that you couldn’t live there anymore? All of a sudden we could listen to the BBC or the Voice of America. We suddenly had access to correct history. I didn’t feel betrayed, really, but I just realized I didn’t want to live in that society. I said, “I’m not a child anymore. I will have to join the Party or become a dissident.” I wasn’t brave enough to be a dissident. It was August 21, 1968 when we were invaded. I was going to go camping with some friends, but the phone rang and my friend was yelling, “The Russians invaded us! The Russians invaded us!” I rushed to the window and these tanks with the red star were rolling down the street with Russians behind machine guns pointing in the windows. When you live in Central Europe you’re raised with the War because it is everywhere. I had friends whose parents survived concentration camps and had tattooed numbers on their bodies… You live it there, because it was there not long before. I always thought if a war came I would just go kill myself because I couldn’t be a hero. I couldn’t take it. I lived with these horrors from my youth; heard them from the mouths of the victims. It was an extraordinary thing though because I found myself doing the opposite: I found myself saying, “I’m going to stay and fight for my country.” My college friends and I ran into the streets and started tearing down the street signs so the Russians couldn’t navigate around the city. Because we speak Russian, we staged a demonstration. There are several bridges over the river in Prague and we sat on one of the bridges. The tanks came and lined up opposite us and they raised their guns and aimed and they shot above us. Then we talked to the soldiers in Russian. Some of them didn’t even know where they were – they were young, some only 16 – and they thought they were in Germany so they were surprised we spoke Russian. We said, “What would your mother say to see you doing this?” And we would give them cakes and cookies. We basically talked them down. They were so demoralized they had to change the whole army division in Prague. Rostya Gordon-Smith with Her Three Daughters-in-Law and a Granddaughter I took photographs of the invasion in Wenceslas Square and I handed them out to foreigners so the message could get out about what was happening to us. Because I did that I was taken to a police station and beaten, but then they found out who my father was and they let me go. My father was put in prison and my mother left us all and emigrated to Vienna. I was left with my two younger sisters in Prague. I was 19, and my younger sisters were 18 and 11. I had no money. I hitchhiked to my grandmother’s house and stayed there until my father got out of prison. That was when I told my father I had to leave. My father got me a passport through a friend in the Ministry of the Interior. But I still needed a visa. One of my friends, a boy from school, was Jewish and living abroad at the time of the invasion. He arranged for me to work as a nanny for a family in London. To get a visa, you had to have a letter saying a sponsor would pay for you and take care of you, and this family wrote that letter. My father saw me off at the airport and he said, “I know that you are the only one of my children who will make it.” And those were his last words to me. I never saw him again. I left on January 3, 1969. I felt like I was free. To celebrate, I bought myself a packet of cigarettes on the plane. This is 1969. This is the height of long hair and short skirts. My grandmother had told me in England the women were very elegant and so she made me a dress of brown and white checks, wool, with a white Peter Pan color and white cuffs to my wrists. We had no pantyhose, we had instead stockings, which were shaped like the leg and had seams in the back and were held up with garters. I must have looked a sight arriving in London in 1969! When I arrived in the airport, the family that was sponsoring me was not there. I had made friends with a college boy on the airplane and he helped me call them. Even making a call on a public phone was new for me. It was a Friday evening around 7pm, and they said, “We have a houseful of company, tell her to come on Monday.” They had no idea what I had just gone through. I thought I would just live at the airport for three days, but the boy invited me to stay with some friends of his. Those college boys thought they got a pretty good deal with a Czech chick landing on their doorstep! Life with those boys was a party. People were making out on the stairs and everywhere else. All these British college students wanted to know about the invasion so I was an instant celebrity. There were three boys I lived with: one was a Welshman called Dai, one was an Englishman named Nigel, and the last was an Irishman named Jim. Three characters! Jim studied Russian so I was speaking to them in Russian. 1968 was a big student movement throughout Europe, and at home in Prague we had been led to believe that the students were beaten and oppressed and poor because that’s the way capitalist countries worked. I was sitting on the floor one night with the boys, I remember, telling about ourselves and I realized, The communists were right. These poor university students were so poor they had to roll their own cigarettes! And they had to share them! I thought, “Well, look at me! I’m from a communist country but at least I have my own cigarettes. You poor things, you have to roll your own.” It took me a while to figure out what they were rolling was not the same thing I was offering! These three boys decided to take me under their wing, even though I did move into the family’s house to nanny. One taught me how to drive a car, one taught me the rules of rugby and the last taught me how to drink Guinness. A perfect education. Life skills! They took me shopping so I didn’t have to wear my wool dress anymore. We bought a miniskirt – which I still have to this day – tight sweater and boots, and we went to the hairdresser and then to tea. I had a feeling they wanted to talk to me about something, so as we were having our tea Jim said, “Rostya, is it against your religion to shave your legs?” I said, “I have no religion. I’m an atheist. Why should I shave my legs?” He said, “Look around you. You can’t wear a miniskirt and not shave your legs.” So we went back to the apartment and they gave me their razor. There was blood everywhere! After about two weeks of working for the family as a housekeeper and nanny, I realized I couldn’t do that for long. That wasn’t the career I wanted. I was always a bit lazy at school; things came easy to me and I played truant. And so suddenly I realized without education I couldn’t get anywhere. I worked very hard. Took my English lessons, went to school, did my Cambridge Proficiency Exams and was accepted to London University. It took me a year and a half after I arrived to enroll in university. They waved the fees for school for Czech immigrants because they felt guilt about giving our country away to Hitler in 1939, but we had to prove capable of supporting ourselves. I told them my mother lived in Vienna – which was true – and she would support me – which was not true. I had very little contact with her after she left. My father had to publicly disown me. I was tried and sentenced in my absence for two years in a rehabilitation camp if I ever returned. But the British immediately gave me asylum because they knew I was in danger because of who my father was, so thankfully I never had to fear being turned in. I was a really small fry anyway; the Czech government had bigger problems than me. The British gave me a work permit, a student permit, and asylum. Rostya Gordon-Smith In the mornings, I used to go to a train station and sell newspapers in a booth and running along the train. In the evenings, after classes, I worked in a bar in a hotel shaking cocktails. I met my husband about two weeks into college at a party in a cellar. He comes from an upper class family. His father had been the military attaché to the Prague embassy, so he spoke Czech. I met Simon and we had a date and then he took me to his parents’ house for the weekend where there was a big party. As we were driving back into London, we stopped in front of Big Ben and he asked me to marry him. Our second date! And I said no. And it took two years until I finally agreed. When we got married, we got a little house in Dorset and he went off on his first engineering job to Scotland and I started my graduate work. I got my teaching diploma. He was building bridges in Scotland, gone for long periods of time. He came home every 5 weeks for about four days. That was the shape of our marriage. Then he came back one day and said, “How do you feel about going to Brazil?” I reached for the suitcase and said, “How fast?” We went to Brazil. I had a network of Czech friends in England, and my husband joked that once we went to Brazil he wouldn’t be hearing Czech for a long time. We belonged to a sports club in Brazil, and I was sitting there sunbathing and a group of American women there were very friendly and came up to me and introduced themselves. One of the women, Zaza, said, “Gordon-Smith is English. But Rostya sounds Czech.” And she started speaking Czech to me! Her family had left Czechoslovakia in about 1947 when she was a little girl, she had moved to America, married, and she was a Mormon. I invited her to my house and we were chatting away in Czech. My husband thought, “Those darn Czechs, they are everywhere!” She invited us to her house for dinner about three days later and it was the weirdest thing cause she called our house and invited us to dinner but then she said, “Bring a salad.” I put the phone down and I said to my husband, “The strangest thing just happened. We were invited to dinner and they asked us to bring food.” This was unheard of in Europe! So we went to dinner and there were these two young men in short sleeved white shirts with little black nametags… I found them rather uninteresting at dinner and just ignored them. Zaza, this Mormon friend, introduced me around to her friends and we started playing tennis with them. But none of them would show up on Sundays. We thought that was the oddest thing. We said, “Where were you?” And they were all at church. I said, “Well, fine go to church. Get it over and done with and then come play tennis with us.” And they said, “We go to church the whole day!” You were raised atheist. Was there anything in your youth that suggested you were looking for the truth or for some spiritual meaning? My grandmother wasn’t very religious, nevertheless, I remember every time I went out or had a test she’d make a cross on my forehead. I remember once she decided I should go and have some religious instructions, but it had to be all underground. So she signed me up for a Catholic Catechism class, but I was thrown out cause I drew a mustache on the Virgin Mary’s picture. That was the end of my religious education. Zaza and her husband Don were fellowshipping us, and I said to my husband, “We need to be really careful cause they are Mormons and they’re the people who do exorcisms and roll on the floor when they pray.” I had no idea. Then, they invited us to a stake conference. President Kimball came to announce the temple being built in Sao Paolo. I remember President Kimball standing there, a very small man. Everybody was singing “We Thank Thee O God for the Prophet” and he was waving. I found myself in tears. I was really moved. My husband was moved. We felt something. We quickly wrote it off as mass hysteria. But then we were invited to a fireside at the mission president’s home and it was President Tanner and President Kimball. As we were standing around outside, President Tanner said to me, “I understand you are not a member.” I said, “I am certainly not a member and I have no intention of being one.” He put his hand on my shoulder and he said, “Don’t worry. You will make a good member.” Zaza talked to me about the church all the time. She offered to drive me around to all my errands so she could trap me in the car and talk to me about the Church! Otherwise I wouldn’t listen. This way I couldn’t escape. How did her approach not affect your friendship? It was the way she did it. She was very gentle. I wouldn’t have listened except that she and her husband intrigued me. They were extremely good examples. They were ten years older than we were so they had children. I noticed how they talked to each other, the fun they had, how they were raising the children, and it struck me because I had come from a divorced family. They reminded me of my beloved grandparents. They were fun. They were normal. Rostya Gordon-Smith and Simon with Their Grandchildren At the fireside, we agreed that the missionaries could come teach us. The elders were taught to teach in Portuguese and they had this old system where they would bring a flip chart. And so they put a picture up of Joseph Smith in the Sacred Grove and asked me, “Do you believe Joseph Smith saw God and Jesus?” And I said, “Of course I don’t.” They tried suggesting that my husband and I have family prayer: we should kneel down together or across from each other and hold hands… I said, “Elders, are you giving me a lesson about religion or about sex?” So that wasn’t going anywhere. Then, we got a new a set of missionaries who I think were the sharpest missionaries I’ve ever met. They took no nonsense from me. They put me in my place. They’d drop by my house and play cards with me some afternoons! It was perfect. During one visit, the said, “The next lesson will be on repentance.” I, like anybody else, have a tremendous capacity to excuse my own wrongdoings so I thought, Bring it on! I’ll have fun with these guys. But during the lesson, the missionaries started describing the process of repentance and I stayed very quiet. “If the whole world did this,” I thought, “the world would be a different place.” It was a very profound lesson for me. The missionaries challenged me to pray about it, and I gave them my usual answer that I didn’t believe in God. They said, “That’s like standing in front of an apartment building and saying no one lives on the tenth floor. You don’t know that unless you’ve rung the doorbell.” After they left, my husband was sitting on the couch reading the paper and I was sitting at the table and suddenly my life flashed before me – all of my wrongdoings, like a film. I turned around to Simon and said, “I need to tell you, I’ve lied to you many times.” I sat up through the night and wrote letters to people, I packed up all the books I had stolen from the library – they must have been very surprised at the library to get all these books back! The next morning, I was washing dishes and I started a prayer: “If you are there, God, you need to listen to me cause I feel really awkward about this. I’m going to test this, cause I really want to know. The reason I want to know is that I pride myself on living life fully. If you are there, I want to know because if there is a God, then I’m not living my life fully. Please, answer me. I am ready to know.” I knelt down and I said, “My father in heaven…” just like the elders had taught me. I felt this heat, like someone had poured hot honey all over me, on my head and then over my shoulders and in my chest. It was like someone put their loving arms around me. It was the most amazing thing. And it reminded me of when I was a very little girl and my grandma and grandpa would hug me and read me stories. I called again, “My father in heaven!” I was calling him now, and I felt it again. I started asking questions about the Book of Mormon and having a testimony. That was early in the morning, so I called Zaza and woke her up. “I got it! I got it!” I yelled into the phone, “I got that testimony you keep on talking about!” That evening, I told Simon, “I’m getting baptized. I got this testimony that they keep talking about and I know that it’s true. So this is what you do to get one too: you kneel down, you say, ‘My Father in heaven,’ and this is what you will feel… So go, go go.” And I shooed him off into the bedroom. He went to the bedroom, and comes back and says, “Nothing.” “Well, did you fold your arms just this way and bow your head?” “Yes.” “Go back and try again.” So he went back a second time and still nothing. So I said, “I don’t know what you are doing wrong, but this is what I felt and I know it’s true. If someone put a gun to my head and said deny it, I couldn’t.” Simon said, “I’m going to get baptized with you because even though I didn’t feel the same thing, I trust you that something happened to you and the Mormons are good people.” Our baptism was scheduled quickly, but before then we went to a fast and testimony meeting with Zaza and her husband Don. That was a problem. Everyone crying. Afterwards, Don asked what I thought. I said, “I’ll tell you what I thought. It was a mass hysteria.” The Sunday before we got baptized, it was stake conference and Elder Faust was presiding. Our friend Don was in the stake presidency and he announced, “Elder Faust would like some people to come up and bear their testimony.” My heart started to pound, but I thought, “I’m certainly not going to get up there and give my testimony in front of all these people. I am not even baptized yet!” But Elder Faust was scanning the audience and nodded at me. I stood up and went to the podium, and cried and cried and shared my testimony with all those people. So much for the mass hysteria. Simon, being an Englishman, wasn’t crying along with me and afterwards Elder Faust came up and put his hand on his shoulder and said, “Simon, I know how you feel.” And then Simon cried. About 10 days after we got baptized, we got a phone call from the bishop. “I’ve got a job with the Church,” Simon said after he hung up. “Excuse me?” I said. “I am the one with the testimony. How come they gave you a job?” “I’ll be the sports director.” “No, no. They know you don’t have a testimony and they just want to keep you busy so you’ll keep coming to church. This is not an inspired calling.” So the next Sunday, I marched into the bishop’s office and I said, “This is not an inspired calling. He doesn’t have to be in this church to kick a ball around. He can do that on the beach. So you need to think of something else where he can actually gain a testimony.” The next month, Simon was called to be in the Young Men’s and that’s where he gained his own testimony. How about the relationship with your extended family? It was a disaster. We sent a letter to my parents-in-law saying we had joined the church. They sent a telegram back saying “We beseech you not to do join that sect.” My father-in-law said, “I don’t want you to bring the Book of Mormon into this house. I don’t want you to talk about your church. I don’t want you to pray in this house. And I don’t want you to muck about in your temple with me when I am dead.” He blamed me, the foreigner, for leading his son down this path to a cult. He felt Simon had been raised right and I had ruined him. This went on for years. Two of my children were born in England, then we went to Canada for a time, my father-in-law died and we went to visit my mother-in-law. She lived far away from the closest church branch, and so my three little kids said, “Let’s go to granny’s church instead!” I had gotten married at the local Church of England church and I’d taken them there so they knew about it. But before we went I told them, “You will go to the children’s Sunday School at granny’s church. You don’t say anything. If they say God and Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost are the same person, you don’t say anything. We will discuss it later and I will explain to you but this is granny’s church and you don’t talk there.” Rostya Gordon-Smith and Her Family During the sermon, it just so happened that day that the minister spoke on the passage from Matthew chapter 10 about how missionaries go two by two and shake the dust off their feet… And then he proceeded to talk about missionaries: they come, they knock on your door. They try to brainwash you, they talk about love but they don’t really love you… All this stuff about other religions. I heard a voice say to me, You need to bear your testimony to this man. I said, “No I don’t! I gave my children strict instructions that they are not to say a word and I’m going to bear my testimony?” Again I hear, “You need to bear your testimony to this priest.” I felt the spirit really strongly. People filed out and the priest stood by the door saying goodbye to the people. My mother-in-law and I approached him. I walked past him and walk out of the door. I stopped in my tracks and turned around. I said to him, “I am Mrs. Gordon-Smith’s daughter-in-law.” And his eyebrows went up and he said, “Ah, yes.” “I really liked the scriptures that you read, but I need to tell you I am a Mormon and I believe that Christ is my Savior. I consider myself a Christian.” He said, “Well, my dear, I feel you’re sincere. But you really don’t believe in this Bible. You’ve got your own Bible.” “I just felt I needed to tell you that I believe Christ is my Savior and that He is the Son of God. I’m sorry you’re not hearing me.” I headed back to the car where my mother-in-law was waiting, and I just felt she was going to let loose on me. Here it comes. She said, “May I know what you talked to the vicar about?” “I told him that I know that my religion follows Christ and that He’s my Savior and the son of God.” She was quiet for a minute, and then said, “You know, Rostya, I never thought I would tell you this, but I admire you for doing that. I could never stand up for my religion like you did.” That afternoon, over lunch, she said, “I understand that you bless your food before you eat. Would you like to say the grace?” That night, I was kneeling beside the bed with the children and they said, “Let’s ask Granny to join us.” And she did join us, in fact she said the Lord’s Prayer with me and the kids that night. That’s why I had that prompting. It wasn’t for the darn vicar, it was for her, to change her attitude towards our beliefs. When I talk about conversion, the baptism was just the physical act of it. But the conversion of my mind and my whole being and my desires and my goals and values… those were a revolution in my life. The first revolution in my life was when I left home, and the second one was my conversion to the gospel. I did have a third revolution. That was when I realized that people in the Church are not perfect. It took me quite a while to realize that. I was in a honeymoon period in the church for a long time. After Brazil we went back to England, and then to Canada. I really started having different eyes when I went to Canada and I got mixed up with Americans. For me, the church was church, it had no gender, it had no nationality. I loved everybody and everybody loved me cause we were brothers and sisters. And then in the mix of Canadians and Americans, it was American church. I remember fighting with somebody cause they wanted to put up an American flag in the church on the Fourth of July. On Halloween, we would have church Halloween parties. And I said, “Show me in the scriptures, show me in the manuals, where it says we have to celebrate Halloween at church.” I would even get rid of Santa Claus because it has no bearing at church. It’s not that I would be purist; I just did not like the penetration of these things. Then I realized that there are two different things: there is a gospel and there is a culture. A folklore. For me that folklore is really dangerous because people begin to be sheep, and I don’t mean the sheep of Christ. Sheep in a sense that they are comfortable, and they go through the motions, and it seems they have blinders on. And then they become judgmental, intolerant, you have to fit a mold, in dressing, in speaking, in hairstyle. So there was a third revolution for me when I had to reconcile my testimony and my belief and figure out how to keep my faith pure. What are the tools that keep your faith intact? I learn for myself if things need to be essential parts of what I believe or if they’re not. For example, after we got baptized, we were surprised to learn about garments. We didn’t know about those before we got baptized. I was angry to learn about them. In Brazil, clothes under your clothes in the middle of summer? It seemed crazy. It really bothered me. I knew I wouldn’t go through the temple until I had a testimony of the garment. So I prayed and prayed. And one night I had a dream. I was taken up on the top of a busy street in our city in Brazil, and I was hovering over. A voice talked to me and said,” Look down. Do you see the lights?” I saw people walking below, and some people had light coming off of them. They were brighter than others. And I heard, “Those are people who wear the garments.” So when I need confirmation, I get it. I very strongly believe that it’s dangerous to blindly follow. I don’t take my commitment lightly. Even though some things about the church organization drive me nuts sometimes, I believe nowhere, no other organization, has people who so closely do what they say. As a group, we are strange, we’ve got righteous and unrighteous people, we’ve got honest and dishonest members… I have no illusions, no rose-colored glasses. But I think that as a group, we are the closest to doing what we say we believe. Our church is an enormous movement for good in this world. I want to be a part of it. I have served in the church in many callings. From Relief Society President to Young Women’s president. I served in Sunday School, and participated in many activities. Now I have a calling that I feel I have prepared for all my membership years. I have been called to be the National Director for Public Affairs for Czech Republic. I love this calling because it challenges my belief, faith and strength and gives me the opportunity to talk about our faith to non-members. I love the challenge and I feel my Heavenly Father’s guidance and support. This year, particularly, is interesting as the “Mormon Moment” ideas penetrated even into my country. My main challenge and the goal I was charged with when I was called is: “To bring the church in Czech Republic out of obscurity and darkness.” I shall do my best! At A Glance Name: Rostya Gordon-Smith Location: Prague, Czech Republic Age: 62 Marital status: Married 40 years Children: Four – 35,34,33,26 Convert: 1976 Occupation: CEO of a consulting and training company in Human Resources Development, called People Impact Schools Attended: Czech elementary and high school, University of London, UK, Simon Frazer University, Canada, Macquarie University Hong Kong/Sydney Australia Languages Spoken at Home: English, Czech, Portuguese Favorite Hymn: “I Know That My Redeemer Lives” On The Web: LinkedIn Profile Interview by Neylan McBaine

Suzanne Harwood didn’t always want to be a nurse. In this article, she explains how she felt guided to nursing and how that decision has affected her life and the lives of countless others in Guatemala, India, Timor Leste, Mozambique and beyond. “We both feel we were guided to each other.” Suzanne Harwood’s eyes light up. Her cheeks blush under her freckles. She and her fiancé, Chris Silva, have a lot in common. They went hiking on their first date. Their Facebook profiles are a canvas of the two of them: cheery photos running together, crossing finish lines, and wearing medals. She chops onions and carrots and throws them on the stove to sauté. She wants to get the ingredients into the slow cooker before she spends the day wedding dress shopping with friends. Harwood talks in low tones and speaks softly. She is perpetually calm. Her bright blue eyes lock on yours as she speaks. She makes people feel comfortable, but says she used to be shy. “Nursing helped me a ton because immediately you have to be intimate with somebody and help them feel comfortable.” Over the past four years, Harwood has traveled to Central America, Africa, India, and Timor Leste, using her medical expertise as a nurse practitioner to bless the lives of others. She gushes about her favorite organization, Care for Life, in Mozambique. Suzanne Harwood in Mozambique “That is the best organization that I’ve ever encountered. They kind of take the principles of the gospel, and the organization of how the Church is run and apply that to humanitarian work.” She went to Mozambique in May of last year. “Care for Life goes to a village and talks to the village elders and asks them, ‘Hey do you want this? This is what we offer.’ A lot of times village elders will approach Care for Life. They’ve heard about what they’ve done for other villages. They use local people to teach other local people how to improve their lives. They use all local resources. It’s teaching a man how to fish; it’s a fabulous organization.” Harwood explains one of the first things Care for Life teaches is how to build latrines. “A lot of times they get sick because they don’t use latrines. They teach villagers the importance of using latrines instead of going to the bathroom wherever.”She continues, “If they build a latrine on their own using local products, Care for Life will supply cement so they can make the latrine permanent. It’s local cement that they could purchase. They try not to use anything villagers couldn’t get themselves if they had the means, or anything that is not locally produced. One man was taught how to make bricks from local mud for latrines. He built a latrine for himself, and then he realized he could build more bricks and sell them to other people. Now he employs two men building bricks. What a huge difference that can make. I can’t say enough about the program.” Care for life teaches healthcare and finances and offers microfinance, education, and other life skills. The organization promotes safety for women and children. Harwood says, “Most all of the women have been raped by the time they are thirteen. There are a lot of misconceptions, especially with AIDS. There’s a misconception that if someone has AIDS, if they have sex with a virgin, they’ll get rid of the AIDS.” Suzanne Harwood with Rising Star Outreach in India Harwood talks about her role in Care for Life: “When I was there, I talked about basic health care. The village will elect certain people to represent them–Health Promoters of the village–who are then responsible for about five families in the village. We teach the Health Promoters and then they go and teach those families they are responsible for. They check in on those families to make sure that they understand concepts and are applying them.” She taught the village Health Promoters about tuberculosis, malaria, and nutrition. “A lot of the problem with nutrition is that they don’t realize that you have to eat a varied diet. They get a lot of starch, but nothing else, so their diet lacks a lot of vitamins and protein. They have access to protein, so we talk to them and explain they need protein.” “It’s changed the whole life of the village. People are healthier and they’re more motivated to be kinder to their families. There is less abuse going on, and they are more successful and empowered,” she says. Care for Life is Harwood’s favorite humanitarian organization she’s worked with, but going to Mozambique wasn’t her favorite trip. “My favorite trip was probably Guatemala. I kind have a kinship with Guatemala. That was the first place I ever went internationally. I did that as a student at BYU. I developed a love for the Guatemalan people.” Harwood didn’t always want to be a nurse. She started BYU majoring in biotechnology. “It sounded cool,” she says. Still unsure about what to do, however, she took general education classes. “Then I just kind of felt like I should do nursing. I went and declared that as my major,” she says. Her friends’ reactions surprised her. “Everybody I told said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s totally right for you!’” Harwood says although it felt right, she didn’t recognize it for the inspiration it was at the time. “My mom was always a big influence. She never tells me what to do. I decided on nursing without talking to her. When I told her she said, ‘Oh that is so right for you, Suzanne.’ The confirmation of that decision was really encouraging.“ Suzanne Harwood with Leprosy Affected Patients at Rising Star Outreach in India But there were obstacles to being a nursing student at BYU. She reflects that her grades could have been better, and says she’s a natural procrastinator. “The nursing program at BYU is really competitive. You go to the counseling office and they say, ‘There’s no way you’re going to make it into the nursing program here at BYU. Either go to another school–here’s a list of schools–or change your major.’” She decided not to go back to the counseling office. “It made me a little bit more determined,” she says. She credits a good letter of recommendation from a summer job to her acceptance into BYU’s nursing program. “I knew I was doing the right thing, but I didn’t know know, until my first day of clinicals. I was doing an OB round and I saw a vaginal birth and a C-section. I thought, ‘This is so for me!’ I was on fire when I came home that night.“ As graduation commenced, BYU offered the opportunity to go to Guatemala for a month as a nursing student. “Study abroad sounded great, but it’s expensive. I didn’t have the money to do that kind of stuff. I was supporting myself. My mom had helped me out a little bit, but for the most part I was on my own. I don’t know, somehow I just kind of ended up doing it.” Suzanne Harwood She says her time in Guatemala was life changing. “I think that was a huge directional thing for me in my life. I think that was inspired, too.” “I didn’t know the other people who were going, and because I was shy, it was a big step for me. Being in Guatemala really helped cement my high-school Spanish. It helped me feel comfortable in a third-world country. I had never had any experience like that before.” Harwood says from the time she chose nursing, she always knew she wanted to be a nurse practitioner, but knew she needed experience first. She had worked for two years in Salt Lake City when she discussed graduate school with her mom.“I said, ‘You know, I don’t think I’m going to apply for grad school this year. I don’t have enough experience. I’m not going to get in.’” “My mom said, ‘I think you should apply anyway.’ It was kind of firm for her–usually she’s not like that. I thought, ‘Well, I guess I’d better apply then.’ So I did. And I got in.“ Suzanne Harwood in Guatemala Harwood’s first job as a nurse practitioner was in West Valley, Utah, where many of her patients spoke Spanish. “I was in a position a couple of times where there was nobody else in the room besides me, and the patient didn’t speak any English. That really helped my Spanish over time. I was able to apply for the job I have now in Oakland. Part of my interview was, ‘OK, in Spanish explain to a patient why they need a colonoscopy and explain the procedure.’” Harwood had taken Spanish in high school, and speaks with affection about her high-school Spanish teacher. “One of the great things my teacher in high school taught me was, ‘If you don’t know how to say something, you talk around it and explain it.’ That’s what limits a lot of people. That’s the key I’ve learned with languages.” Suzanne Harwood With a Baby She Delivered in Guatamala There was another opportunity to go Santiago, Guatemala, to work in a little tiny clinic in 2008. “I thought, ‘Well, I know Guatemala.’ That was a good experience,” she says. In February 2010 Harwood traveled with Rising Star Outreach to Chennai, India, where she worked with people affected by leprosy. She also worked with children. In August of that same year, she traveled with LDS Charities to the island of Timor Leste. Her experience there was difficult. “The saddest thing I saw was this little baby, I think about nine months old. He was probably the size of a three-month-old. Severe heart defect was all I could pick out, and that the baby was going to die. There was no way that baby was going to make it to two years old. And we didn’t really have the capabilities on the ship to do that kind of surgery on a child. And we were only there on a temporary basis. Usually with stuff like that you need follow up.” Harwood didn’t feel like she or the other providers were able to do much for the people of Timor Leste. “There definitely were some lives that changed because we did have surgeons on the boat. We’d send people back for surgery–kids with cleft palates and stuff like that. But it was frustrating to me, too, the people we couldn’t help. We saw some people with things you would never see in the United States, people who were severely deformed, a lot of times, with something that if caught earlier on would have been taken care of. Suzanne Harwood in Timor Leste Harwood has worked in a clinic for low-income patients in Oakland, California for the past eight years. She knows she could make better money elsewhere, but loves her job. “You know, I like all the people. The providers I work with, we all kind of work there because we want to work with that population. They’re not in it for the money, because you could make more money somewhere else. We’re trying to make a difference in the lives of people who don’t have the same opportunities as we do.” A large number of Harwood’s patients are Latino. “And there’s just something about Hispanic people. They are the nicest people, they really are,” she says, “For the most part, just salt-of-the-earth people. Really humble, very generous, very grateful.” She isn’t sure she’d have the same experience working somewhere else. “It’s my patients that I like. I enjoy the challenge of speaking Spanish, but most of all I feel like I’m making more of a difference than if I were working for a private practice. Eventually I might move over to a private practice, if that is what works for me in my life. The nice thing is I can help my family and friends, too. It’s nice to have a skill that’s so practical and usable and to be able to help people.” At A Glance Name: Suzanne Harwood Location: San Francisco Bay Area Age: 38 Marital status: Single Occupation: Nurse Practitioner Convert: June 1981 Schools Attended: Brigham Young University, University of Utah Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: “Brightly Beams our Father’s Mercy” On The Web: www.careforlife.org Interview and article by Marintha Miles.

Summer Bellessa spent her youth living in Paris, Japan and New York as an international model. So it was an easy transition for her then to start Eliza, a magazine for “women who want to be stylish, sexy, and engaged in the world while retaining high standards in dress, entertainment and lifestyle.” Now as a new mom, she’s shifted her talents to producing and staring in a variety television show with American Idol alum, Brooke White, while continuing to be a representative of her faith. I was born and raised in Chicago Heights, Illinois, which is south of the city of Chicago. My parents are converts and my mom started me in modeling when I was four. She had a girlfriend who was also putting her kids into modeling and they thought it would be a fun thing to do together. My mom didn’t have any experience in the industry, but she is a very capable woman. She can figure things out very quickly and she’s a go-getter. She definitely has a lot of energy and is always a great worker. When I was young, I did catalogues and magazines and even runway shows. I was also in five or six commercials, including one for McDonald’s. One of my favorite shoots was for the Sears Wishbook, which was a five hundred page catalogue. I would tear out the pages of products I liked and put them together for Santa. It was fun seeing pictures of myself around town, but, even more, I loved the excitement of the city. My mom would keep it interesting by taking me to the Art Institute or the Rock’n’Roll McDonald’s after shoots. I have great memories with my mom, exploring the city, going to auditions, and enjoying the amazing food Chicago has to offer. When I was seventeen, I started modeling full time. I worked in Tokyo, Osaka, and then Paris. I mostly went during my breaks from school, until I graduated from high school early. My teachers would let me take extended breaks, or would give me special assignments. For example, for my English final I had to write a fifteen-page report on the differences between Japanese and American culture while I was living there and experiencing it. Summer Bellessa Do you have siblings? Yes, I’m the oldest of five kids. My mom and dad managed as best they could with five crazy kids. My mom tried to get my brothers and sisters into modeling but it just didn’t work out. If you don’t have the personality for it when you’re little, it’s really hard. I liked getting my picture taken. I was a calm kid. My siblings have more energy and so they weren’t as good at modeling, even though they were adorable kids. My first trip to Japan, I was seventeen. I took three or four trips there, for two to four months at a time. I think my mom would have loved to go with me; however, we didn’t have a lot of extra money and she had the four kids at home, which just didn’t make it plausible. Tell me about being an LDS teenager in the modeling world and about living alone. My child will not be going to Japan alone when they’re a teen! I saw a lot of things in the modeling industry when it comes to sex and drugs that we probably shouldn’t have had to deal with at that age. At the same time, it was a hands-on classroom. I was able to experience the different lifestyles first-hand. I’ve had a lot of friends that I’ve seen go through really hard times and have issues with drugs or other things. It’s a hard industry and it can be difficult to make it through without succumbing to influences that aren’t healthy and aren’t good for you and your relationships. However, because I had the gospel I was able to stay anchored, stay grounded, and battle through without anything crazy happening. But it definitely is not an ideal situation. However I still really enjoy modeling. I love the travel and it’s always been fun for me. Was there ever a time when you had to help a modeling friend through a hard time? What perspective did you offer your friends? I would like to think I was a good example to my friends, and that I gave insight and wisdom to any situations they were going through, but I honestly couldn’t say. I was learning and trying to figure out what I believed in. I wish I had a stronger testimony sooner in my life. I did have a few girls that I worked with over the years who were impressed with how strongly I took a stand as to what I would and wouldn’t do in the industry, when it came to nudity. A lot of them felt pressure to do certain things, and to see me have success and make money without doing that, made them rethink their stance. What was the most important spiritual factor that helped you stay grounded? Every Sunday I knew I was supposed to be at church and I would get so much every Sunday from going. It would uplift me and enable me to carry on for the whole week. I’d say before my testimony was even super strong, I still knew that every time I went to church I gained something from it. And I think that’s what kept me going every Sunday, and I felt that anchor in my life, and so I never wanted to not have that. More then a particular lesson that I needed to hear, I had a feeling every time I walked into our buildings that this is where I should be, and I felt a love from my Heavenly Father and I needed that comfort, especially when traveling and being so alone. Did you ever feel your modeling career was hindered by your unwillingness to do certain things or wear certain things? How did you handle that? I have had many situations when my career has been hindered. I had one of the top photographers in the world tell me he would make sure I booked three upcoming huge jobs if I would just do a private nude session with him. Later in my life, I also had a successful producer offer me a role in his next movie if I would sleep with him. Unfortunately, it seems like those aren’t uncommon situations. After Japan, where was the next step in your career? I lived in New York when I was nineteen, and then in Los Angeles. I still traveled around and continued to model and do commercials. I met my husband, Kerry Bellessa, in Los Angeles. Summer Bellessa So Summer Bellessa is your married name? It’s so perfect! Yes, I know! My maiden name is Smith. Summer Smith. My modeling agents all wanted me to keep Smith cause it sounds so all-American. That’s the look I am. But I only use Summer Bellessa now. Anyway, I had a girlfriend living on my couch, and she went out on a few dates with a guy living on Kerry’s couch. And that’s how we got introduced to each other. And then he proposed to me a month and a half after that first date. And then we got married a little over a month and a half after that. We did not waste any time. He was going to film school at the time, at the Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena. He directs music videos and commercials and he just finished his first feature film, Amber Alert, this year. We settled down in Los Angeles and I kept modeling and acting. I was having a hard time finding clothing that was appropriate for auditions, that was fashion-forward, that made me look my best, and that held standards that I wanted now that I was married. So I decided to start a clothing line. And that’s actually how Brooke White and I met. I had a MySpace page, when MySpace was cool. She saw one of the dresses, and MySpaced me, “I love this dress, can I get one?” and we kind of emailed back and forth. I did these little things called ‘she-markets’ instead of a flea market, and I invited her to come perform her music. All my girlfriends who painted or made jewelry or were photographers would kind of set up in someone’s backyard and have a hundred, two hundred people come and buy stuff, and Brooke would be the entertainment. She would play some songs and sell her album. And then I started Eliza magazine and Brooke was on American Idol, so I put her on the cover and then we became best friends. Tell me about the beginning of Eliza. Was it related to your work on these dresses? Well, I was working with the youth program at church at the time, and so I started to look at the fashion magazines that I love from a youth’s point of view. I love the imagery in the magazines, the high quality and artistic photography, but when you look at them from a youth’s viewpoint you realize the image of women put out by those magazines is not a healthy one. I remember reading in a teen magazine an article entitled “How do you know if you’re ready to have sex?” And the answer was, If he could leave you the next day and you’d be okay, that’s when you know you’re ready. Summer Bellessa on "The Girls With Glasses" And I thought, “What a backwards way to look at sex!” I felt like I wanted to put something out there that still had imagery that I was drawn to, that was feminine, that was pretty, that was artistic, but that show-cased women in a positive way. I wanted to show that women don’t have to be “sexed up” to be beautiful, and I wanted to include articles that had substance and were encouraging women to be their better selves. Where does the name “Eliza” come from? I am obsessed with Audrey Hepburn, and she played Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. I really like how that character is symbolic of a girl from nowhere, who was a flower girl, who had nothing, and with a little cultivation she was mistaken for a princess. I think all of us, no matter where we come from or who we are, with a little cultivation can look our best and feel our best. What’s been the trajectory of Eliza since you started it? Did you have to get funding for it, or did you have to just bootstrap it yourself? I pretty much bootstrapped it. My mom also gave me a loan to start it. I reached out to advertisers who wanted an audience with educated women, who wanted to be fashionable in a more classic way. We were in Barnes and Nobles across the country. Summer Bellessa How have you been balancing Eliza with modeling? Modeling definitely took a back seat. I think when you can use your brain and your talents for something, it’s much more enticing than just looking pretty for a picture. However, I still work with clients with whom I have built relationships. I do specific jobs that are worth it, financially. And now you’ve added a new project to the mix, your web show, Girls with Glasses. Tell us about that. Since the beginning of our friendship, Brooke and I have really admired each other and really wanted to work together… on something. It’s a funny story: Brooke called me a little under two years ago and it was the day my husband and I were leaving Los Angeles to move to Arizona. We’d packed up a U-Haul and were getting ready to go, when she called me and said, “Hey, I just want to get together and chat,” and I said, “Okay, let’s go to IHOP right now. I have like two hours, that’s it, before we’re getting in this truck and leaving.” And so we sat down and talked and she expressed that she wanted to work together and I of course wanted to work with her also. It’s funny because I normally wear contacts, and so does Brooke, but that day I had packed my contacts, and she had gotten something in her eye, and so we were both wearing glasses–and we were both wearing blazers and skinny jeans with ballet flats. And we thought that was so funny, that we were so matchy-matchy, and we just kind of were the girls with glasses. And so, the idea of Girls With Glasses came about. And we talked about doing some type of variety TV show, and we knew we wanted to take it in our own hands and start online, because it was something we could do realistically. So between me coming to California for work or to visit family or her coming to Arizona to visit her family there, we do our videos, either there or here or other places we meet up. What is your goal for Girls with Glasses? Where do you see this going in the next couple of years? With Girls With Glasses our goal has always been to be on television. However, with the online market growing and projections of online content getting the same kind of ratings as television for advertising, we are really happy being online right now. We’ve had a few television networks and production companies reach out to us, but it just hasn’t been a perfect fit yet, partly because I have a baby now and Brooke is pregnant. But if we did find a perfect fit we would definitely move forward and be really excited. Summer Bellessa and Her Family I think when you become a mom, your priorities really change as to working, your creative outlets, and making sure that you are getting what you need out of them and not taking away from your family. My son is eleven months old now and motherhood has definitely changed the goals of my career. I wasn’t the girl at church always trying to hold everybody’s babies and I wasn’t “baby hungry” by any means. I really like being creative and working, so I wasn’t really sure how this whole thing was going to work. But I have been pleasantly surprised by how madly in love I am with my son Rockwell. I think part of that is because we did wait so long. My husband and I have been married for nine years; we started thinking about having kids years ago, but we just didn’t get pregnant for six, seven years. We didn’t know why I wasn’t getting pregnant, but we just felt like it would happen when it was supposed to happen. I think it did happen at the perfect time for us, so Heavenly Father knew what he was doing. I think because He made us wait so long, I’m smitten much more and love being a mom even more than I would have if it had been really easy for us. I’d heard some scary stories from friends about how much I was going to have to give up so I thought, “Oh no, I’ve got to get ready to quit everything and just focus on being a good mom.” But I’ve been really surprised at how much I’m able to do and work, with Rockwell right beside me. He’s a well-behaved baby so I bring him on shoots and he makes it easy to keep going. He’s only almost a year, so that could change. Quickly. But I’m ready to adapt with it. Do you have any further thoughts you’d like to add? I definitely want to make sure I say I’ve made mistakes in my life and I’m grateful for the Atonement. I try to learn from my mistakes and be better, and try to be the best person I can be. In our culture, we sometimes sugarcoat things, especially when we talk about marriage. I tell people that sometimes life is hard and marriage is hard and sometimes we hate each other. Well, my husband always says, “Hate is a strong word,” but I guess we get on each other’s nerves. We have to think, “How can we work on this marriage?” But I think everyone feels that way at some point, and then you work through the situation and you’re grateful that you hung in there, and then you realize how small your issues are, how small your problems are when you work together and make progress in your relationship and your love for each other. At A Glance Name: Summer Bellessa Location: Arizona/California Marital status: Married Children: One Occupation: Personality/producer Schools Attended: SMC, UCLA Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: “Be Still My Soul” On The Web: www.elizamagazine.com and www.thegirlswithglasses.com Interview by Neylan McBaine. Portrait by Trever Hoehne.

Nearly two years ago, tragedy struck when Julie Hall’s 14-month-old son died before her eyes. She now understands what C.S. Lewis meant when he said sorrow is not a state but a process. Gently, slowly, and with great pains—and joys—Julie began a cathartic journey of discovery. “I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable.” -Anne Morrow Lindbergh Tell us about Jonah. Jonah came into the world a unique soul. He was about ten days late, and we were so anxious and excited to meet him. When he was born, my husband Jordan and I knew something wasn’t quite right. We noticed his jaw seemed small, his eyes were slanted, and his ears hadn’t fully developed. The nurse cleaned him up and told us he also had a cleft palette. All of this was so unexpected and scary. We had no idea if he would be okay. I remember feeling instant worry for him. Is he going survive? Is he all right? When the nurse bundled him up and brought him to us, Jordan looked at him and said, “He has perfect lips. His lips are right out of a magazine.” I was so grateful for Jordan when he said that. We found ourselves in an unexpected moment, holding a new baby with numerous physical problems, but Jordan was able to see the perfection in him. Julie Hall's Son Jonah The next day, Jonah was diagnosed with Treacher Collins Syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects the development of facial structures. Jonah’s ears, palate, jaw, and cheekbones all stopped developing at some point in the womb. We were relieved to know that he would have normal intelligence and development, but it was heartbreaking to think that he would face a lifetime of painful surgeries. I worried about his future. I wondered if I was strong and brave enough to be his mother. I remember standing in the shower in the hospital and weeping and worrying. Then I had this overwhelming feeling that I couldn’t waste my time with feeling sorry for myself. I felt an immediate impression that he was a gift and that I needed to love the moments I had with him. From that moment on, that’s stayed with me. I felt peace. God was speaking to me. He was helping me to find joy in this sweet little boy. I wish I would have understood that day in the hospital how easy it would be to love Jonah. He was so alert and observant. He couldn’t hear for the first four months of his life, so he watched. He watched people closely and seemed to look right into your soul. He was also so curious. He crawled and walked and climbed through every inch of our house. He learned sign language, charmed everyone he met, always shared his blanket and had the sweetest giggle. I feel like I was prepared in a few ways to lose Jonah. I felt really compelled, especially in the last few months, to write down memories and milestones. I’ve never been a very diligent journal writer but I wrote down the important things. My journal of Jonah’s life is a great treasure to me now. I also felt promptings to spend as much time with him as possible. Jordan and I considered going out of town for our anniversary when Jonah was 13 months old. We thought we might leave him with my mom and take a few days to go camping, but we both decided we wanted to spend the time together as a family. We loved him so much, we just didn’t want to leave him. What happened the day Jonah died? It started like any other ordinary day. Jordan got Jonah out of bed and made him breakfast. Then Jonah and I went over to our friend Katie’s house to help can spaghetti sauce. We were hanging out in the kitchen and Jonah was playing with Katie’s kids. Katie had to take her daughter to dance class and asked if she could leave her other kids with me and Jonah, and I said of course, that’s fine. We went out to the back porch to play. I was holding Katie’s six-month-old and Jonah was playing with Katie’s little boy David, and eating fruit snacks. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the moment I gave him a fruit snack. I immediately saw that something was wrong. He was choking. I felt that panic and fear and the desperate need to act, but I had this baby in my arms and I was the only adult there. Inside, I thought, “Help me, help me know what to do!” I put the baby down on the patio—there was a blanket there, which I don’t remember being there before. I scooped Jonah up and tried the Heimlich, but the fruit snack wouldn’t come out. I grabbed the phone while I held Jonah and dialed 9-1-1 while running to the front of the house. I laid him down on the driveway as I talked to the 9-1-1 operator. The operator kept asking if I was with Jonah and I yelled, “Yes, I’m with him, tell me what to do, tell me what to do!” I saw a trickle of blood coming out of his nose and he was really pale. I was so scared, so terrified. I tried mouth-to-mouth but it didn’t help because the snack was still stuck in his throat. I remember feeling safer when I saw Katie’s neighbors come out to help me and put their arms around me. And then the ambulance showed up, and I watched this strong firefighter grab Jonah and try to get the fruit snack out. It was like an out-of-body experience watching all of this. Julie Hall's Son Jonah Katie pulled up and saw the ambulance and came running. She’s always been such a strength to me. She said, “We just need to pray. He will be okay.” At that moment, I appreciated her faith so much. I still do. But I knew it wouldn’t be okay. I felt it in my heart. The ride to the hospital was surreal. I could hear the sirens and I was asking God to give me strength for whatever was coming, to just give me strength. I felt like I knew what was going to happen, and that I couldn’t handle it. They were never able to restore Jonah’s heartbeat. By the time my parents and Jordan got to the hospital, I had already said goodbye to him. The shock of having a healthy child one minute and then losing them the next is more than your brain can process in a moment. I was in shock for a while. I remember leaving the hospital and thinking, we’re leaving our child here, and now we’re going to go home and stop at the Maverik and get a Coke, or something. That feels so bizarre. We pulled up to our home where we had so much love and all of Jonah’s things—his high chair was left out from breakfast, his little pajamas still smelled like syrup. I grabbed his blanket, and Jordan and I crawled into bed. We cried all night; I think that’s when it really hit us. The next morning our ward members, neighbors and family started coming over to tell us how much they loved us. I remember people bringing a lot of bread. Was that good or did you want to be alone to mourn? For me, I needed people. I needed people to recognize that I had experienced this great pain. I admired the people who came; it takes courage to come to someone’s door and say “I see that you’re in pain and I’m sorry.” Whether that’s done through bread or cookies or a hug or note, that was really good for me. I think it was harder for Jordan. Jordan is very private; he appreciated everyone coming by, but I could tell that it was wearing on him. If someone came to the door and he didn’t want to talk to them that was okay. We just took it one day at a time. How have you learned to recognize those different needs in each other? The Thursday after Jonah died, it was my birthday and I told Jordan I wanted to go to the temple. I thought that maybe I’d have some sort of revelation or I’d see Jonah or God would explain all of this, and it would just make sense to me and I could move on. But Jordan told me he wasn’t ready to go to the temple yet. I had kind of panicked, thinking what is this going to do to our marriage? I feared our marriage wouldn’t survive this tragedy. But then I realized that I just needed to let Jordan grieve in his own way and time. If I felt like I needed to go to the temple, then I should do that, but I didn’t need to make him go with me, and I didn’t need to worry that he was going to lose his faith. We would work through questions and doubts as they came, but I didn’t need to panic. For me, I get a lot of healing out of talking and writing about what happened. And for Jordan, he’s very internal; I think he processes things while he’s working in the garage. Julie Hall with Her Child What made you decide to start a blog? A couple of weeks after the funeral, Jordan needed to go work in Montana; he’s a paleontologist. I went with him. We stayed in this tiny little town in a place that looked like the hotel from “The Shining.” It had really long creepy hallways. There I was in this creepy hotel in this tiny town without my baby and thinking, how did this happen? How am I here? At night, every time I closed my eyes I would see Jonah dying. I would visualize and feel all of the physical sensations of that moment. It was horrible. And so I prayed to Heavenly Father to take that image and those feelings away from me. I immediately had the impression that I needed to write everything down. So I spent that day writing in my journal while Jordan was at work. That night, I slept and didn’t have those images or bad feelings come back to me. I never thought I’d blog about Jonah since it was such a private experience, but as soon as I started blogging and got feedback that my words somehow helped other people, it became therapeutic for me. Blogging gave me the opportunity to say, “This is how I’m feeling,” and people could read it if they wanted to. And when I saw people in the grocery store, I didn’t have to rehash everything I was experiencing. They could just give me a hug and tell me that they loved me, or related to something that I wrote about. You titled your blog, “In the Quiet Heart Is Hidden.” Why? Right after Jonah died, that song came to my mind, and that phrase in particular: “In the quiet heart is hidden sorrow that the eye can’t see” [from “Lord, I Would Follow Thee,” by Susan Evans McCloud]. There’s something about experiencing the loss of a child that gives you great empathy and compassion. When we had friends and neighbors visit us, they shared their own losses and heartaches. As I went to the cemetery, I looked around at the other headstones and realized all these other children were buried there, all these other mothers had also experienced this intense heartache of losing a child. Even walking around Walmart, I’d look at all the different people around me and wonder what their heartaches were. I realized that life is all about loving each other. I felt like I could see the pain of the people around me in this new way and sometimes that’s hard because I feel like I have this heart that’s more open to pain. I’ve realized that I have to look for joy and goodness and beauty and light, and remember that life is not just about enduring pain. Tell us more about joy. How does it give meaning to the pain you feel? This whole experience made me realize that I could experience joy and pain simultaneously. The Christmas after Jonah died, people kept saying, “Oh, I’m sure this Christmas must be incredibly hard for you,” but I’ve never had a Christmas that was so meaningful to me. None of the commercialism and gift-giving mattered. All that mattered was the message that “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life” [John 3:16]. What could be better than that? I felt radiant joy because of that message. And when I heard the Christmas carols, I wept because of the message that was behind them. I still felt the pain but also felt so much joy in the promise of Christmas and the understanding of Christ’s Atonement. Sometimes I’ve found myself kneeling in the most random places, like on my bathroom floor in the middle of putting on my makeup, praying that God would take away the pain, and then having it taken away immediately, having relief. There’s great joy in that. Julie Hall with Her Family How has losing a child changed your relationship with God? I’ve always had a strong testimony, I’ve always believed in God, but prior to this experience I thought I would try to make the best choices and follow the commandments, and then God would keep me from experiencing pain, you know? I don’t think it registered that I was thinking that way until I had to shift it, until that paradigm didn’t work anymore. After Jonah died, the Young Women’s theme kept coming to my mind: “I’m a daughter of my Heavenly Father, who loves me and I love Him.” That became my new focus to understanding God. I believe that God is all-powerful, but I don’t believe that He will prevent difficult things from happening in our life; doing so would rob us of our mortal experience and agency. What advice would you give to those who wonder what to say or how to act around someone who’s lost a loved one? I think people have good hearts and want to say something comforting and meaningful, but a lot of times they try to make sense of it all for you. I remember people saying things like, “Well, Jonah obviously served his mission here on earth. He didn’t have anything else he needed to do and that’s why he’s gone.” That could be true, but that explanation didn’t make me feel at peace. In fact, it made me feel guilty for being so sad. This taught me that I don’t ever need to explain to someone else what they’re experiencing. Whether it be a divorce or losing a job or losing a child—every experience is so different, and I don’t need to make sense of suffering for other people. What I do need to do, what I think our moral obligation is as Christians, is to mourn with those who mourn and comfort those who stand in need of comfort [Mosiah 18:9]. One of your blog posts is about you washing away a little handprint on your bathroom mirror and how that was a cathartic experience that helped you move forward. Can you describe that experience and how you’ve tried to move on after losing Jonah? At first, because of that fear of forgetting, I wanted to cling to the physical reminders that Jonah was here with me. Until recently, the clothes he was wearing the morning he died were still in his hamper, and every once in a while I’d stop and smell them to try and find that smell of him again. For days and weeks I slept with his blanket because it smelled like him, but then eventually it smelled like me. All of those physical things are so fleeting, they just don’t stay. After the funeral, I asked my sister-in-law to help clean our house. After she left, I took a shower, and as I came out there was this little handprint on the mirror. I thought that was weird because she told me she had cleaned the mirror. No matter how it got there, that little handprint felt like a sign that God knew me and so I just couldn’t wash the mirror for several months, it was like a handprint over my heart. But one morning it just felt like I was ready, it was okay to clean the mirror. I felt like I moved from this external knowledge and reminder of Jonah to an internal reminder of Jonah and of God’s love for me. It’s baby steps—like going back to work, and letting go of little things like moving his coat off the rack in our living room. I still have all of his clothes and his bedroom and crib is still set up. I don’t know when I’ll change that, but every once in a while, I’ll have a day where I feel like I can put something away or give something away to a friend who could use it. Heavenly Father has helped us move forward, one baby step at a time. We recently got called into a bishopric at BYU—that’s been a good thing. How so? Being in our home ward, everyone was worried about us all the time and always asking how we were doing, shepherding us and caring for us. Serving in the BYU ward shifted our focus from everyone being concerned about us to us being concerned about those students. That’s helped shift our gaze so we’re not so entrenched in our own pain all the time. I’ve also been asked to volunteer on a board at Primary Children’s [hospital], which has also helped shift my gaze from inward to outward. It’s given me a lot of purpose and feeling like I’m being used as an instrument in some way. Have there been any books or music or art that’s been especially meaningful to you? A lot of people gave me books on grief, and I read quite a few of them. I avoided some books because I didn’t want to feel like I was grieving in the wrong way. I loved C.S Lewis’s “A Grief Observed.” It felt really raw and real. It was this beautiful combination of the reality of grief and the reality of the Atonement coming together. It helped me feel okay about being so sad. I loved “A Gift from the Sea,” by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, because it’s not technically about grief, it’s about making sense of life and what it’s like to be a mother and go through the stages of life. I also just read “A Woman of Independent Means” [by Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey], which was really powerful because it puts grief in a larger context. I’m moving to the stage where grief is still a part of me, but it’s not my focus, and so I really loved that book for that reason. Another book that I really relied on is “Lighten Up,” by Chieko Okazaki. I loved that book so much that I started giving it away to everyone. I love that she gives women permission to re-categorize their lives as they go along; to reframe who they are during different stages of life. She emphasizes having a core understanding of our faith and our worth as daughters of God. Sister Okazaki taught me that when new roles come into my life, when things change, that I can rely on my Savior for help. I can be prepared for when change comes again. Because it will.I’ve always wanted to have a lot of experiences in life. I wasn’t in a hurry to get married, and when I got married, I didn’t feel the need to have children right away. I’ve never been the kind of person who thought motherhood was the end-all, be-all of my female experience. But once I was a mother and committed myself to that role, and then all of a sudden I wasn’t a mom anymore, I think that really made me question my purpose and plan. I have to ask myself, “Does my experience have value even if it’s not what I planned? If I don’t get to have more children, will I be able to define myself in a way that’s still satisfying to me?” Julie Hall Is there anything else that you’d like to add? I’ve asked my Heavenly Father a lot what He would have me do with this experience. I’ve felt over and over this desire to testify that God is a God of love. That is one thing that has never wavered for me as I’ve questioned doctrine and why things happen and the justice of life. God loves us. We are His children. He is a God of miracles. I don’t necessarily believe that miracles happen the way we want them to, but God is a God of miracles. He works on our souls and heals us. He is healing me. At A Glance Name: Julie Hall Location: Mapleton, UT Age: 32 Marital status: Married Occupation: Museum educator; part-time paleontologist; volunteer at Primary Children’s Medical Center Schools Attended: Brigham Young University, Southern Utah University Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: “Lord, I Would Follow Thee” On The Web: inthequietheartishidden.blogspot.com Interview by Kathryn Peterson.

Raised in Bahrain and Dubai as the daughter of a falconer, Catharine had early exposure to the life cycles and rituals of animals, which deeply informed her understanding of the gospel. Today, she embraces the complexity and messiness of life, especially as a single woman in the Church, believing that answers to spiritual questions come from lifelong wrestles with God and interaction with other members of our church communities. When I was very young, my father was hired to go to Bahrain because he could breed falcons in captivity. The Arabs are very invested in the sport of falconry, but with habitat loss and chemical problems, the falcon population there has been decimated. So breeding them in captivity was of great interest to them. Falconry is when you hunt other birds and animals using the falcon. You work with a falcon, you become a partner with this creature of the sky who comes down onto your fist. It’s a great partnership, and I’ve been privileged since I was two or three to be able to be part of that kind of relationship. Various cultures– Chinese, Indians, Arabs, French–train the birds of prey in different ways. In all of them, though, at the end the falcon just brings the prey to the ground. And then the hunter walks up and gives the bird a better offer. The falcon is sitting there with the rabbit or whatever that is all covered in fur or feathers and it’s going to have to work to get all that off, so you come up with a bare piece of meat. It’s actually far less meat than what the falcon has in front of it, but it’s familiar with you. You’re a good partner for it. So it jumps on your glove, takes the prepared meat, and then you take the prey away. When I was 9, we left Bahrain for Dubai, and there my house was the Dubai Wildlife Research Center. The falcons and the other animals created a fantastic atmosphere to grow up in, first of all because they’re interesting, but also because I can’t imagine hooking into the natural world without them. The world works and fits together in such beautiful, fascinating, messy ways, and as someone who works with animals, you’re a part of that. The acts of breeding and courting and dying and eating each other were part of my childhood. It’s an introduction to the Plan of Salvation: what came before, what’s now and what’s after. Did your parents point out those overt spiritual connections to you as you were growing up with the animals? Absolutely. My parents come from four generations of Mormons. We crossed the plains. And they are, each in their own way, very interested in the big picture of the gospel. My father is an ecologist, very much a scientist, and is quite enthralled with the gospel and its ability to attach us to God and the natural world. So I think from him I inherited the sense that there’s no disjunction between good science and good religion. Both of them will make the world magical. My mom, on the other hand, has shown me that you wrestle with things—whether it’s an animal dying or some other hard thing—you take it to God, and you just work it out before Him. You presume that you will trouble the Lord and wrestle with the Lord until you and He come to an answer, an answer that it isn’t always the easy way. You have to show up with all of yourself. Your pets will still die, you will still have questions about doctrine, life will still be hard, but it’s in the wrestling that you come to answers about why. What was the Church experience growing up in these Arab countries? It was wonderful. It was great to be a Mormon in the Muslim culture, not only because of the whole effect of Muslim family values on the society, but particularly because of the women. Seven years in an Arab girls’ school freed me from many of the constraints that American girls face and also exposed me to the strong, educated, devoted, gracious women that that world can cultivate. I am the oldest of four and, for some of the time, we were the only members of the Church in the area, or there were just a few other people. All the time I was growing up, we had church in our home, which was not large, and we crammed more and more people in there. We celebrated the Sabbath on Friday because that is the day people have off in the Arab world (as something like a day of worship). Us kids would get up on Sabbath mornings and rearrange all the furniture in the house into rows of seats. The bathroom didn’t have a class in it, but every single other nook and cranny—including outside with the animal incubators—had a church class going in it. I presume to this day that an office or classroom will have skulls and incubators in it! How can you have Seminary without the incubators going? So it was our job to rearrange the house for church in the morning while my parents drove around the city to pick up various other people who would come meet with us. And from the time I was 14 or 15, I taught our Sunday School sometimes, so that there would be enough teachers for the other classes too. The idea that you walk into church and the pews are already sitting there . . . That’s great, but for me I still find myself wondering: Why aren’t the 7-year-olds here setting up? Where are the 14-year-olds getting ready to teach? Every week, I had to put muscle and brain into figuring out how thirty plus people were going to fit in my house to worship, and into feeding them all afterwards. I don’t know if I would have been able to wrestle my way into a testimony if I hadn’t been asked for such a personal investment in the worship. My family was not only the church spiritually, but the church organizationally, so my parents were always innovating in how we carried out the church programs. The restrictions for meeting in our stake—which takes in Saudi Arabia and several other countries—are very strict, and there were often decisions that had to be made about the best way for us to meet. As a youth, I saw the brethren in church leadership in Salt Lake City make decisions about how we would worship that they had no personal experience that qualified them to make: an older white man in Utah deciding the best way to deal with the rulers of the Middle East? . . . and yet, they would make exactly the right decision, beyond any capacity they had in their personal wisdom. I have seen that so many times. Because I grew up oversees, we children had lots of exposure to the Church leadership who would visit and pass through my home, so I don’t think I feel the distance that many people feel from the interests, the humor, the goofiness of the people who get called, “The Brethren.” For instance, Elder Packer is passionate about birds and would spend hours talking with my father about them. Whenever we would travel to the States we would bring pictures and eggs and feathers to him. Having that kind of insight, and spending time hearing them tell stories, makes me appreciate them so much more deeply. Maybe because I had those personal experiences with General Authorities as a child, I don’t feel that I have to live only by their pronouncements in a void. Rather, I embrace the act of trying to make a church that saves people through their best efforts and through the grace of Christ. I feel that clunkiness, that attempt to put together disparate but holy things. I think the more lives you are a part of, the less platitudinous the preaching feels because you feel that, even if a sermon doesn’t apply to you personally, you just wish that Arete or David could hear these inspired words. You’re really invested because of your personal connections to others, and by means of that investment, the words strike home to you. We have such responsibilities to be translators, to claim that role of the Holy Ghost as our own so that we can interpret what our leaders say into the language of our particular life—into our particular needs. That’s so much more effective than saying, “They don’t understand me. They’re not talking to me.” The Greek word for the Holy Ghost is parakletos, which means “that which calls to the side of” or “from the side of.” Either way, it’s saying, “God’s word is there for who you are, where you are.” It is our responsibility to call it to our sides. I think we can demand that the Holy Ghost fulfill its role in making church rhetoric speak to all of us in our varied needs and circumstances. I haven’t had to face so much of the Mormon culture that women in the United States talk about. It is utterly foreign to me. I feel like I can own so much of the pioneer ancestry of my heritage as well as the spiritual ancestry I feel in my soul from other cultures. I can claim women who have stretched out their faith onto the last limbs and then kept going and taken flight. It is the people-yness of the Church that I love, the fact that I am needed, that I have a real place in the Church, far more than I could ever hope to fill. Every minute, right now, I am needed. How have you maintained that feeling since moving to the States and no longer being needed as completely by the institution simply to make it function, like you did growing up? I went to college mostly in the States, and I was in a little tiny branch outside of a tiny town in Minnesota. It was a small farming community. I don’t know if, in my small liberal arts school, I would have been able to make a smooth transition to traditional American Relief Society, but the branch leadership immediately put me in Primary, where I was in charge of Singing Time and Sharing Time and my own class ages 4 – 8. I was completely accepted by the people of that branch as busy and involved in their children’s lives and in the lives of the adults. People need someone to listen, someone they feel has time for them, and I’m passionate about my role as community aunt. I feel there’s really a need for children to have someone who is not a parent and yet is not a peer, someone to listen to them and say how wonderful they are. I was just spending time with an 8-year-old girl recently and teaching her how to use the footnotes in the scriptures. That’s not something her parents are inclined to do. I’m not a parent, but I do know where the footnotes are, and she and I could learn about locusts in Leviticus! I feel that’s part of how I maintain a place at Church. There’s just so much to be done, and perhaps that comes from having to move the chairs and teach the classes as a child that I feel that way. I keep looking for those ways I am needed. How do you find the parents receive your willingness to be “community aunt”? I’ve yet to find a parent who is suspicious and standoffish. It would be so different if I were a man because I probably wouldn’t be able to babysit children, but you show up to church and after a while these very careful mothers and fathers will say to me, “Hey, sure you can babysit our kids!” The kids will push their parents out the door or beg for their Visiting Teacher to come over. (That’s me!) These kids must have a warped idea of what Visiting Teaching is because for them it’s when I come over and play Swamp Monster and we have wild shenanigans while Mom is out on her own. They will be sorely disappointed when they grow up to discover Visiting Teaching does not include Swamp Monster. Their mothers need to remember that they married adults or go to the grocery store by themselves or pursue their own hobbies. If I can strengthen home and family, as the Young Women’s motto says, I can do that all the time, and I’m desperately needed. Even in very traditional families, let alone some of the wards I’ve been in where the children are being raised by a grandparent or cousin, the moms need someone else to come in and run circles with the kids in the park. I am intrigued by the fact that you have such devotion to motherhood and parenthood and yet you are not a mother yourself. Can you tell me more about where that comes from? When I was little, I didn’t like dolls. I liked animals, but some of the maternal expressions that are normal were not mine. I really struggled with wanting to be who my Heavenly Father had made me to be, but I didn’t like kids in that cutesy way. My father is really into children, and I think that helped me realize that you didn’t have to like kids as proto-adults but that you could appreciate them as their own beings in that space and time. When I grasped that wonder, that messy wildness of children, then I began to be excited about that. When I was ten or eleven, I really started having questions about women and God’s gender and marriage and all these things, and I really tried to take it to the mat—reading the scriptures, fasting, praying—and the relationship with God that developed was one that really made me want to be a mother, whether or not I had children. Around that age, I started soliciting babysitting jobs just to let the parents have an hour or two of breathing time. So believing that I could be one who loved and led (my favorite definition of mothering), no matter what my child situation was, certainly began by ten or eleven. I had a good run of years when mothering wasn’t even an option, but when caring and teaching and leading were part of my regular activities, to prepare me for the time when motherhood was physically an option but still not a reality for me. How do you approach being single in a church that speak so much about marriage? I’ve always presumed that I can come to answers through a relationship with God, and that the answers won’t simply be handed to me. I feel Him saying, “You’ve got to work at this, you’ve got to find your own answers.” That’s the way I approach being single: it’s a wrestle with God. Things have never been delivered to me in nice little packages. The prepackaged life doesn’t fit. I’ve had to craft my own life, my own identity, even though at times it’s been lonely. Except it hasn’t been lonely in the sense that no one else has to go up against it. I have seen so many people—past and present—struggle with singlehood and other situations that deviate from some perceived norm that I have a much broader view of what the church encompasses and supports us in than I think some people hold. I love the double negative in Paul’s letter to the Hebrews where he says, “We have not a high priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities.” It catches the moment when we cry out we say, “He does not understand! He cannot feel my differences!” and Paul is saying, “That god you think can’t understand you? That is exactly the kind of Christ you do not have. You have a Christ who can suffer and feel along with you.” Paul tells us that because He went through our pain and went through it without sin, we can come boldly to the throne of grace. Don’t come groveling or whining to it. Come with your problems, your differences, your “I-don’t-fits,” your temper tantrums, your wrestles, and come boldly to the throne of grace. Get comfort that way. I don’t understand why I haven’t found someone, and why I may never make out with someone for the rest of my life, even when every fiber in my body sometimes cries out for that physical connection with someone. To live with those feelings, knowing that I want to eat my arm off some days because it’s so intense, and to think that there might not be a resolution or an expression of that in this life, requires that I come boldly to the throne of grace, whether that means praying or preaching sermons to myself, pulling together what Paul calls the “many splendored” gospel, and demanding that the gospel have that power to speak to me. How does the church organization helps you in this struggle with God? I feel so glad that—partly because of the Church organization—I’ve been given experiences where I see the multiple anguishes and awkwardness and strengths that surround me. What keeps me tethered is my belief that the gospel is not some rarified practice that one can do on a mountaintop. Certainly I’ve never found anything else that calls the everyday world to the same cosmic thrills that the gospel does. And that includes its people-yness . . . the multiple muscles called up in working out with free weights . . . the kludginess of trying to balance these things . . . that’s what makes us whole. Christ asks the disciples at one point, when others have left because he hasn’t produced bread, “Will ye also go away?” The disciples respond, “To whom shall we go? Thou hast the gift of eternal life.” I think that for a lot of life, the trials are not the car accident, the wayward child, the fact that we can’t be mothers. The trial is who we are during the time of who we are not. The question is, “Who did God know me to be before I came here? Who does he know I can become?” I truly imagine that when I meet God he will pat the sofa beside him and say, “You, come here! Just as you are!” My heavenly parents won’t want me in some cloned, cleansed version. They’ll want me with my quirky sense of humor and my over-purple prose and the part of me that gets down and looks at potato bugs. They’ll want me that way. I love the people-yness of the Church: That child gumming the pew to death, the 80-year-old woman who’s next to me asleep because she has to take her meds at 4 in the morning but still gets herself to church. . . . I love that aspect the Church brings to the gospel. My mother is chronically sick with many health problems, including polio at age 4, and all these things have been horrific for her, and yet she teaches me about the promise that we will be healed, that we will have health in our navel and marrow in our bones, because salvation is the real form of health from the God who brings healing in his wings. And so I see the church as a carrier for the gospel—as that which brings healing and health through the goofiness of being enlisted in rolling out the work of God—to make me a being that could more likely hang out with my heavenly parents. How does this appreciation for the messiness and complexity of existence play out in other areas of your life? Is it something that colors your perspective beyond your church experience? It is my love for how the world fits together that took me on an undergraduate and graduate path in English Literature and Classics (Ancient Greek and Latin). I’ve pursued the idea that disparate things are woven together to make the world magical. There’s the unbearable beauty in “A bracelet of bright hair about the bone” that still makes me cry. I’ve wanted to learn to see the chosen-ness of a line—in sound, in visual art, in poetry, in commandments—from all the ways it could have been otherwise. Seeing the strands that weave together to form the world makes it more charged, more magical. Ancient Greek literature is often so highly wrought: you come into a world where even the ceiling decorations gleam massively, where what it means to be Home is just native enough and just strange enough that it can shift our world. For me the most intense experience is an art form called tragedy, which is more than just stories of terrible things happening. It is a drama that creates a space that very precisely calls up what is normal in some area . . . and annihilates it. For example, one play calls up the idea that a good woman will be both a good wife and a good mother. So far so good. It then says that this particular woman, as a good mother, should kill the man who killed her young daughter. It also calls up the horror of a woman killing her own husband. Problem is, the same woman is killing the same man. Messy! You in the audience see chasms in what you thought was a whole package-deal of being a good wife and a good mother. You have a wrestle with supposed norms so great that you can’t imagine ever putting your world back together and carrying on. You are left with a connected-ness before and beneath the norms of society. You are left with relationships made not from of-course-ables—because you have experienced their annihilation—but from choice. You come to a community—which may even be of multiple parts of yourself—where radical alternatives fuel engagement, where jagged doubts find shelter, where you push your hand-cart to the beat of that different drummer. You come boldly to a God who gives power not by taking away the senselessness, the pain, but by wading into the middle of it. You find that goodness has a lunge to it. At A Glance Name: Catharine Platt McGraw Location: Los Angeles, CA Age: 38 Marital status: Divorced Occupation: Teacher, administrator Schools Attended: Carleton College, University of Birmingham (U.K.), University of Pennsylvania, University of California – Los Angeles Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: “From Homes of Saints” Interview by Neylan McBaine.

At a very young age, Heather Farrell began thinking about her role as a woman and the place of women in God’s plan. That led to a Women’s Studies focus at BYU, a passion for studying women in the scriptures, the publication of her blog, Women in the Scriptures, and deep-seated feelings about birth and motherhood. Tell me about how you came to be so passionate about the role of women. I grew up in Idaho. My mom worked from the time I was little until I was about twelve or thirteen. Then she got really sick with some mental illnesses that required her to take medications that would wipe her out. She would sleep all the time. I’m the oldest of four children, and I felt like I had to step up and take over. Maybe because of that, or maybe because it’s just the way my spirit is, I started thinking about women’s roles in the Church when I was a Beehive or younger. When I was really young, I told my mom I wanted a cause. I remember thinking I should have been a suffragette. I was angry that in Young Women’s we’d spend our time doing cooking or quilting. (We did whitewater rafting and rock climbing, too, but somehow to my young mind that didn’t count!) I had read in history about women who did big, important things to change the world, and that’s who I wanted to be! History never tells you about the women who stay home and raise the babies. I thought you didn’t change the world by quilting. I remember telling one of my Young Women advisers, who was a stay-at-home mom, “I’d never stay at home all day. That would be so boring. What do you do all day?” She laughed at me. She had six kids. She wasn’t bored at all. Of course some of the women in our ward worked, but I thought they weren’t doing anything important—they weren’t winning the Nobel Peace Prize, they didn’t have titles or make lots of money. It’s funny to see where I and all my high school friends are now. We swore up and down that we would never be stay-at-home moms. But most of us are stay-at-home moms now and have two or three kids and are really, really happy. Now I wish we had spent more time in Young Women’s on homemaking skills because I think I came ill-equipped to adulthood. I had to find someone to teach me to knit recently. Yet at the time I was angry. Heather Farrell and Her Child It’s interesting that you were angry and yet you still diligently attended Young Women’s. Your questions didn’t push you away. Why do you think that is? The Lord grounded me with a strong testimony of the gospel. I had faith in scriptures and I had faith in God, not faith in Mutual. Going to Mutual was just jumping through a hoop. What mattered to me was that I had talked with God and I had learned how to receive revelation. I desperately wanted more knowledge, so I had started reading my scriptures on my own when I was ten. My parents were active in the Church, but we never had Family Home Evening, and you could probably count on your hands and feet the times we did family scripture study. It was just never regular. I never saw my mom and dad reading scriptures. I’m sure they did, but I never saw it. So I hid that I was reading my scriptures. My mom would come in to put me to bed and I would hide my scriptures from her. I had a goal to read the Old Testament when I was thirteen, before I went to seminary. I wanted to make sure I read every word, but I kept falling asleep, so as I read I kept lists of all the boy names I liked and all the girl names I liked, just to keep me awake. It was my first scripture journal.I can really relate to Joseph Smith at fourteen. I look back on some of the prayers I said when I was that young and I am amazed at all the insights I got, things I still don’t fully understand, things I’m still trying to figure out. When you’re that young, you don’t realize that you can’t know things. When you get older, you think, “People don’t see Christ.” But when you’re twelve or fourteen, you know that you can see what you want to see. That was an important age for me. Issues around women and their roles can hurt. I have quite a few college friends who could never reconcile their feelings and experience and have drifted from the Church, and I have friends who are still faithful but shaken. That’s hard. I know what it feels like to be shaken. But I’ve always had that rock, which the Lord gave me really young, and which I’ve never lost. So while I have questions and times when my rock is shaken, I know that even if I don’t understand it now, there is an answer. I understand that God is no respecter of persons. He doesn’t love men more than He loves women. What was a time when you felt shaken? My parents got divorced when I was a sophomore in college. It had been coming for a long time. It shouldn’t have been a huge surprise, but it’s never something you want to happen. When your sealed family falls apart, everything falls apart. You ask: who am I? Where do I fit in? Where do I belong if this relationship that was the most stable is not stable? That summer, instead of going home like I had the summer before, I took a job as a camp counselor in Maine. I fled. Looking back now, I feel guilty; my brothers and sisters probably really needed me, and I simply said, “Nope.” I just couldn’t handle it. So I went to Maine, and I had the worst summer of my entire life. It was awful. I was at this girls’ camp that was for rich girls. Really, really rich girls. Tuition for one girl for one summer was $25,000. At Young Women’s Girls’ Camp, your counselors are your role models, and I assumed that was what this camp would be, but it wasn’t. It was like glorified babysitting. I got to pick my age group, and I chose the twelve year olds. Beehives! I love Beehives! But these little girls were twelve going on seventeen. I was so sad. They went to boarding school all year and then they went to sleep-away camp all summer, and their parents came for one day of the summer to visit them. Also, I’d never been around college kids my age without my same values because I’d attended BYU. But at the camp, the other counselors were dealing with drinking and sex. I had friction with another counselor. It was bad. It was the darkest point of my life up to that point. I was really low. My parents were getting divorced. I was surrounded by all this filth. I saw what it was like to have lots of money, and I thought, I don’t want it! I don’t want money! I don’t want fame! This is how your children turn out! This is what you have to deal with! I saw what the girls my age were into, and I thought, I don’t want any of that. I realized that what I wanted was the gospel. It came back to that rock. Even though marriages fall apart, even though people lie, even though people don’t treat you right, you still have light. And even if those people treating you wrong are in your family, even if they’re in the Church, it doesn’t matter. You still have light. Someone else’s behavior doesn’t change any of that. What led you to your interest in women in the scriptures? When I got back to BYU, I got a job at the Women’s Research Institute. I worked there four years, and the women there were hugely influential for me. I can’t think of key conversations that changed me, but I watched how those women professors lived their lives, what they thought about, what they were passionate about, how they balanced their family and their work. By the time I graduated, I understood that God loves women. Our office was a healing spot for me. I got my degree in Public Health and did a Women’s Studies minor. I learned that God did not make women unequal, but in the way our world is set up, we don’t see women. They’re invisible. A lot of the classes I took asked us to look for what the issues are for women and to talk about them. I realized that a lot of the anger I had was simply because women aren’t talked about. I think that’s central to my blog. Once you know that there are women in the scriptures, you can bring them out and talk about them. At BYU I took a class from Camille Fronk on women in the scriptures. She was writing a book for Deseret Book about women in the Old Testament, and recruited us to be her research assistants. I got Deborah. That was my first taste of research and, wow! I loved it. In that class, I learned about women I’d never heard of before. It’s funny to me now because I know them so well that I think, how did I never know who Puah and Shiphrah were? I don’t know who Puah and Shiphrah are. Really? They’re in Exodus. They’re the midwives who saved the babies. You ought to look them up. Later, after I had graduated, I had our first baby, Asher, right before Christmas. I found myself thinking a lot about Mary. How did she go anywhere on a donkey nine months pregnant? I think she must have walked more than she rode. I had this kinship, this real affinity with Mary. I felt an amazing amount of love. I remember being in the grocery store and wanting to burst into tears seeing other mothers with their children. I went to a BYU football game almost a year later and was so overwhelmed seeing all these people and thinking, every person in this stadium was once carried inside a woman. Some woman gave blood so they could be born. The love! So I was thinking a lot about Mary and other scriptural women. I started looking to see if anyone had written about women in the scriptures. I found two websites on women in the Bible but nothing on women in the Book of Mormon, and nothing on women in the Doctrine and Covenants. There’s lots of academic stuff, but nothing in easy layman terms. I wondered, why is nobody writing about women in the scriptures? I had a powerful feeling: YOU should write about women in the scriptures. I had started a family blog to show my family in Idaho baby pictures. So I started writing one or two little posts about women in the scriptures and eventually started the blog Women in the Scriptures. What is your process for writing posts? I feel self-conscious about my qualifications. Some people think I’m a great scriptorian or have a degree in ancient scriptures. I don’t. When I study a woman I just read her story over and over and over again. If I have questions I look them up. I try to read the whole chapter so I can think about her in context, thinking about the other people in the chapter and how they would relate to her. Who would be her neighbors? Would she have known this person? I try to put the whole puzzle together. I don’t have time to go to the library and I don’t have access to the kind of library I’d need to do a lot of research. So I rely on scriptures. Sometimes I read my scriptures and a woman will stand out. I have a lot of thoughts about her and then I write a post. Other times I try to find the most obscure woman I can think of and pull her out and see what I can learn about her. How does blogging affect your social world? When I was first pregnant, I struggled with the idea of staying home and being happy. I used to think I didn’t even want kids! But while I had come to know that I wanted to stay at home with my kids, I was still afraid being at home would drive me crazy. I wanted to have some kind of career. My blog has helped me transition. My blog is a little career for me. It meets the desires of my heart while I’m at home. The problem is that when you’re a stay-at-home mom, the online world becomes addictive because it provides instant gratification. You can see what people are doing anytime. It’s easy to know more about the girl who lives in Pennsylvania whose blog I read than about my neighbor across the street. At first, I would be writing blog posts in my head all the time. I’d go to the computer first thing in the morning because something might have happened during the night. Because people are awake in New Zealand when I’m asleep! Also, because your readers don’t really know who you are, you can be whoever you want to be on a blog. When we first moved into this ward I was nervous about telling people about my blog. I wondered, do I really want them reading my blog? I had my secret online identity and then my real life identity, but I feel they’ve merged a lot more now. My blog’s more a part of my life. We cancelled our internet for a while because I couldn’t figure out boundaries. During that time, I had to go to the library in the evenings to blog. I realized that I had to set limits for myself, that my blog should be a benefit to my life and not something that sucked me in. You have a book coming out this spring. Tell me about the book and how it came about. I wrote a post about Eve and about how childbirth is not really a curse. Felice Austin is a blogger who writes about childbirth issues, and she linked to my post. Because of that link, I eventually co-authored with her and a group of women a book that’s coming out this spring, The Gift of Giving Life. When they first invited me to work on the book, I didn’t know how I was going to be useful. I’m not a midwife. I don’t write a birth blog. Then one day I realized a significant proportion of the stories of women in the scriptures are birth stories. Especially the women we have names for: Rebekah, Mary, Elizabeth–they’re all birth stories! I realized that’s what I could contribute to this book: I could tell their stories. Heather Farrell and Her Family We hope our book will help people realize that birth is a spiritual experience. You’re bringing a child through the veil to the earth. All of us co-authors had natural births, so we started by wanting everyone to think like we do. But the Lord has led us in a different direction. We gathered stories—there are about 70 different voices in the book–from women who prayed, and they were supposed to have C-sections, or they were supposed to have epidurals; that was what was right for them. And other women prayed and they were supposed to have a home birth. We came to realize that birth is innately spiritual; it doesn’t matter how you do it. So the book doesn’t advocate for one type of birth. Doing the book, I came to realize that God cares about birth, and He’ll give you guidance. You should pray about where to give birth. You should pray about how to give birth. You should pray while you’re giving birth! I think we’ve lost those things a bit in LDS culture. I did the historical research for the book and realized that LDS women used to have a different, more spiritual perspective on birth. LDS midwives would pray before they’d attend births. During the births they’d call on priesthood holders to give the mother a blessing if the birth wasn’t progressing. LDS women did washing and anointing before birth. As LDS women, we’ve lost that understanding that birth is not separate from your spiritual life. Is there anything else you’d like to add? I want women to know that God didn’t leave women out of the gospel. They’re not a side story. When I ask, “How many women do you think there are in the scriptures?” people guess twelve, twenty, thirty. Actually, there are nearly 600 women in the scriptures. Women are there in the scriptures, but you have to find them. Too often we skip over their stories or just don’t talk about their stories.Now that I know these scriptural women so well, I find myself wondering, why there are only 600 women in the scriptures. Part of it is that women didn’t write books when most of the scriptures were being written. They didn’t record their faith. I’ve been struck by how important it is for us as women to write our personal histories. If we don’t do it, then in a hundred years when they’re writing our history books, women will still be hidden. At A Glance Name: Heather Farrell Location: Utah Age: 27 Marital status: Married for 6 years Children: Three ( 4, 2, and 5 months) Occupation: Wife, mother, sister, daughter and friend Schools Attended: Brigham Young University (BS in Public Health with a minor in Women’s Studies) Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: “A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief” On The Web: http://womeninthescriptures.blogspot.com/ and http://thegiftofgivinglife.com// Interview by Annette Pimentel.