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As a high school student, Rebecca decided that broadcasting was definitely not an industry in which she wanted to work. However, her dynamic radio personality and distinctive voice opened doors to television and radio work which she pursued piecemeal as her three sons were young. Now with grown children, Rebecca is the host of FM 100.3 in Salt Lake City and a host on BYU TV. Would you briefly tell me about the journey of your career? Interestingly, my high school, San Diego High School, had a special broadcasting program. This was the early 1980s, and it was a new program and the teachers handpicked outspoken, extroverted participants. I was the student body president at the time, and the faculty encouraged me to get involved. I attended the program classes three or four times but felt there was a lot of emphasis on presentation rather than content. This turned me off broadcasting, and as a high school student, I deliberately decided I did not want to go into broadcasting. When I went to BYU, I studied organizational behavior and business communication, following theory from people like Steven R. Covey, who was just beginning his career. My schooling included things about improving the lives of people, making people’s lives easier. Ironically, however, in 1988 I married a television producer. Rebecca Cressman My husband, Dale, graduated from BYU’s broadcast program and had worked as a television producer. Because of this, and his connection with the business, opportunities came for me to work behind the scenes of television. For example, someone at a station would hear my voice and ask me to voice commercials. Before long, I did some radio voice work for a station in Vermont. And then, after ten years of living outside of Utah, we moved back and a station was looking for a radio show host. Before long, someone recommended me for a job, and I went from being a radio disc jockey to a radio hostess on a talk radio program. Then someone asked if I would like to try television. I was certainly not a television reporter, but I did my research and worked closely with my husband, and soon, I was a public affairs reporter for the Church. From there I went to morning radio for five years and then I was back in commercial radio. With all of that, it’s clear that I came into the business backwards. As every door opened, whether or not I felt completely ready, I just walked through it. From the beginning, some people set out to be a television anchor, and it’s very deliberate. That’s not how it worked for me. Opportunities would come and I would walk through the door whether or not I felt totally prepared. Working in the media, how do you remain unbiased but loyal to your beliefs? Growing up in California, I often had people ask me about my beliefs, and so it became easy and natural to talk openly about my faith. I think that’s why I’ve never had a hard time talking about my beliefs. I am not afraid of the truth. If someone wants to know about my beliefs, I’m happy to share. In situations when I’ve had to report on something that sheds a negative light on the Church, I’ve never worried. I just report the truth. How have you and your husband prioritized your careers? It’s been very fluid. Wherever we’ve lived, I have found work. But I have been flexible. Not only did I work in broadcasting, I worked at the YWCA teaching children to swim. I also worked at a state college in student affairs. I taught Spanish at a ski academy in Vermont. I also worked at a physical fitness gym. I always pursued things that I loved and was interested in. I’m one of those, however, who received the painful news from a doctor who said, “I don’t think you’ll ever be able to have children.” I was given this diagnosis in my early 20s, just before I was married. I was heartbroken. I had just returned from serving an LDS mission in Bolivia, and children were always tender to me. But because of this news, I knew it would be difficult to have children, and I was open to fostering my career. Rebecca Cressman When our first child came, within our first year of marriage, motherhood became very precious and important to me. From that point, I made family my priority and wanted to be home to raise my three boys. Although I did things here and there to help pay the bills, I didn’t go to work full-time until after my youngest was in school. In what ways has your career opened doors for making a positive difference in the lives of your family and your community? I have been able to do so many rewarding things. For one, I host “Living Essentials,” a television series that provides helpful ideas on life, health, and family. It really enriches lives. People around the world watch the show and can relate to stories and feel empowered to face problems they might have, like depression. I’ve had the chance to interview specialists in all sorts of diverse fields. I have talked with the area’s best family therapists, the most experienced educators, the most qualified financial planners. The program not only touches others’ lives, but I have been helped, too. I have learned things to help me broaden my views and become a better mom. How do you balance church, work and family? I don’t. I first look at my children and make sure they are happy and that my relationship with them is where it needs to be. I do the same with my husband. My family always comes first. My work keeps me very busy, but I enjoy it. I also enjoy my church calling as a gospel doctrine teacher. But there are a lot of things I have to shelve. If the Relief Society passes around sign-ups for canning, I might have to shelve that, and other things. I’m sure I could also be a better neighbor if I weren’t working full-time. I reconcile that, knowing there was a time when I could bake bread and take it to the neighbors. Now I think to myself, “Rebecca, there was a time when you did those things. It’s okay for someone else to step in and play that role, too.” Looking back, how do you feel about your choice to be a working mom? How is your view of motherhood different than that of other LDS women? I never would regret having spent more time at home. When I was raising young children, however, the secret was looking for the right kind of work. I was flexible. I would do freelance jobs or limit work to small amounts of time a day. I would also work early in the morning when everyone was still asleep and then get home at 9:30 in the morning. All of this I did piecemeal. I treasure the times when my kids were young. I miss holding a baby and caressing the cheek of newborn. I really enjoyed those years, and I continue to have a deep connection with my kids. I have one son with learning disabilities, and I’m grateful for the blessing to have been home while he was young. I know he wouldn’t be where he is now if I hadn’t been able to dedicate that time to be home. In conjunction with motherhood, I have found opportunities to develop my interests. My mom encouraged individuality. She always told me to try things, to go for it, to do what I loved. When I went to BYU, I was the California girl with flip-flops and hair down to her waist. I knew I didn’t fit the mold in a lot of ways. I’m a feminist. But I didn’t feel the need to conform, either. I pursued the things that interested me. I always did what I loved and had a passion for. And, again, when an opportunity came, I walked through the door. Many Mormon women feel they are duty-bound to give up a career and be a stay-at-home mom. How do you feel about that stereotype and what would you say to other women who feel like they have a lot to give both personally and professionally? I have a friend who recently said she was worried about going to our high school reunion because she didn’t have a resume of accomplishments; she had stayed home to be a mom. I think we need to be at a place where we’re happy, proud in our role as a mother. We need to say, I do this and I love it. It makes me happy. Our influence as mothers is immeasurable. One thing I strongly believe is that if our children see us happily living the gospel they’ll want the same thing for themselves. Women don’t have to have a full-time job to develop their talents. They can do little things here and there. I would just encourage them to walk through those doors that open themselves to opportunities. Rebecca Cressman on the Living Essentials Set What is your next pursuit, personally and professionally? A lot of people have asked this question and wonder if I’ll write a book. I think, however, that I will focus on some of those things I’ve left behind because I just haven’t had the time. I want to get my food storage, not because I think there will be a disaster tomorrow, but so I feel prepared. I want to document memories for my children with digital scrapbooks. I will try to do a better job at the things I’ve had to overlook. Now that my three boys are grown, I look forward to the days of having a house full of little children as a grandmother. There’s so much to look forward to. At A Glance Name: Rebecca Cressman Location: Spanish Fork, UT Age: 45 Marital status: Married Children: 3 boys: Troy (20), Parker (18), and Mikel (15) Occupation: Radio Host- KSFI FM100.3 Salt Lake City, TV Host-BYUTelevision Schools Attended: Patrick Henry High School, San Diego, CA , Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, Lyndon State College-Lyndon Vermont Languages Spoken at Home: English, Spanish Favorite Hymn: “How Great Thou Art” On the Web: http://fm100.com/?sid=121875&nid=46 Interview by Melissa Hardy

Saren Eyre Loosli, co-founder of the Power of Moms website, talks about how her educational background and her personal challenges as a mother of five young children led her to create a website that seeks to empower moms by creating networks of support and meaningful mothering resources. She also talks candidly about her own struggle to balance mothering with a desire to make an impact in the world, and how, ultimately those two goals are intertwined. Would you describe the path that led you to help found the Power of Moms website? I always had in my mind that I’d finish my undergraduate degree and then get married pretty soon after that. But that didn’t work for me. I didn’t find the right person until I was twenty-eight. So that gave me time to pursue a career, to get a master’s degree in education, to live in a lot of different places, to go on a mission (to Bulgaria). I believe the Lord designed it that way for me; with my personality, I would have felt quite trapped if I’d jumped straight into having kids right out of college. I think the Lord knew that, so he said, okay, do all these things! And then when you do have your kids, you’ll be able to focus on them. My big dream coming out of college was to travel the world and to help third world countries by setting up educational programs in those countries. But then I started to realize that that was not going to work well with having a family—which was my other big dream—and trying to put my dream to make a real difference in the world and have a wonderful family together in my mind has been a really hard thing. Saren Eyre Loosli and Her Children The question for me has been, “How do I balance these righteous desires to be a great mom with these righteous desires to help the rest of the world?” Power of Moms has been my answer, but it’s not something that came overnight. It took twelve years basically trying different things, doing this training here, working in this school there, and then finally coming to this. Right after finishing my master’s in Education at Harvard, I started up a company with a friend and we ran after-school programs in the Boston public schools, mostly in some very needy schools. It was a great program, but we couldn’t make it work financially. So we closed that company and I worked for the National Institute on Out of School Time (NIOST), part of the Center for Research on Women at Wellesley College. They do training all over the country for people who are trying to do high quality after school programs. I set up regional training conferences all over the country for them in partnership with the Corporation for National Service. Around this time I met my husband, who was going to school at MIT. We lived in Boston for a year while he finished his degree. We ended up accepting a job for him in San Jose, California. When we moved, NIOST asked me to keep doing the job remotely. I worked from home while I was pregnant with my first child. When my son was a little baby, he just sat in his swing while I made all my conference calls. I even took him with me to a couple of conferences when he was an infant and kept my fingers crossed and said my prayers that he wouldn’t scream at the wrong moment. It was a little stressful, but it worked out fine. It was a great job: they respected my work and I was able to be involved with a lot of interesting things. But this transition to motherhood was trickier than I’d thought it would be. I had this colicky baby who was either in his swing or was screaming at the top of his lungs and didn’t really want to snuggle or be held. At the same time, I’d just come from Boston where I had all these fabulous friends from college and couples in our ward that we’d really connected with. I didn’t feel I clicked with anyone in San Jose. Because of my job, I was so involved with people who were still in Boston and I didn’t really fit in with the local moms that had little kids. I didn’t have coworkers per se and I couldn’t hang out with the other moms and their babies because I was working—I was working when they were off to the park. So it took me a while to kind of ease into the whole thing. I got into my groove more once I had my second son. I tried to just totally focus on my two kids for a few months, but when a new project popped up to evaluate after school programs in the San Jose area, it felt right to jump into that. Saren Eyre Loosli and Her Family I think it’s interesting that people talk about being stay at home moms or working moms; I’ve always been at home with my kids, but I’ve always been doing some big project on the side – heading off to a school to evaluate a program with a baby on my back. In some ways it feels like going back to the pioneer model: all moms were working moms, you’re out there taking care of the chickens and you’re out there picking the crops while you tend your kids. There’s no such thing as a non-working mom. Every mom works, a lot. It’s just a matter of whether the work she does has to do with hobbies or paid employment, whether she’s going out of her home to do it or staying in her home. For the most part, being involved in part-time projects worked well for me, but it’s always a huge challenge when your heart’s tugging you this way and that at the same time. Every time I was offered a new project, I asked myself, should I do this? Or is this now the time that I should focus totally on my kids? my kids? When I was pregnant with my third child, the decision was made for me: Almost right at the time when we found out we were expecting, I was asked to be the Relief Society president. I was completely blindsided. Not only was I pregnant and already had a baby and toddler, but I needed to keep my job because I’d committed to the project, we needed the money since my husband’s job had slowed down and he was only getting paid part of his salary. I said to the bishop, “Do you know we’re expecting our third child and I work?” He said, “I didn’t know you were expecting and I didn’t know your whole situation, but the Lord knew.” The bishop went on to explain that he’d gone to the temple twice because he kept fighting the Lord on this calling, thinking that I couldn’t possibly be the right person. This was a ward that had over 400 women in it, and I would say fifty percent of them had pretty serious needs. It was really one of those moments when you think: can this be the right thing? I just remember thinking, how can we do this? The bishop encouraged me to pray for my own answer. The answer was yes. While still finishing up my school-evaluation work, I stepped into this huge project of being Relief Society president. I took the kids with me (my oldest was three at the time and my baby was another colicky one) and we went to the bishop’s storehouse and we went to convalescent homes and we took care of the things that needed to happen. There were days when I thought, I can’t do this. How can I deal with all these needs when some days I couldn’t physically take the kids with me to the hospital, and my husband was in Singapore or France half the time on business. But that calling made me get out of the house and be involved in other things and made me meet with other people. I needed to do that for me at that time of my life. I also got to use all my training experience: we really trained visiting teachers like I had trained my after-school teachers and held people accountable. Also, people really stepped up to help me, because they could see me with my three little kids and they knew that I couldn’t do everything. It was truly a faith building experience and a wonderful chance to be thoroughly involved right in my own community, as opposed to trying to help people all over the world and all over the country that I wasn’t personally invested in. This experience taught me a lot about lifting where you stand. Saren Eyre Loosli and Her Family After two years of being in that calling, we decided to go ahead and have our fourth and final child. So we got pregnant, and we found out we were having twins. I was going to have five children in five years. At that point, I did go to the bishop and say, “I don’t know how much longer I can do this.” I was released, and I was then in a position to need help very much from others. I ended up needing an emergency c-section with the second twin, our oldest turned five one week before the twins were born and we didn’t have any family around (my parents travel around the world for work). So the ward stepped right in and it was a wonderful thing to see first-hand how a ward family can really work. As Relief Society president, I had been on the giving end, then I had a chance to be on the receiving end. People would show up during the times that I was the most desperate and say, “Hey, why don’t you just go to the grocery store by yourself for half an hour and I’ll be here with the kids.” Or people would bring us all their extra diapers and formula. Or they’d bring play groups to me, because it was such a hard thing to even get in the car with five kids in car seats. This experience really gave me a chance to see what the gospel’s all about. Shortly after this, we felt guided to move to St. George, Utah (we simply could not fit in our house in San Jose anymore and my husband needed a career change) and this is where the Power of Moms really got started. Soon after we moved here, a friend of mine and and I worked together to schedule a weekend retreat where moms like us could get together and have serious training conferences for their chosen profession of motherhood, just like workers in any other profession have. We put the first retreat together five years ago. People flew in from all over the country when they heard about this concept, it just resonated with people. Women left saying, “My life is changed, I’m a different mom and a different person than I would be.” The concept was so powerful we decided to drive forward with that and put together a website and an actual instruction manual so people could put together similar types of retreats for the mothers that they knew in their own circles. My friend and I got to a point in our lives where we just couldn’t work on the retreat concept anymore, so it got put on the backburner for a while. Then, a couple years later, my mom met April Perry who’d started a similar website to help moms called the Power of Moms and suggested I should get to know her a bit. Something kept nagging me at the back of my mind: “You need to talk to April.” So we emailed back and forth a little bit. We decided that we should combine our efforts, and the Power of Moms went from a little website that April was working on to a much bigger project that also incorporated my motherhood retreats. We launched last Mother’s Day 2009. Since then, thousands of moms have gathered to our website. That’s been really fulfilling. There have been times when I’ve asked myself, why am I doing this? – especially when it’s 1am and the back end of the website is giving me fits. But we felt so guided. Every time I’d hear a Conference talk or read the scriptures, I’d open to something that said to me, “Do this. The moms out there need you to be doing this, to be a catalyst to bring them together.” The whole point of the website is to bring moms together so they can all share what they know and we can have conversation around this career of motherhood. Saren Eyre Loosli and Her Family I really searched, together with April, to find resources that help mothers really take care of the person inside the mom and become their own best sort of mom. We found tons of websites that are about fashion, the best baby products, potty training, or how to deal with kids’ behavior issues that come up, and there are tons of chat rooms that seem to focus on husband bashing or complaining about how hard it is to be a mom. But it seems that so many moms want to progress and grow through motherhood – not just get through it, complain about it, or look good while doing it. We couldn’t find much that seemed truly uplifting and truly empowering to moms. So we’ve spent thousands of hours building the Power of Moms. The Power of Moms website states that the aim is to help moms be really and truly happy as mothers. How do you see the site helping moms tap into their potential as mothers? Motherhood is not just about getting the kids from point A to point B. Motherhood is about developing who we are as women and as individuals. A lot of the happiness we feel in life comes when we’re progressing; the gospel teaches us this, but it’s true in any walk of life, whether you’re religious or not. And when we feel like we’re in a rut and we’re not progressing, when we’re sad or feeling useless, then we get down about everything in our lives. The whole point of the Power of Moms is to help moms feel the joy of progressing. It’s not just our kids we’re trying to help progress, it’s ourselves. And that matters. It matters enough that we need to make time for it in our lives, whether it be getting involved in an online community or figuring out in your own personal way, what do I want to improve? Who do I want to be? What aspects of my personality should I be developing? What talents should I be developing? What can I do with my kids? How can I do those in conjunction with what I’m doing as a mom? One of our big focuses is taking care of the person that’s inside the mom, where a lot of the other websites are trying to take care of the person outside the mom: let’s see how she looks, let’s see what products she has, let’s see how she acts toward her kids. We thought, let’s start on the inside with how we feel about ourselves, with how we feel about our job as a mom and then let’s build from there. I want mothers to say, “I’m not just barely treading water, but I’m making motherhood into the joy and the progression that it should be.” For me personally, I’ve come to realize that by being the best mother I can be, the best wife I can be, that will help me become the person that’s going to make me happy. By working on Power of Moms, I feel I have a team of mothers working on my goals with me. I’m asking them for their answers. I feel the sense of empowerment from not only learning something for yourself, but being able to share it with others at the same time. My biggest hope for the Power of Moms, for myself and other moms is the chance to progress and to connect. Being a mom can be very lonely. I’ve been very lonely and I still am sometimes, but to be able to connect with others, without even leaving your home—that’s why mom blogs do so well, I think. How can moms take the skills and education they’ve accumulated and apply it to motherhood? I think that’s the big issue that so many of us who stay home with our kids struggle with. We’re trying to be the best moms we can be, but we need an outlet, we need a chance to share what we’re learning and learn more. No one in any profession is going to do a great job unless they share what they’ve learned with someone else and learn from others. Motherhood is taking all these wonderful things the gospel teaches us about love and our role as nurturers and the role of eternal progression in our own lives and then putting it into daily practice. We hear all these great talks, but the how tos . . . the daily practice is often the mystery. We’re not going to have our General Authorities stand up there and say, “This is the schedule you should follow” or “This is what you should do with your kids each day.” It’s up to us to figure that out. In my own life, I try to take my strengths and interests and use them in mothering. As an educator, I know all the different types of curricula out there, so when one thing isn’t working well for my child at school, I understand that there are other approaches we could try. I think my kids have a real love for learning and a lot of that comes from the background I have in education. I love art, and I’d love to be more serious about it, but that’s not going to happen in this phase of life. But I can do it a little bit; I pull out those art supplies and do art with my kids. I love reading, and I can’t read as much as I’d like because my kids need me a lot and I have other projects going on, but I can read books with my kids. I really make a point of searching out the best chapter books for their age groups, Newbery award winners and that kind of thing, and we really love to read together. I love traveling and I want to go all over the world, that was a big part of my growing up experience and I’d love to do it with my kids. Right now we’re kind of stuck with places we can drive to, because seven air plane tickets? It’s not going happen. But we still travel all the time. We drove down to Mexico because we wanted our kids to see what it’s like down there. And we drive to California, we go to different places all the time and try to expose them to all that we can, because I need that and I think it’s so good for my kids. And I think it’s something they will develop a need for, the need for different kinds of people and different sites and sounds, different opportunities in life, different ideas. How have your experiences as a mother changed your views on the ways we can make an impact in the world? My husband and I went to Bolivia and Africa when I was pregnant with my oldest because I have this passion for going other places in the world and helping people that are really needy – we crammed those trips in before having kids. But after I became a mother I learned that the difference I’ve been able to make when I was Relief Society president, the difference I’m able to make in my own home and in my kids’ school right now, that means more to me. I still have big ideas, but my idea of what is big and what really matters have fundamentally changed. I think I can make a big difference by the things I do with my own kids, these five little people that I can send out there to be great catalysts for good things in the world. That can be a big ripple effect right there. Every mom can do this. It’s not that I think, oh, I’ve arrived. Every day, it’s hard; I have to decide, Should I finish that project on Power of Moms that I really need to do or should I go and help the kids with homework right now? I feel this tug all the time. Of course, if push comes to shove, I know that Power of Moms will go on the shelf and my kids will get the attention, but it’s not that black and white. It’s not like, choose one or the other, it’s like, I need to choose less of this so I can choose more of the other. That is the perennial issue that I struggle with. I know that I’m doing the right things, but I don’t know how much of which things to do when. This question of finding the right balance is also something we’re trying to help moms with through the Power of Moms. I think that what I’m trying to do is what every mom is trying to do: better herself, take care of her family, plus do a little beyond. We want to take care of ourselves, we want to take care of our families, and then we want to take it a little step beyond that and feel like we’re leaving a little print in other people’s lives, that we’re being a “light to the world” in our own way. At A Glance Name: Saren Eyre Loosli Location: St. George, Utah Age: 39 Marital status: Married Children: Five, ages 5-10 Occupation: Mother; Wife; Co-Director of The Power of Moms; Director of The Joy School Company Schools Attended: Wellesley College (B.A. 1992), Harvard University (M.Ed. 1997) Languages Spoken at Home: English (and some Spanish – the kids go to a dual immersion school) Favorite Hymn: “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” Current Church Calling: Teaching the Valiant 10 class in Primary On the Web: powerofmoms.com, joyschoolco.com, personal blog: Five Kids in Five Years Interview by Rosalyn Eves. Saren’s portrait by Saydi Shumway Photography.

Noelle Pikus Pace is a world-champion skeleton athlete. In 2005, she was ranked number one in the world when she was injured during an accident at the Calgary Olympic Park. The story of her miraculous recovery is told in the documentary 114 Days. Eventually she was barred from competition at the Torino, Italy, Olympic Games in 2006 but she reclaimed her Olympic dreams when she came in fourth at the Vancouver Games this past winter. How did you get started doing skeleton? I ran track and field at Mountain View High School in Orem, Utah. When I was about sixteen years old, they were recruiting track and field athletes to try bobsledding in Park City. I went up during my junior year and fell in love with it. The following year I went back up to do it again, and they had taken away the junior bobsled program and told me that if I wanted to be a better bobsledder I should learn skeleton. I saw this cookie-sheet-looking thing on the ice and the coach said, “Okay, come here, Noelle, you first.” I’m thinking, “This is crazy–I have no idea what I’m going to do.” He takes a helmet, he puts it on my head, he takes lacrosse padding and puts it on my shoulders, and he tells me to lie on my stomach, head first, and just hold on to these little railing things on the cookie sheet. So I’m thinking, “Oh my gosh, this is the weirdest bobsled drill I’ve ever seen.” He kicked me off down the hill and I started screaming, “Oh my gosh!!! I’m gonna die!!! Holy cow, get me off this thing!” Then all of a sudden, I was like “Woo hoo! Woo hoo! This is awesome!!! Put me back up there, I want to go again!” From that time forward you couldn’t get me off of it. I was hooked. That was my introduction to the skeleton. Noelle Pikus Pace In college you were also an All-American track and field star. How did you decide where to place your emphasis as an athlete? I loved track and field. I started competing in track and field when I was about twelve years old and I knew that that’s what I wanted to do when I was in college. When I was in high school I competed in basketball, softball, track and field, soccer, bobsledding, and skeleton. My mom often said, “You gotta pick and choose what you want to do, or else you won’t be great at anything–you’ll just be okay at everything. Decide where to put your focus.” I knew it was track and field. I got a full-ride scholarship to the University of Utah for the heptathlon, which is seven events: high jump, long jump, shot put, javelin, hundred meter hurdles, the two hundred and the eight hundred. I also did discus. Then after I was there for a year, I met my future husband. We were married in July 2002, after my freshman year at the University of Utah. At that time I transferred to what is now Utah Valley University and continued competing on a full track and field scholarship. I also kept doing skeleton. During the 2002 Olympics, I thought I had the potential to go to the Olympic Games in skeleton, and even though I loved track and field, I kept getting injured. I saw more potential for myself with skeleton at that time. You said earlier that you did a little bit of everything when you were in high school, and it seems like the heptathlon really played to the breadth of your skills. Has that been a recurring theme in your life, to do a little bit of everything? I just never wanted to be bored. I’m always taking on something. I was going to school full time, taking seventeen to nineteen credits, competing in Division I Track and Field, and competing on the World Cup tour, and trying to do it all at that time. I guess that’s always how I am. Noelle Pikus Pace What is daily life like for a skeleton athlete? From October to March we travel. Most of the time it’s in Europe, anywhere from Japan to Norway to Canada, New York, Italy, Switzerland, Austria or Germany. We get a week off for Christmas, and then we’re back in Europe competing. During the travel season, we train all the time. We wake up at seven in the morning, we’re at the track at eight o’clock. We’re sliding from nine until eleven, watching other people slide from eleven to one. We go back, we eat, we work on our equipment from two until five, then we go to the gym and train for a couple of hours to get a workout in. During the evening we watch video from training that day, then we go to bed and do it all again. So we’re gone quite a bit, and then during the off-season months, from March to October, we do some of our training on our own, and we have strength and conditioning coaches that plan our workouts. I do a lot of sprinting, lifting, and plyometrics. Training during the off-season usually takes about three to four hours a day. It’s a pretty full schedule. A lot of my teammates live at an Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid, NY, and all of the athletes are welcome to live and train there, but I’m married and I have a little girl, so it’s just not practical for me. I live in Eagle Mountain. It’s about an hour drive to and from the track in Park City. Would you give me a bit of background about how your career progressed up until the Olympic trials in Calgary? My first time down from the top on a skeleton sled was in January 2001. In 2002-2003, I ended up making it onto the World Cup team, that’s the team that everybody wants to be on, the Olympic team. I was only on the team for half of the season and finished nineteenth in the world. 2003-2004 I was on for the full season and I finished fourteenth in the world. Going into 2004-2005 I was the third girl on the team, competing with a gold medalist and a silver medalist. There were some people who were disappointed that I had finished fourteenth the previous season, and at the same time some of my coaches didn’t expect that much because a lot of eyes were on my teammates, the gold medalist and the silver medalist. Noelle Pikus Pace After the 2003-2004 season, I didn’t know if I wanted to keep competing. My husband and I had talked about it and competing entailed a lot of time away, a lot of stress, and it’s not the lifestyle that I necessarily wanted to be around. First of all, I was the only married one on the team, the only LDS one on the team, so the standards just weren’t how I had hoped they would be. That summer, two weeks from the start of the season, my husband and I knew it was time to fast and pray about it. We went to the temple and felt very strongly that I should continue to compete. During that season I won a gold medal on the World Cup circuit for the first time. I continued to do well and win medals, and actually ended up first in the world in overall rankings and second at World Championships. Noelle Pikus Pace Going into the 2006 Olympics, I was ranked first in the world and expected to win. My husband and I knew that continuing to compete was the right choice. Every year we try to make sure that we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing and we’re in the place that we’re supposed to be in. Just before our Olympic team trials, I was praying and fasting and going to the temple and just feeling like it was right, feeling like I was where I was supposed to be. In October of 2005, I was in Calgary for the trials, waiting for one of my teammates to come down the track. I had just finished a training run, and was sitting there with four of my teammates talking. All of a sudden we heard a loud noise coming, and we turned and looked at the finish line, and we saw a 1,400 pound four-man bobsled just screaming towards us, going 60 or 70 miles an hour. I tried to take a step to jump out of the way but it hit me from behind, and I flew 25 or 30 feet. I did full flip in the air and landed on the asphalt. I immediately tried to jump to my feet, but I couldn’t. I tried to jump to my feet again, and I couldn’t. I looked down and that’s when I saw bones sticking out of my leg. Even from the beginning I don’t think I ever thought, “How could this be?” or “Why me?” I immediately had comfort, because I knew beforehand that I was in the place where I was supposed to be and I knew that everything was going to be okay. The doctor said that I wouldn’t be able to walk for two or three months and I was walking in two weeks. They said I wouldn’t be able to run or compete for a year, and six weeks later I was back competing on the World Cup circuit in Austria. I know it came down to the faith and the prayers and the blessings I received. It’s interesting because everyone was telling me, “You’re recovering so quickly, you have to be able to go to the Olympics, that must mean that you’re supposed to be there.” In my heart I always knew I wouldn’t make it to the Olympics that year. I was trying to be as optimistic as possible, but I felt comforted knowing it was going to be okay, that maybe there was a bigger story to tell in the perseverance of things rather than the end goal. I was planning on retiring after 2006, but after I missed the Olympic Games, my husband and I both knew it wasn’t enough, so I went back to compete the following year and ended up winning the World Championships by the largest margin in the history of our sport, which was awesome. Going back that year to compete for World Championships was probably the hardest thing I ever had to do. I was so drained–mentally, physically, spiritually. I was just shot. I didn’t want to compete, but I knew if I didn’t I probably never would go back. That’s the year I ended up winning. After I won that race, I needed a break. My husband and I wanted to start a family so I took the 2007-2008 season off and we had a little girl, Lacee. Were people surprised by your decision to start your family when you were at the very top of your career? Some people completely understood, and some thought it was crazy, but for us it was the only option. If I chose not to go back to competing after having a child, I had to know I was ready to be done with the sport if it was taking away too much from my family. I had to know I was ready to give it up, and that it was going to be okay. Talk a little bit about how your family continues to support your career, especially now that you have Lacee. My husband has been an amazing support from the beginning. Anytime when I would be down on myself and say I probably shouldn’t keep going, he’d be right there saying. “You can do it– this is a dream that we’ve got to go for.” My mom was always the one to drive me back and forth from Park City when I was in high school. We have a big family, and she was working full time, and she’d just take days off of work for me. Both my parents were amazing. My sister Amanda and her husband were the ones to watch Lacee for the past two years, almost every single day that I was gone, nearly every single day that I had to travel or compete. My sister took her in like one of her own. Noelle Pikus Pace Your husband also made your sled. How did he get involved in the technical side of your training? People don’t just up and build a sled. It’s really complicated, and this isn’t his profession. I was having troubles with my old sled a year ago at World Championships in New York. When I shipped it to Lake Placid, it broke and I couldn’t ride it. World Championships is like the Olympics; it’s a race where you want everything to be perfect, and I had to borrow one of my teammates’ sleds. It didn’t fit right, and you want your own equipment and you need it to be a certain way. My husband said, “That’s it. I’m going to build you a sled. We’re going to make this thing work perfectly for you, and I’ll know how to fix it when problems come up.” Last summer, every spare minute of every day he was studying the rule book and learning how to build it and designing it. I’m not going to lie, the first time I took it down I was a little bit nervous, but it was perfect. It fit like a glove and did everything I wanted it to. That’s the one I ended up competing on in the Olympics, and Lacee helped me decorate it, so it was a family affair, I guess. Will you talk a bit about what your experience was like at the Olympics this year? Oh, it was so amazing. I guess you dream of what a day might be like, or what it might be like to obtain your dream, and you have this picture in your mind. I did; I had this picture in my mind, especially of Opening Ceremonies, and my competition day. It was much more than I ever could have dreamed. It was an incredible experience to be able to represent the United States and also to have all my family there cheering for me in the stands. How do you think your faith and your cultural and spiritual upbringing have brought you to the place you are today? I couldn’t have done anything that I’ve done without it. Having faith in things greater than ourselves, knowing things happen for a reason, and that we’re not alone, plays a huge part in my life daily, and I hope that I can do my part. What are some of your future goals, and how do you see yourself continuing to balance having a family and being a world-champion athlete? I retired from skeleton after the Vancouver Olympics and I’m working now on a company called Snowfire Hats that I started with my husband and sister and her husband. The company and my family are really what I want to focus on now. We’re licensed through the NCAA, so we’re making hats for BYU, Utah, Utah State, UVU, and pretty much all the schools throughout Utah. They’re kind of crazy hats, knit hats with hair on top of them. They are fun for fans, fun if you’re going skiing or anything like that. We made them for the Olympics with USA written across the front, and it was a lot of fun to see everybody in the stands wearing them, and my family raved about how it made them feel united. We’d see people walking down the street we didn’t even know and they’d be wearing one of these hats. Going to the Olympics was my dream and I’ve been the overall World Cup Champion. I’ve been the World Champion. Obviously, I thoroughly missed out on a medal in the Olympics and so for that reason a lot of people think I should try to go back for another four years, but I have so many other goals and dreams to obtain, too. I gave it my best, and I’m happy with my result. So I think it’s time to close this chapter in my life and begin a new one. At A Glance Name: Noelle Pikus Pace Location: Eagle Mountain, UT Age: 27 Marital status: Married Children: One (Lacee Lynne) Occupation: Owner of SnowFire Hats Schools Attended: Mountain View High School, Utah Valley University (B.A. Community Health), Colorado Technical University (MBA) Languages Spoken at Home: English and Lacee has her own language Favorite Hymn: “How Great Thou Art” “There Is Sunshine In My Soul Today” Current Church Calling: Youth Sunday School Teacher Ages 14-18 On The Web: www.snowfirehats.com, www.noellepikuspace.com Interview by Shelah Miner. Noelle’s portrait by Jac Scott.

Pauline Sanchez was born in her grandmother’s hogan on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. From the age of eight until graduation from high school, Pauline spent her school years living with a white family in northern Utah as part of the church’s Indian Placement Program. Pauline describes feeling lost within different worlds and how her native language helped her understand the value of her experiences. She is on the Advisory board at The Anasazi Foundation, a wilderness treatment program for troubled teens and their families. She, with her husband Ezekiel, were honored as the 2001 Arizona Parents of the Year, and in 2002 received the National Excellence in Parenting Award. From 1961 to 1972, you participated in the church’s Indian Placement Program, which placed Native American children in LDS families for the school year. What was that like for you and your family? Pauline Martin Sanchez I struggled with being part of three different worlds all at the same time: my Indian world, my Mormon world, and then my American world. As I grew, I realized there are so many variables, so many points of view, and so many ways of doing things in life. In my native life, for instance, I was expected to go through certain rites of passage and maintain a certain way of living spiritually which was different from what I learned while I lived with my foster family in Utah. I thought, “How do I stay tied to my heritage, to my people? How do I live my new found faith along side what is expected of me on the reservation? ” It is Navajo tradition to bury a daughter’s umbilical cord stub in the hogan in hopes that she will make a good home. The burying of the umbilical cord also symbolizes the child belonging to the family. I wanted to maintain that tie. But some of the things in my native culture I couldn’t bring into my membership in the church. I had to ask myself how to resolve that dilemma. My native family faced all kinds of different challenges as a people. Living in nature without a lot of modern facilities was surviving day to day. But there were wonderful things they gleaned out of that life, like the value of life itself, the value of being tied to kinship. That kinship is sacred. That there is a Creator. That kinship is valuable, and our life is valuable. My father did not know any English. I maintained my tie to my culture because of the necessity of the Navajo language in our home and interpreting for my dad and the older people. The generation of my grandparents’ spoke Navajo on the reservation, so that’s what we spoke. Would you describe how you became involved in the Indian Placement Program? How did your family make the decision to send you away to school? There are many of us who left the reservation because of necessity, the need to be educated better.Because my father was never allowed to go to school, he saw this as an opportunity for me not only to gain education, but for other opportunities as well. In their love for me, and I believe guided and directed by the Spirit, my parents sent me off so that my life might not be limited. It was brave of my parents, who often needed me to interpret for them when they talked with doctors and others who spoke only English. Pauline Martin Sanchez with Her Foster Sister and Brother We lived way out there. The closest school on the reservation was in Tuba City. In order to go to school, we had to get up really early and catch a bus so we could make the 45 mile trip with stops to pick up all the children on the way to Tuba City. And even before that, there was building a fire, getting us dressed, and getting all the food cooked without running water and electricity and then get to the trading post. If you missed the bus there was no transportation because we didn’t have a car. So when the case workers came and explained the Indian Placement Program, my parents signed me up because they trusted these people, the ones that came speaking for the church. The United States government required that participants in the Indian Placement Program had to be members of the church. The program took kids off the reservation; it was all done in a legal way so the children taken were accounted for. The tribe could also ensure that the children were well cared for. It was an act of faith on the parent’s part. As time went by my eight siblings joined me in the program, one by one, with varying results. And so I was baptized that summer when I was eight. I don’t know if I was taught the gospel, but I do remember vaguely being in some kind of class. I was so young. I remember being taken to Tuba City on the reservation and being dressed up in white. I remember singing a hymn and being baptized, being brought back home and running wild again until it was time for them to put me on the bus to Utah. As the bus moved north toward Provo, Utah, passing my birth place and familiar surroundings, my heart would get that hollow feeling as tears rolled down my cheeks. I was heading to the land of abundance while my family on the Reservation was moving into the winter months, without electricity or running water. Life was difficult in the small one-room square home built by my father, with two windows, one full size bed, one twin bed, one crib, boxes of clothes, and a wood burning stove. During the school year, when I went back to Utah to go to school, I could not live up there like I did on the reservation. In Utah, I turned on the lights, I had electricity. I opened the refrigerator, it was full of food. I turned knobs and switched on things, and traveled at a faster speed than on a horse. The schedule in my Utah life was the greatest challenge. On the reservation, life was based on certain works that I did. I had to build a fire. I had to nourish myself. There are things that need to be done, but at their natural pace. When I would go back to the reservation, I put the clock away. I lived as the sand moves, and the sky. It was so much simpler! I could enjoy being with my family and enjoy the learning that took place. They supported me and encouraged me to do my best. Every year I would leave my natural parents wearing new clothes, bought by their meager income. As I grew into my teen years, it became harder to leave them. This time, instead of them buying me new clothing, I would leave whatever was left of my meager summer job income with them. What were the most difficult challenges for you culturally, going back and forth from your reservation home to your Utah home? Outward appearance was more important in Utah than it was on the reservation. On Sundays I had to wear a dress. I had to wear nylons and my hair had to be just-so. When I was a child in Primary, there were classes and tasks we had to complete and banners with check boxes to fill in. That is how children earned honor. This was very different for me. I really enjoyed those years, but as a child I had to absorb two very different cultures. Back in Navajo life, in the hogan, there are no windows. The door faces east and there is only a smoke hole. When I went on placement and into my foster home there were three doors, one that faced north, one that faced south, and one that faced west. They had all these windows and they divided the house into all these different rooms. The hogan was just one big room where you did everything. You cooked there, you slept there. It was the classroom, it was the kitchen, it was the living room. We all come differently. We’re all living life tailored for our own experience. It doesn’t matter who we are, we have been all blessed with a power to become better than we thought we could become. In doing that, we have to accept that we are going to be different, that people have different languages and different ways of looking at life. We experience different things. Some of us experience two parents in a home. Others experience one parent. Others are orphans. Some are like me: because of my Utah foster home, I have two sets of parents and I have six sets of grandparents that I claim as my own. If someone sees life from a different point of view and they share it with us we think, “Wow! I didn’t realize there was that way of living.” Most of the time we are filled with gratitude and we honor what somebody else has gone through, but we generalize too much about each other. A lot of times we look at each other just visually. I look at somebody who is Caucasian and think they are different from me. “They don’t understand where I’m coming from. Their life has been easier than mine because they’ve had the advantages of science. They could afford things that I couldn’t afford when I was younger.” I judge them on their possessions or on their opportunities compared to the lack of opportunities in my life and the catching up I’ve had to do to stand equal with them. Pauline Martin Sanchez It is important for all of us to honor our pasts so we can be blessed with gratitude and appreciation for who we are and what we are. Where much is given much is required. Life has been given us to grow. In that growing we can’t grow alone. Alone it would be like surviving in the wilderness. We can’t survive alone. We need to be tied to others in a way that we can develop trust, in a way that helps us grow well together. I struggled at first to adjust with the strangeness of this new world I was entering. Looking back, I am amazed at the trust I had put in the decision made for me, by my father and mother. I cried when my foster parents were introduced to me as “my new parents.” In that moment I realized how far away from home I was, and that there was no going back. I came to love and trust them and their children. I inherited more grandparents, more uncles, more aunts, and more cousins. As I grew among them I was not just “the placement student,” but I became “our Indian daughter Pauline,” “our Indian sister Pauline,” “our Indian granddaughter Pauline,” and “Aunt Pauline.” This family and the extended families have been the most wonderful examples of kindness and generosity. They created a belonging place for me in their family and in the community. They opened up the world to me in a safe way by their love. They encouraged me to be better than I thought I could be. The Placement Program became a saving opportunity for me. The greatest gift my natural parents gave me was allowing me to live my newfound faith and accept that I might not come home to stay for a long time. This gift of allowing me to own my own life has given me the freedom to choose the best of the different cultures that I lived in. My experiences off the reservation brought me back to enjoy the rich goodness of my heritage as a Native American woman, and equally live my divine nature as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Indian Placement Program began in 1947 and ended 1996. Do they have better schools on the reservation for the children now? I have visited some of the schools. I visited one where I am from. After fifty-four years they finally built a school near the place of my birth for seventy-four children. The Navajo Nation is trying to improve the educational systems on the reservation. It takes funding, good educational leadership, dedicated teachers, and supportive parents. In some areas of the reservation conditions are similar to third-world countries, but children are learning and graduating. It is good to see them succeeding. I admire the parents who do all they can to support their children’s education. They are trying. It’s difficult and the children struggle a lot with it too, sitting in a classroom all day and being forced to read out of books. I think like me a lot of them are visual learners so they need to get up. They need to touch, to make, create, to understand what the words in the book mean. As a mother to your own seven children, how have you incorporated your culture as you’ve tried to teach them the gospel? Have you been able to mesh the two? It’s not so much the traditions of my people, but the language itself that has enhanced the gospel principals in our lives in a way that our children and the children of The Anasazi Foundation have responded to them. The children are so used to the English labeling of things. Some words have come to have a negative connotation. For instance, religion is a bad word. Being a virgin is a bad thing. Good things aren’t ‘good’—they are ’bad’ or ‘wicked’. Pauline Martin Sanchez and Her Family The role of parents has been tainted. They are no longer people that these children honor; they’re caretakers, “Oh that’s just my parent, my old man, old woman. They don’t care.” They’re not tied to their children as they used to be because the language has begun to change. The words have lost that special meaning they used to have. The Navajo language is different, it does not change. In Navajo, ‘wicked’ doesn’t mean good; it means wicked. In Navajo, when you address your parents you say shi’ma’, which means ‘my mother’, or shi’azhe’e, ‘my dad’. Already they are yours, and there is a connection to them. The language has a kinship foundation. You come from a family group. You’re born to a family group, through your mother. You’re born for the family group your father belongs to. Families are very important, and you must memorize the family group name of your mother, and the family group name of your father, and those of your grandfathers’. I am tied to four different families called clans. I have a responsibility, I have a stewardship to act my part. No matter where I go I am always part of a family. Navajo is a spiritual language, and because of that I can teach my children in ways that make them feel it in their hearts and paints a picture for them in their minds. They learn and feel it so it lasts and lingers in a way that makes it valuable to them. For example, in Navajo we use the walking language. The question with which you greet someone is “Do you walk well?” It’s a positive thing. It’s a goal, it’s a searching question. “Do you walk well?’” It is the same in the scriptures: walking with God, walking upright, walking forward. There is a visual association with that. How do you walk with God? It causes you to stop and create a picture in your mind about how you personally would walk with God. It takes you a step forward. You’re obligated to have this uplifting experience. You have to look up and say, “How do I walk with deity? How do I walk with this pure perfected being? Is it possible for me?” You begin to search for how you would dress. How is he dressed? Not in clothing, but what are his attributes? The inside, the inward characteristics of who this person is, is valuable. You have to take that journey into what kind of experience that would be like, or how you picture it. It takes pondering and making choices. It’s like painting with words. Pauline Martin Sanchez Members of my tribe often call each other shi’a’we’e’, which means “That’s my little one”. They honor that we belong to them. I love going home to my people. They take our temperature, or feed us, or ask about us. They sit down and start telling stories about when we were little, bringing back wonderful memories of us or our families and those wonderful memories that we can’t remember or that we have forgotten. They again recreate it the way they saw it. They paint it beautifully so that it is good, not only for us, but because these are the sacred things they continue to carry with them. I think, “Wow! I didn’t realize I was that important to them, that I am still that important to them! They really do know me, they really do care about me. I’m really tied to them. I really do belong to them.” I would come back home to the reservation and my family would hug me and hold me and tell me stories and cook for me. They would invite me to serve them by chopping the wood, cooking with them, butchering the sheep with them, weaving the rugs with them, walking with them, riding horses with them. Whatever it is they just bring me in, taking me in with them. Pauline Martin Sanchez's Wedding Day with Her Foster Parents and Her Husband's Parents I come home as a married woman and they want to hear about what life is like now. Are you walking well as a married woman? Are you happy? Is he making you happy? When I come now with children, they not only enjoy being with me, but also look at these beautiful beings that have come. They, and my children, are all joined together. I put the babies in their hands. They delight in us coming home to them and having these little ones. How does your language help you understand and teach the gospel? My language has been very valuable in teaching about spirituality. The name of deity is still holy and sacred. He is still a holy and a sacred being. I always try to convey who he is to my children so they feel his sacredness. That comes from my language, speaking words in a way that it lingers, speaking in a way that it is pressed into them and painted like beautiful murals on the walls of their hearts. I am trying to paint beautiful pictures about love, about compassion, about how much they are loved. I’ve tried to find a word for sacred and holy because in the English language these beautiful word have lost that feeling. How can I help others understand what that word means from the experience I’ve had with it? I finally came to a definition that I hope conveys the feeling of the words “sacred and holy”. If we are sacred, we are of immeasurable worth, beyond price, beyond anything earthly. Our value expands. There is no beginning and no end to our worth. Painting that picture of who we are I hope conveys that we are sacred beings. We are of immeasurable worth. Our power to create is unlimited, our ability to grow is unlimited. In my native language, things are said in a way that gives more meaning to the things that really matter. It is a spiritual language. As I began to look back as an adult, I loved it and thought, “Why does it sound so pleasing to me?” When I look at the gospel of Jesus Christ, I realize it’s another way of looking, another point of view, another way of describing and putting into pictures what I was experiencing, creating a picture so when it was done I understood it better. It was beautiful. It was nourishing. It was pleasing. You are the mother of seven children and now a grandmother. How do you describe your experience as your family grows and expands at this stage of life, and what do you tell your children and grandchildren about their rich heritage? I tell Ezekiel, my husband, that through having little grandbabies we have been given added years. We are living our lives with our seven children, and then now we’ve got more years that have been given us to live with our granddaughter Grace, and more years to live with her sister Serenity, and more years to all these others that will come. It multiplies our years. Not physical years, but it gives us years of experience living with somebody else, knowing another person. The word that comes to me in describing living lives with others is ‘kinship’. I picture living with them horizontally, walking back and forth through them, finding and sharing good things of the soul and heart in pure moments, sharing spirit to spirit, and being blessed with and enjoying some of the heavenly dividends in each of those kinship. I keep telling my children we are really blessed because we are living so many lives. We’ve just begun, earth life is just the Primary. We know in the pre-mortal life we were there with our Heavenly Father and our Heavenly Mother. We were there in this wonderful place where we learned with each other, but in a very sterile situation. We are let free here on the earth. We are a little more expanded, experienced. We won’t experience everything because we aren’t capable of experiencing everything yet. But there’s going to be enough joy and enough sadness, enough light and darkness in our lives, enough storms and enough suffering to enjoy the blessed peace and love and happiness so that we can move forward to another experience. The Anasazi Foundation, a wilderness treatment program in Arizona for troubled teens and their families, has had hundreds of children come through the program over the last twenty years. You are on the board of directors, and your husband Ezekiel is one of the co-founders and widely recognized as a pioneer in the wilderness treatment industry. What have you both learned as you’ve watched the program over the years? The word ‘Anasazi’ means ‘those who walked before,’ full of wisdom. I know that it was an inspired program. There’s not another word for it. I’ve been an observer and a participant. I’ve walked with some that came these twenty years; the children themselves and some of the parents, our wonderful staff and those supporters who have been a great blessing to us over the years. It’s a family experience. Some of the children come with more than one set of parents, sometimes two sets of parents, sometimes three sets of parents. I think about the statement of one young walker before he came to Anasazi: “I’ll either be dead, or I’ll be in prison.” For a child so young, that’s a tragedy. We’re in a country that’s rich. Our capacity to do good is unlimited and yet here stands within this country among us a child who thinks the only two directions he can go is either prison or death. It’s a sad commentary. But after he leaves those choices no longer linger in his heart. He can move on. He is unlimited in all the good he can do and the value of that is immeasurable, not only to him as he moves forward, but to his parents and all those that care about him and love him, all those who will be in his future, the young woman that will stand by his side, the children that will be in his future. You often see children who went through the program return as adults to work for you. What is it like to see them return? It is so awesome to see them. One day I was sitting in a parents’ seminar and we were going around in a circle and telling the others who we were, where we were coming from, why we were there. When it came to this young man he said, “I am here because I have come to repay a debt.” At that time I thought, ”Your debt is paid. Your debt is paid to the one who paid your debt.” I thought he should be somewhere getting an education, and not feel burdened with something that has already been paid for. But it was an honor to sit with him. I realized nevertheless, it is good for him to be here. What he can give to those he walks with in the desert is amazing. I looked at this man that first day and thought, “I don’t know if those children he walks with understand who this person is.” But they did. They saw him and who he was and what he had, and they wanted what he carried with him. He shared that with them. I know he walked away satisfied with his giving. It’s been a great joy to Ezekiel and me to see these Young Walkers now stand as leaders and loving and caring for the children in a way that the children can feel their Seed of Greatness. Our lives are of immeasurable worth because we are tied to each other, and we tie ourselves to so many other lives that are of immeasurable worth. Once in a while it’s nice to stop and just look at the rippling effect and the good that it’s doing. It gives you hope that there’s still good in the world, that there are miracles to be made, prayers to be answered, and sacred beings to return to a holy place called home. At A Glance Name: Pauline Martin Sanchez Location: Mesa, AZ Age: 57 Marital status: Married to Ezekiel Sanchez 36 years Children: Seven –Jacob 35, Nephi 33, Lehi 31, April 29, Sariah 26, Rachel 24,Moroni 22 Occupation: Everything! Schools Attended: Tuba City Boarding School, Tuba City Public School, North Summit HighSchool, Brigham Young University Convert to Church: April 1961 Languages Spoken at Home: English, Spanish, Navajo Favorite Hymn: “I Believe In Christ” Current Church Calling: Ward missionary On the Web: Anasazi.org Interview by Marintha Miles

This dynamic mother of five grown children shares her love of travel, of reading, of science and her admiration of her own mother. Camilla serves as the Church’s Public Affairs representative in the San Francisco Bay Area, and she further contributes to her community by being a trustee of the National Public Radio foundation, the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library, the San Francisco Interfaith Council, and Clog America. I grew up in a big family with seven siblings. My place in the family was special because I was five years younger than my next older brother, the only girl born between four boys. As the youngest girl, I was in a great position and very close to my mother. What was your mother like? For a Mormon woman of her era (she was born in 1907), she was a free woman, meaning she did what she wanted to do. That had a lot to do with my father, who wanted her to be happy. That’s a great gift, to have a husband like that. As the older children grew up, we helped with the family responsibilities and my mother felt totally free to travel every summer and leave the younger children with my father and the older children. It was a pretty unusual situation. My mother had enormous energy and interest in many areas. She felt it was her right to pursue those interests. My mother worked a full-time job all of my life. She taught school. She was also a natural-born leader. She was a poet, published three books of poetry and five of prose, a member of Pen Women and was a member of the Utah Poetry Society. When she was in college, Mother received an efficiency award. She’d say, “Efficiency is the best, the most, in the least amount of time. Time is always an element. You try to do the best you can, but always remember that you can’t overspend time on it.” I grew up with my mother’s philosophy and a real sense that I had a responsibility to the community, particularly the church community. Mother felt a responsibility to all of her communities and to the Mutual Improvement Association (MIA) as a general board member. Another thing she was very talented at was making me feel that I was her favorite child. When I talk with my siblings, each one has something they particularly shared with her, so she had a way of figuring out what you were interested in so you felt special. It wasn’t artificial, she truly was interested in you. For example, I loved literature and writing and wanted to be an editor. When I worked for The Putnam Publishing Group in New York as an editorial assistant, I would send her books we were publishing. She read everything, and would say, “Oooh, that was pretty sexy.” Camilla Smith You attended graduate school at Columbia University in the 1960s. How did a Mormon girl from Utah end up in New York City and how did it change you? I went on a BYU Study Abroad to Grenoble, France during my sophomore year of college and that opened my horizons. Additionally, both my mother and father were very broadminded people. My father cared most about whether or not you were a good person. It wasn’t whether or not you were a good Mormon or were rich or poor or were of a certain class. Because my father spoke Spanish so well he translated for the migrant workers who lived in the community. He always did that, kind of quietly. Mother was much more of a social person, but she had friends from all walks of life and all situations, and dealt with them equally. For example, two men lived next door to each other and were her friends from her poetry group. I remember her saying to me, “Oh, they’re probably homosexuals. Isn’t it too bad we have to label people?” This was early on, maybe in the 1960s. My parents’ worldview helped me feel that I was not just a Mormon girl, but I had further horizons. I felt very free to travel and after my senior year of college, I worked for the National Association of Food Chains in Washington DC. (an editing job). I loved my job in Washington BUT my friend Sally Ann said, “You have to come to New York, it is the place for you.” I felt, “Okay, that’s the thing to do.” So I moved to New York. I always went to church while I lived in New York City. But I remember having a crisis of faith when I was in graduate school and we were studying literature. I was taking a course called “Black Literature,” and one of the authors of an assigned book wrote about how he had given up what he called “tribal religions” to become a Bahá’í. Why? Because he viewed Christianity, Judaism and Islam as tribal religions. The nature of a tribal religion is that it excludes anyone who is not part of the “tribe.” I thought about that (and of course Mormonism is very tribal) and agreed with him that tribal religions were destructive. I remember thinking that I could give up the church because excluding others is not what a loving God would do. Then I started thinking about family and how important family is for the development of a child and obviously a baby would not survive without a family, which is actually just a small tribe. So the tribe was probably not the problem. Everyone needs a family and that tribe to give them strength, but then that strength should be focused outside of the tribe and community rather than trying to keep people huddled together. That’s really at the core of my religious faith. I am a very religious person. I am a very religious Mormon. But the purpose of the church is to make people strong in order to reach out to the larger world, and not to keep us isolated from the world. What other organizations have you been involved in—besides your family? Certain issues really interest me. One such issue is learning what it is to be human. It’s so mysterious to me. I’m a believer in the evolution of man, so I naturally question what is the change that took place between the anatomically human person that existed for a million years and what evolved about 50,000 years ago as the modern human? There’s something that took place. It probably had to do with language and symbolism. . . something happened in the brain. We were anatomically human making simple stone tools that didn’t change for a million years. Then something happened that affected humans’ ability to learn, innovate, and seek for new ideas. This interest is why I’m a trustee of the Leakey Foundation, which does research into human origins and ape studies. Other organizations? A friend introduced me to the University of California-Berkeley Bancroft Library specifically to help them with their newsletter, so I got very involved with the Bancroft Library at U.C. Berkeley and I write the newsletter for their special collections library. I love such positions. I love associating with scholars and researchers. I’m also a trustee of the National Public Radio Foundation. For that endeavor, I am particularly interested in public education and science education in which we are woefully lacking in the United States. I also love my church job. I do public affairs work for the church. I’m on the executive committee for the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s a long-term job; it’s not a job that changes every two years or so. With public affairs work, I form long-term relationships within the community. I work on interfaith relations and on foreign consulate relations. So has this been a difficult job for the last few years with the recent political discussions about same sex marriage in California? Yes, but it’s an interfaith council. We have Catholics on the council and Muslims—all of whom feel similarly to Mormons about same-sex marriage. The interfaith community is interesting because we understand that we will disagree on moral issues but there’s warmth and an understanding of differing opinions. Some interfaith organizations say, “Don’t give prayers or say anything that would be offensive to other people.” But our group says, “We want authentic expressions of faith from you. So we expect you to pray before us as you would pray in your church or synagogue. That’s a very freeing experience.” People pray to Allah, and you really do get to understand what other people feel. Camilla Smith and Her Family There was so much negative media with Proposition 8 (The California Marriage Protection Act) on our church and protesters picketed at the temple. When I went to an interfaith board meeting soon afterwards, there were nothing but expressions of sympathy and understanding that this was a very painful issue for Mormons. The other council members may not agree with us, but they didn’t want us to be the target of such hostility. It was quite a remarkable experience for me, especially because I personally do not support Prop 8. I think families come in different forms. But my church supports Prop 8 and I represented them and I found the interfaith community support for my church quite remarkable. You have five adult children. Have your notions of what it means to be a success changed as you’ve raised your children? That’s an interesting question. I’m a big believer in education, so it’s easy to feel successful when you see your kids wanting to be educated and work in fields like medicine or education, as three of my children do. When you have someone like my son George, who is focused on music and hasn’t graduated from college, defining success is harder. If anything, he’s the brightest of our kids. I adore him and want the best for him and it’s somewhat of a hard life that he’s chosen. George has probably influenced you in ways that wouldn’t have happened if everyone had followed a path similar to the one your other kids chose. Camilla Smith in Antarctica That’s true. Because of George, I actually went to a rave. George was organizing a rave party [all night dance party] so I went. He met me at the door with earplugs. At the end there were a bunch of teenagers dancing all night. His comment to me was, “See, they just want to have a place to dance.” You’ve learned not to look at his path as a limiting path. It’s a different path; a creative path. I think it’s dangerous sometimes but I don’t see it as a failure. It’s interesting because he kind of wants to be on his own, but at any family event, he’s there. He always attends. Can you tell me about some of the most interesting places you’ve traveled? Recently my sister Rosemary and I went to Antarctica, which was fantastic. It was an expedition with National Geographic. We went on Zodiacs [inflatable boats] out to the shore and walked among the penguins. We learned a lot! Travel is an educational thing. I don’t think travel is somewhere to go just to sit; you go to learn something about the people and about the terrain and about history. My husband and I went to Mongolia, where we stayed in round tents called “gers”. Mongolians had the largest land empire in history. It was brief and they did not leave behind what the Roman Empire left because they considered language sacred and did not want other people to speak their language. Mongolians were mainly interested in trade. Camilla Smith in Mongolia I am also an advisor to Clog America [a world performing folk dancing troupe] and have traveled with them for four years. That has been particularly interesting because I meet local people who share their own traditions. I’ve been to Sardinia, Slovenia, and to the South of France. We recently had a festival in Istanbul and I was there for a week and dancers from Sierra Leone and South Korea attended (and did such a marvelous dance!) The folk dance the South Koreans performed was from early Korea. Korea was settled by Mongolians and a third of Japanese noble names are Korean. I knew that the Japanese tea ceremony originated in Korea, but I was talking to the Korean dancers, and their choreographer in particular, and asked her where the dance came from. That was a revelation to me, because it’s clearly very ancient and I think probably from Mongolia. Folk dances kind of pull all of that history together. When you see it, it’s kind of a gestalt—it brings it all together. Has travel affected your relationship with the gospel? When I first went to the temple, I was surprised that the temple is so ritualized and mysterious and has little to do with what I normally love about the church—which is that it’s a lay church and we all try to help each other be better people. Another time when I was at the temple, I was thinking about the humans in the Lascaux cave [one of a group of caves in southwestern France famous for its Paleolithic cave paintings]. Early man did not live in those caves—they used them for ceremonies. There is something in the human psyche that needs ceremony and symbolism. The seed for the modern human can be seen in those caves in France. When I go to the temple, that’s what I think about. I think that I’m doing a ritual that goes back to original rituals. Not that our temple ceremony has evolved from that, but that our need for ritual is part of what it means to be human. Understanding such things from having seen these places helps me to make sense of church teachings and practices. At A Glance Name: Camilla Smith Location: San Francisco, CA Age: 64 Marital status: Married Children: Four sons and one daughter Occupation: Writer/editor, Trustee: National Public Radio Foundation, LSB Leakey Foundation, San Francisco Performances, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Music & Menlo, UC Berkeley Library Advisory Board, UC Berkeley Bancroft Library Council of Friends, Interfaith Center at the Presidio. Schools Attended: BYU (BA), University of Grenoble, France (Certificate D’Etranger), Teachers College at Columbia University (MA) Favorite Hymn: “Come Thou Fount Of Every Blessing” Current Church Calling: Bay Area Public Affairs Executive Committee Interview by Shelah Miner

Over a period of about ten years, Chrysula Winegar transitioned from being single and in a busy career in Sydney, London and New York, to being married with four children and consulting and blogging from home. Chrysula discusses why she made the choices she did, and how balancing her former self with who she is today is so important to her. Everything rides on my decision to have four children. I felt I needed to have four kids, and I didn’t feel complete until the fourth one came. I can’t really explain that decision in any kind of rational or logical way. I can only explain it in the traditional Mormon framework: I knew that there were four children who were entrusted to me and who needed to be part of this family. My decision to maintain my career was a very rational, economically-based choice at the time. I was married at the age of 30, and I always intended to stay home with my children. However, right as I had my first child, my husband was launching his own business, so it made sense for me to stay at my job as International Marketing Manager with Aveda Corporation, part of the Estee Lauder Companies. I really enjoyed it, although it wasn’t my passion. I stayed in that role, progressed in it, and was promoted, while my husband started his business and took on the majority of household administration and managed our baby’s day care schedule. Chrysula Winegar and Her Family I love being a mother and I love my children, but I don’t love mothering per se. I find that constantly meeting the needs of a child is extremely difficult. I’m not a naturally playful person. It’s not instinctive for me to get on the floor to play. I have to make very conscious decisions to do those traditional “mommy” activities. I don’t like to bake. Making cookies with my kids is a nightmare for me! That’s stuff that I have to schedule in my diary and make happen, because it’s not instinctive for me. As I more consciously mother, I am finding greater joy in those small activities along the way, but it’s a work in progress. So at what point did you decide to step out of full-time work? I had my second child—so I had two daughters by then—and the transition from one to two children was tough for me. After maternity leave, I went back to work. It was really hard. The conclusion that my husband and I came to was that it just wasn’t working; I felt like I was missing out on too many things. A few months after returning to work, I was offered two possible promotions, one of which was my dream job. That one would have required relocating to Minneapolis and the other would have required extensive international travel. Neither of those options would have worked for my family. My husband’s career is in the art world, and his whole network is in New York City, so moving to Minneapolis was out of the question. And I wasn’t willing to regularly travel internationally with two babies at home. The decision was a no-brainer at that point. I cried for two days and then I resigned. After grieving for those professional roles, I felt fine; I didn’t feel forced into a corner, and I was really happy to be at home with my girls. For the next couple of years, I didn’t really think about anything else other than being home full-time with them, running my household, and supporting my husband’s business, doing his administration and marketing communications. In the meantime he started a corporate role. After a couple of years, I started getting a little bit antsy. I was pregnant with my third—our first son—and had even started praying about it: “What is next, Lord?” During that time, my husband had a job that required him to travel more than half of the year, and he was also in the bishopric of a singles’ ward. I was essentially on my own most of the time, and that probably compounded some of this thinking for me. So I’m about to have my third child, and am having all of these “ifs, buts, and maybes” in my mind. Then the stake presidency called me in for an interview. They said to me, “We have been given this answer three times, and every time we’ve said, ‘We can’t do this to this poor woman,’” because my husband traveled and was in a bishopric, I was about to have my third child, and we were living in 750 square feet in Manhattan. But they said, “We feel very clearly that you’re the person for this calling,” and they called me to be the Director of Public Affairs for the New York New York Stake. After my initial shock, I thought, “Oh, thank you, Heavenly Father, you know me so well.” Because what I needed was a seat at the table, and this gave me that. I had been missing meetings. I had been missing dialogue. I had been missing brainstorming, and important conference calls that had to happen right at that moment. I had been missing writing. It was right in the middle of Mitt Romney’s campaign, so the church was receiving a lot of media attention and inquiry and it was a dynamic time to be involved in public affairs. The role put all of my corporate skills to use. It was absolutely the hand of the Lord. It was a great experience. Chrysula Winegar You have started doing more in relation to work/life balance issues. How did that start? Those issues have always been in the background. I was a recruiter in my early life, and I have always been interested in the questions of “Why do people do what they do?” and “How have they gotten to this point?” I was always fascinated by others’ career paths and the accidental jobs that people picked up that changed their lives and pushed them down a certain pathway. Because of this interest in human behavior in the workplace, I had done a master’s degree in Organizational Behavior in London in my late twenties, and within that degree I focused on work/life issues, along with training and development, which go hand in hand. But I couldn’t find a job in that area when I moved to New York City initially in 2000: companies weren’t really interested in it and didn’t have money for it. So I ended up back in marketing instead. I always knew that I wanted to do more around work/life issues, so I’ve kept up on the conversation and the policies. The public affairs calling is now gone, and so right now, I’m beginning a work/life consultancy practice and writing curriculum for some training programs that will be really powerful. If I’m going to invest time and effort away from my family, it has to be something I really care about. You also started to blog about work/life issues in Fall 2009. Why did you start to blog and how has it helped you maintain your sense of self? For a long time, I hadn’t really gotten into blogging at all, and I had resisted Facebook and Twitter. I think it was a spiritual prompting for me to get involved, and I felt like this was a way that I could progress my ideas and explore some of the concepts that were important to me. I’ve been thinking about some of these work/life ideas for 20 years, but I haven’t always spoken up about them. When I turned 30, I started to feel like I no longer needed to be frightened of my opinions or who I am. Then I got married and had children, and those years in my late thirties were a blur. But when I turned 40 and had my last child, I felt like I entered a new phase; it intensified those feelings of “I do not need to hide my opinions. I’m smart, my opinions are informed. It’s okay to share them, it’s okay to have a platform, and it’s okay to have an agenda.” I’m really honored when people read my blog. I have a small following by most comparisons, but I’ve also built connections through Twitter. I just had lunch with eight women in New York City who are all making huge contributions to the work/life debate in different ways. We’re trying to put together a conference, and I’ve been invited to write on a few other blogs. I’m building relationships that help this message get out there. I have a seat at the table, and if I hadn’t opened my mouth six or seven months ago, I wouldn’t be there. You write about balancing the different parts of your life. What are the challenges and victories in your own quest to balance home life and professional pursuits? Are there certain things you’ve had to sacrifice or certain keys to your being successful? Right now, I’m not as great of a homemaker as I’ve been in the past. This is hard for me—I can’t stand a dirty floor—but I’ve had to let things go, because I’m making different choices. It’s a clichéd piece of counsel, but you have to prioritize, and for me, the way my household looks has gone down the list in recent months as I’ve upped the ante on my writing and other professional pursuits. I also think you need to be realistic about what you can and cannot do. It’s important to abide by the Word of Wisdom, and also the verses in D&C 88 that talk about getting enough sleep. For a while, I was staying up late every night, because there is so much I am hungry to do, and I was trying to feed my brain in the hours that I could. But I kept getting sick, and it wasn’t fair to my kids, my marriage, or me. So I’ve had to learn to shut down and say “no” to certain things, even if that means saying “no” to myself. Lastly, we hear it all the time, but it’s true that there are different phases to life. Right now, my kids are little, ages 7, 5, 3, and 1. It’s crazy, but motherhood is not always going to be this intense. I don’t need to launch a full-scale business at this particular point; I just need a toe in the water right now, so that I’m ready when I want to grow it to something bigger. I had my first child at age thirty-four, and then another at thirty-six, thirty-eight, and forty. Having kids close together is a recipe for insanity, but then you’re on the next ticket. I couldn’t do the baby thing forever; I feel at peace about moving to the next phase. I grew up the same way; my mom had four kids in four years. It was phenomenal; we were very close. Chrysula Winegar Related to this idea of balance, you have also written about the various pieces of counsel that are given to Mormon women: to be prepared, to get as much education as we can, to work hard, to nurture our families. These messages can seem contradictory at times. How do you reconcile them? In our theology, we have clearly stated roles about who provides and who nurtures, and I value that. None of my input into this conversation is ever intended to devalue those stated goals. But women have always worked: the pioneer women did sewing, took in extra laundry, cared for animals, and so on. Yes, this work was often done from their homes, but they worked. Today, we’ve become quite linear about how we define work. We all work—whether for money or not; it’s part of our DNA as Mormons. I worry that we’ve become a bit hung up on this and are too quick to judge. I worry when I see Mormon women stepping away from the workforce early in their lives and not maintaining their skills. Our marriage percentages are not that much better than the world’s. Certainly they are for temple marriage, but not by as much statistically as you would hope. There are many women who are unprepared for sudden death or a revealed affair or simply unemployment…and suddenly a marriage is in tatters or under great pressure and there are children, and the woman isn’t equipped to take over. This whole idea of preparedness and education is strong in our church. All this might mean is subscribing to an industry publication or taking an occasional class or reading once or twice per week in an online forum about the latest developments in your area. Just don’t close that door. I get frightened when women do that to themselves. It’s not only fiscally and economically healthy to maintain your skills, but it’s also mentally healthy to have a connection with the world. We need to go back to our history and look at our female ancestors, and we’ll see that they always worked. There are alternative ways—besides working full-time—to stay in the game. What advice would you give to other women who are struggling to balance the many roles and expectations for Mormon women? It would be to never stop reserving a corner of what it is you might do on the side. Be creative. Don’t be frightened to be interested in something outside of your children. Mormon women are really good at frugality—at scrimping, saving, and cutting back. But we’re not so good at investing, growing, and managing our money. I certainly think that women should understand where their money is going and make some effort to be financially aware. Figure out what discretionary time you have and enhance your skill set, whether it’s through taking a class, reading a publication, or joining a forum for an area of interest that you could turn into economic advantage down the road. I’m not saying, “Go out and get a job tomorrow.” I’m saying, “Find a way to stay connected.”It’s also important to counsel with your husband. I have a very supportive man at my side, but we’ve had to have some painful conversations about prioritizing what’s most important to our family. We’ve been prayerful about it and tender with each other. He’s my biggest fan and cheerleader, but it’s a work in progress for us; we’re making it up as we go along. We are open with each other and involve the Lord in determining what is right for our family. Finally, it’s critical to counsel with the Lord and to be open to personal revelation about the best path for you. It’s important to me to remember that the Lord knows who I am in my absolute core much better than I know who I am in my absolute core. He is going to send me opportunities that are right for me and that will ultimately bless my family, as long as I work hand in hand with Him. At A Glance Name: Chrysula Winegar Location: Darien, CT Age: 41 Marital status: Married Children: Four children ages 7, 5, 3, and 1 Occupation: Mother and work-from-home consultant Schools Attended: University of Queensland, University of London Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: “Be Still My Soul” Current Church Calling: Relief Society Teacher, Activities Co-Chair On the Web: www.wlbconsultants.com Interview by Barbara Christiansen. Headshot photos by Michelle Catherine Photography.

As a single 34-year-old, Tiffany followed her Patriarchal Blessing’s advice to seize the opportunities offered to her, resulting in a life full of career opportunities, travel adventures and spiritual highlights. But then, when her sister became overwhelmed with the responsibilities of single motherhood, Tiffany seized a different kind of opportunity: she assumed legal custody of her nine-year-old niece and became mother to an elementary school-aged child overnight. My patriarchal blessing talks about education and having knowledge of the things that are about me and around me. I feel like I have taken that counsel to heart. If life is all about experiences, then we just need to act. And if an opportunity is presented and feels like a good thing to do and we receive confirmation to move forward, then we should just go forward—even if it is scary or maybe not what we had in mind for ourselves or was not our plan. Things happen for a reason and we are definitely given opportunities that help us grow. What were some of your formative experiences that gave you a testimony of this principle? My parents were very encouraging and supportive in helping me gain an awareness of my environment. We took a lot of trips when I was young. That idea really stuck with me. When I was 19, I headed off to Russia for six months to teach English. I didn’t know a soul but I felt like I needed an experience away from my family and friends to see who I was and what I would do when no one else was around. I stayed with a family that didn’t speak any English and I attended a branch in Moscow with new members of the church. I read the Book of Mormon in its entirety for the first time and had a lot of experiences that opened my eyes to the world. I learned that people all over the world want the same thing. We all want to be happy, we all want our families close by; we all want our families to be happy. We are just in different situations and have different struggles. When I returned home from Russia, I left for Israel two months later with the Brigham Young University study abroad program. It was another fantastic experience. I studied the Old Testament and the New Testament and we went to the Sea of Galilee. It was there that I decided to serve a mission. After four months of being home, I decided that I would serve a mission but I wanted to pray about it because I had read my Patriarchal Blessing so many times and it did not say anything about serving a mission. So I prayed and immediately felt a confirmation that yes, in fact, I was supposed to go. I was called to serve in Paraguay, South America and I had a fabulous experience. I loved the language. I loved the country. I had wonderful companions and my mission president and his wife were like parents to me. When I decided to go on a mission, I started noticing a pattern of taking opportunities when they arose. If there was a chance for growth, I wanted to be a part of it and experience what could come from it. Tiffany Peterson Did you feel with all the consecutive learning opportunities in foreign countries that you were on a spiritual journey, even though perhaps you didn’t realize it? Yes…definitely! With each opportunity, and each experience, I learned a little something different about myself and who I wanted to be. And not just from a personality perspective but from a spiritual perspective as well. When I returned from my mission, I was approached to go to China for a semester to teach English. China was never on my radar! But I ended up going and I got to teach adorable little Chinese kids who were just so happy and full of life. I also got to spend 4 months with some amazing girls that were contemplating missions and they would eat up my mission stories. This was great for me to be able share my experiences with a willing audience after my friends and family had had enough back home! It was another great experience. Did your desire to constantly learn influence your career choices, and was it important to you to have a career? An interesting thing my Patriarchal Blessing said was to gain knowledge and be prepared to take care of myself. So because of that I didn’t want to do just anything—I wanted to feel like I was succeeding and a valued employee. I graduated with an economics degree and after working for a mortgage company immediately after college, I ended up working for Morgan Stanley, first in client customer services, and then in a new department offering a new service. Eventually, Goldman Sachs opened up an office in Salt Lake City so I sent my resume to them and started the interview process. Goldman Sachs was top-notch, with smart people and lots of opportunities. The interview process lasted five months long, with a hiring freeze and 15 interviews. I ended up taking a job with them that was not initially what I was interested in, but within three minutes of meeting my future manager, I knew I wanted to work for her. Our personalities just “clicked.” I went to New York City for a month and then the department was moved to Salt Lake City. I started out as the only one on the team and for the next four and a half years it was the most fascinating and challenging time. I put together a training program and traveled around the world to the different offices and trained salespeople. I basically got to construct my own job description. Tiffany Peterson There was so much work to be done and everyone jumped in, which was very different from previous jobs. I really thrived. I felt like I could make a difference and if things were not going as smoothly as they could, I could offer up suggestions and people would listen. It felt very creative and very satisfying. I thought that when I got married it would be easy to quit because I wanted to be married and have kids. But the longer I worked and the more I thought about it, the more I realized it would be hard to do. I was a vice president. I loved my job and I was good at it! People came to me and wanted my advice and wanted me in meetings to brainstorm. You became the legal guardian of your niece almost three years ago. What circumstances led you to make that choice? When Paige was born, there was an immediate connection between us. My sister and I have always been close and Paige first slept over at my house when she was six weeks old. Paige spent a lot of time with me. She was my outlet—I would be working hard, but on the weekends I could go pick her up and she would come over and we would just laugh. I had time with this little girl who was so full of life and people would comment, “She is your mini-me…you look and act alike!” I’m not sure if that was because Paige was acting older or because I was acting like I was five! There was definitely a connection and a bond between us. My sister’s situation was a little tumultuous—she was a single mom trying to pay rent and provide for her kids and she was getting overwhelmed. In 2007, I spoke with my sister about some changes that she could make in her living situation. Her 2 older children from a previous marriage had moved in with my parents to finish high school and I invited Paige to live with me for the school year. My sister lived in an area that had year-round school and it was tough keeping track of the schedule and arranging babysitting and other things. Where I lived, the school system was on a traditional schedule (September to June) with a great after-school program. I wanted to help keep things stable for my niece while my sister’s situation improved. In order to do that I needed power of attorney and I needed to be Paige’s legal guardian. The day before I went to pick her up, I felt very strongly that it was not going to be a short-term thing. I didn’t know why, because we had agreed it would only be for the school year, but I had the feeling that if I went to pick her up, it would be for good. How did you feel about that? And how did that affect your relationship with your sister? It was really overwhelming. I cried. I wondered what I was doing. I knew it would change everything. I was single, working in corporate America; I had friends—all of that. I was 34 years old. My sister and I talked at length and we have always been close and I said, “Look, I don’t know why or how we got into this situation but it just feels like the right thing to do. I love you. I support you and I love your kids. And I will do whatever I can to help them. And help you.” I give my sister a ton of credit for recognizing that at that time, I could give Paige, my niece, something that she was unable to give her, which was stability and the opportunity to go to church. My sister was inactive and wanting to go back to church but struggling. Paige would go to Primary off and on but there was nothing consistent about it. My sister was humble enough to realize that there was something more for Paige and that she was not in a position to give that to her. Paige moved in, we signed her up for school, she started fourth grade and she visited her mom. We discussed how everyone was in agreement that this was the best place for Paige to be and I was not taking her from her mom and her mom was not “giving” her to me; it was that we were thinking about Paige and this was the best scenario for her. And was she responsive to that? She was very responsive to that. We went to see a child psychologist a few times, just to talk through the emotions that Paige was feeling and to express what was going on inside. After about six months, my sister decided to file for divorce from her husband. I worried about Paige being caught up in their divorce case. So after talking with my sister and my brother-in-law, I hired a lawyer and helped my sister get the divorce papers ready. But I intervened in the divorce and requested full custody of Paige. There were a lot of prayers. I wanted to make it as least traumatic as possible, because the last thing I wanted was some kind of court battle. We all agreed that it was the best scenario for Paige. I wanted to help out of love for my sister and my niece. But stepping up and taking that action was based on a spiritual prompting. Taking full custody of Paige never really felt like a choice, it was the thing I needed to do. And since that day, since making that one decision, hundreds of things have fallen into place and have worked out. And we’re keeping Paige moving forward and picking up the least amount of baggage as possible along the way. Paige said, “I am so glad that I live with you—no offense against my mom or my dad, but I just feel like this is where I am supposed to be.“ So it has been an amazing experience. Tiffany Peterson and Paige What has been the response to your situation from church members and ecclesiastical leaders? They didn’t know Paige before so it is inspiration that they are so open and accepting. Not a lot of people ask about the situation and how it happened but when they do ask I am happy to tell them because I think there is no “normal situation.” Everyone has something going on that makes them feel like they are outside of the norm. Being open and talking about it has really been helpful. A few months before Paige moved in I had rented a house with some friends in a particular ward. Over the course of our one year rental contract I felt really strongly that I wanted to stay in that particular area. When the contract was up miracles happened and there was a house for sale a street away that I should not have been able to afford but the price dropped at the last minute. There are only four streets in my ward, so it is not a huge radius of houses to choose from. I know that was a prompting. This neighborhood and ward have been open and welcoming. They make Paige feel “normal” and the situation is great. Our home teacher is the most faithful person! He visits every month and brings a lesson from the Friend for Paige. She sees him at church and says, “There’s our home teacher!” She has felt so included and at home in the ward. What are some of the tools that you have drawn on from your faith to help you in a somewhat unconventional situation within our culture? It is all about having a gospel-centered life and doing the hard things…getting up every Sunday and going to church and reading the scriptures. It is a lot easier not to do those things, but it changes people for the better, whether you are nine or 10 or 30 or 80 years old. As much as I may have thought that I relied on prayer and the Lord to guide and direct the decision to have Paige move in with me, being responsible for her has amplified that to an extreme that I didn’t imagine possible. Sometimes my prayers are, “What do I need to do for her? What does she need?” Paige tells me a lot of things but she also doesn’t tell me a lot of things. I felt like I needed more help because I didn’t give birth to her and raise her from an infant, but when I need that inspiration, it always comes. It always comes. For me, it’s what life is really all about. You can go about life and do your job and do your calling and raise your kids and do your neighborhood stuff and not really grow from it—not really get the whole experience out of it. And I think the experience comes from asking, “What can I do? What should I do?” Because there is more we can be doing. Be open to the potential to grow and know that where much is given, much is required. How has your career been impacted as a result of taking in your niece? Before all this happened, I had been transferred and was working in New York City. My mom was sick so I moved home because I wanted to spend that time with her. Having been at Goldman Sachs for so long and knowing so many people, I had wonderful mentors and managers who bent over backwards to help me move to Utah and get another job. It paved the way for me to be in a position to take in my niece, as well as to spend time with my mother who passed away a few months later. This past May however, I decided to quit my job. I felt very strongly that I needed to be doing something different…I needed another focus and my time needed to be spent differently. Two and a half years ago, I made the decision to go pick up Paige and she had fit in around the edges of my life. But the more time I spent with her and the more inspiration I asked for, the more I felt that Paige needed me. However, my job was getting the best of me; I was giving the best of me at work and then coming home tired and in a hurry to get Paige to bed because I had more work to do. I had another prompting that I needed to quit my job and take more responsibility at home. I was prepared (I had some savings). And I felt confident that I was not making an irrational choice because I could still provide. I thought that in three or four months I would figure out what was going on and see if I needed to get a part-time job or something different. It has been nine months and I haven’t had to worry about finances once. I have just gone back to a semi-full time job for a few weeks and everything keeps falling into place. It is a good reminder that it is really important to be present and emotionally and physically available to mentor and guide and teach. Paige’s development and learning is important. This is her time and she won’t ever have this time again to soak up the feelings of the Spirit and recognize her blessings. I don’t know what is in store for her but she needs to be prepared for whatever it is. Do you look back now throughout your life and see the Lord preparing you for this very experience? Yes…in a hundred different ways! Even the smallest thing about which job I had and how long I had been at that job and who was my boss is reflective of this. I told my boss that my niece was going to move in with me and it would throw a wrench in the timing of my work for a while (I needed to take Paige to school so I couldn’t come in until after 8.00 a.m. and I had to pick her up at 6.00 p.m.). That is a very different mentality! My boss’ response put it into perspective. He said, “You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, so do it.” I know not everyone would have had the same response and been so supportive. It is incredible to see how fortunate I was when this situation happened. What would you say to women who are faced with making choices outside of the norm? When you realize that the spiritual promptings you have followed are right, it makes you want to do it again, because you feel so good! I don’t want to miss any opportunities because they feel good and you grow so much. That’s the message I try to get across in my ward and with my friends. You can look at people’s situations and think, “Why in the world would they do that?” Or, “What’s going on there?” But there is always something deeper. We are all children of God. We all have roles and we all have assignments that we were given. We can’t really look at anyone and judge what are they doing or why they are doing things a certain way. We just need to accept that maybe there is a chance we can participate in their experience or they can participate in ours. There is not a box, there is no one way for everything to be done and there is no formula. If there is one thing I have learned, it is never to pass up an opportunity because it doesn’t seem like the “normal” thing to do. At A Glance Name: Tiffany Peterson Location: Salt Lake City, UT Age: 36Marital status: Never been married Children: Paige, age 11 Occupation: substitute teacher, real estate agent (almost) Schools Attended: University of Utah Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: “I Stand All Amazed” Current Church Calling: Primary teacher Interview produced by Louise Elder

Raised as a Catholic in Rhode Island, Stephanie Soper experienced a powerful communication with God that led her to join the Church twenty years ago. Since then, she has developed her gifts of communicating with God and has used these gifts to provide intuitive readings and emotional healing work for others in the Church. How did your relationship with God begin? I’m not really sure that I had a relationship with God growing up as a Catholic. I believed in Him, but he was this faraway, mysterious person who had no connection to me at all. In Catholicism, I was accustomed to the very rote prayers, and I didn’t realize we could actually talk to God until—in my late twenties—I overhead a boyfriend praying to God as if he were having a conversation. About a year later, I was having a crisis; all of the elements of my life seemed okay, but there was a profound emptiness in me and I had no idea how to fill it. One night, I was getting ready to go to a work party, and I began talking to God as I had seen my former boyfriend do. I poured out my feelings. I didn’t realize it then, but I went about it much the same way that Mormons are taught to do: I thanked Him for my blessings and asked Him for what I needed. As I drove to the party, I continued the prayer in my mind. When I was arriving at the location of the party, I knew I needed to wrap up the prayer, but I only had the habits of Catholic prayer, and didn’t know the appropriate words to end a non-standard prayer. I simply said, “Thy will be done.” When I said those words, I realized that I really meant them. It was so clear to me that my own decisions about my life weren’t making me happy, and I was really willing to do whatever God told me to do. In that moment of realization, I thought, “If I am going to do God’s will, I need to know what it is.” And so I asked, “What should I do?” I heard a very clear voice say in my mind, “Join the Mormon Church.” At this point, how much did you know about the Mormon Church? Well, there were several events that proceeded this moment. First of all, I was a nanny in Italy in my early twenties, and I lived near another American girl who had recently joined the Mormon Church. I learned a little bit about the Church through her example. She gave me a Book of Mormon that I never read, and I remember meeting Mormon missionaries for the first time on the rooftop of the Duomo in Milan. Then, about a year later, I lived in Vienna with a woman who had a Mormon boyfriend and eventually converted. She didn’t make an overt effort to teach me the gospel, but she was another person who familiarized me with the LDS Church. Also, in the month before this communication with God happened, I suddenly couldn’t tolerate coffee or alcohol. After living in Italy and Austria, both of those things were a part of my life. But, for some reason, I became uncomfortable with the jitters of coffee, and I loathed the lack of self-control that came with drinking alcohol. Therefore, a couple of the things that would have been big impediments to my converting to the Mormon Church were already taken care of. At the time, I didn’t know why this was happening, but afterwards, I realized that I was being prepared. Stephanie Soper So, what happened next after that moment of feeling like you needed to join the Mormon Church? It sounds silly, but in that moment, I was converted in my mind. I went into the party, and they were serving wine, beer, Diet Coke, and water. I knew that Mormons didn’t drink wine and beer, so I avoided those. I understood that I wasn’t technically a Mormon, because I needed to be baptized—I knew that much—but I also knew that if I drank, I would be cheating. I didn’t know the Mormon rules about Coke, so I just drank water. The next morning, a Monday, I called my friend who I had known in Austria. She told me the name of the Church so I could look it up in the phonebook; until then, I had no idea it was called “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” I called the bishop, who gave me directions to the church building, and I went to church the following Sunday. I can still remember what I wore that day and where I parked my car in the parking lot. I remember climbing out of my car and saying to myself “Now I’m starting a new life.” I knew that stepping out of the car and going into the chapel was really huge. I went in the front door of the church, and saw the missionaries. I said, “I’m Stephanie Soper and I’d like to take the discussions so I can get baptized, please.” I had lived through a pretty riotous decade in my twenties; I had rebelled against the good girl I was in my teens. I wasn’t very proud of myself for much of that, and so it was a relief to be joining the Church. In one of the early Sunday school classes for new converts, I was struck by the fact that I was with a bunch of normal adults who liked to talk about God. It was wonderful. The gospel addressed the questions I had been thinking about for a long time, like, “Why don’t we have prophets?” If there was ever a time that we needed them, it was now! I had also grappled with the question, “How can it be, if God loves us all, that baptism is necessary (which I did believe), and yet, by accident of where and when you were born, you might not get to be baptized?” It seemed so arbitrary; it just didn’t seem right that God could be that way. When I learned about baptisms for the dead, it made complete sense. How did your communication with God develop after that initial experience? It was my first experience talking to God and I received an answer. The right answer. This experience made me think for a while that I had it all figured out: you pray, and you immediately get an answer. That isn’t really how it always works out; sometimes, you need to figure out things for yourself. But that was the beginning of understanding that we really can receive answers to prayers. I hear so often from the pulpit messages like, “The Spirit rarely speaks to you in words; it’s a burning in the bosom.” I worry sometimes when I hear that, because we receive answers in different ways, and I think the fact that say this is heard so often makes some people distrust that they’ve heard what they’ve heard. Many of my clients have learned to doubt the answers they get in prayer, or even stop seeking them. And then, of course, they get mad at God for deserting them. Also, I sometimes hear people say, “You shouldn’t ask God about X, Y and Z.” But I don’t think that’s right either. I think we put so many limits on how we hear answers, which makes people distrust their own instincts. They’re told again and again that “it just doesn’t work that way” and that they “ought not to ask God about certain things.” But God is our Father, and over the years, a powerful sense has developed within me that this Fatherly relationship is profoundly literal: my Heavenly Father really wants to talk with me, and He wants to talk with me and not just have me talk to Him. You seem to have a gift for communicating with God. How do you recommend that others develop their own abilities to communicate with God? There are three things that come to mind. First, I think it helps to sit down to pray, instead of kneeling, because there is only so long you can kneel comfortably. When you have a conversation with your spouse or friend, you don’t kneel! I know that kneeling is partly a gesture of humility and reverence, but I’m more likely to have a productive conversation with Heavenly Father if I can sustain it for a while, and so I sit. Stephanie Soper Also, I have made an effort in recent years to call into my mind and heart a sense of being with God when I talk to Him. Although I can’t see Him, His presence is powerful. This makes me feel like it’s a conversation and not just me leaving a voicemail; it reminds me that I’m talking to someone real. It dramatically changes the emotional content of my prayers; it makes me much more humble and honest. Finally, I can’t think of any circumstance in my life where it wouldn’t be helpful to get Heavenly Father’s support and guidance. I just don’t set limits on what it’s okay to ask Him about. For example, I once prayed about making a cake. A friend really wanted me to bake a birthday cake for her fiftieth birthday. She asked me to do it three months in advance, and wanted me to make the kind of pound cake that her father had always made for her. This cake was laden with a lot of meaning for her. We arranged the day and time for her to pick up the cake in time for her party. On that day, I had a lot going on and only had a limited window of time in which to bake the cake. Before I began, I said a prayer that it would be baked with love and that my friend would feel that love. As I was combining the ingredients, I accidentally added fifty percent more evaporated milk than I was supposed to add. I knew that I had ruined the cake, and I didn’t have time to buy more ingredients and start over before my friend arrived. I prayed again, saying, “You know how much my friend wants this cake, and you know how much I love this friend. I don’t often ask for miracles, but I need a miracle. I need you to tell me how to bake this cake so that it turns out fine.” I was given very specific directions of how to bake that cake: how long and at what temperature in 20-minute increments of varying temperatures. And it was perfect; it was the best cake I ever made. At what point in your process of developing your own ability to communicate with God did you realize you could use your gift to help other people through intuitive readings and emotional healing work? For the first ten years of my Church membership, I had a really wonderful prayer life. I prayed often and there were many instances where I received really miraculous answers. Anything you do regularly and with good intent, you’ll get better at. I have always been pretty intuitive, and more so as I’ve gotten older. I have always believed that thoughts have tangible power—that there is a dimension that we don’t quite understand. I initially learned how to do intuitive work from a book. I was skeptical at first; I didn’t think I would be able to use my intuitive abilities at will. The book taught me how to “get centered”—to be still and listen—which is also what Mormons are taught to do with prayer. To get centered, I ask in prayer that I will receive the energy the way that God wants me to, that the person receiving the reading will be guided in their questions and answers by the Spirit, and that I won’t get any information that they should receive in some other way—through a blessing, their own prayers, or experience—or even not at all. By the time I am done praying, I am in that deeply quiet, centered space, and I don’t need to go through any other process to get centered. I realized that inviting the Spirit to be with you was a way of being centered and in tune. Stephanie Soper As I learned how to do the emotional healing work, which is very Atonement-centered, I was initially taught a process: the first step, second step, etc. It worked, but at some point, it occurred to me that I was making it needlessly laborious, and that Heavenly Father would guide me in the process as I needed to be guided. I started trying to ask for guidance at each step of the way, and it worked. That’s how I’ve done it since then. Can you explain the different types of work you do for the many people who will likely be unfamiliar with it? There are two services I provide: intuitive readings and emotional healing work. In both types of work, I am careful to help people in such a way that they can become independent of me—that I build capacity for them to do this on their own. An intuitive reading is when I read the energy about something or I receive information about questions a person has. These questions could be as broad as, “What should I pay attention to in my life?” or as specific as, “What dissertation topic should I choose?” An intuitive reading is essentially someone asking me questions and then I receive information through an intuitive pathway, which I can no longer distinguish from the Holy Spirit. I close my eyes and information just comes: sometimes in images, sometimes in words, sometimes in impressions. I have been doing this work for about ten years. I get the deepest questions from my LDS clients, because they tend to have a different perspective on life and they understand that God has a plan for them. They ask questions that would never occur to me, and so I get to learn also. Emotional healing work is the other service I provide. People come to me for emotional healing work when they see something going on in their life—maybe a pattern—that they can’t seem to fix, such as problems with money, anger that is out of proportion with the situation, or recurring relationship issues. The idea behind emotional healing work is that our beliefs and our thoughts are very powerful. To the extent that we are conscious of them and can harness them, they can really make a difference. For example, if you believe that things are always going to work out, then they often do. And vice versa. There are also beliefs within us of which we’re not aware, because they originated in our pre-verbal years or early childhood. We usually form beliefs about ourselves and the world when we are quite young, and we create adaptive strategies for dealing with these beliefs. Those beliefs become part of who we are, and we can’t simply get rid of them—and worse, they become, over time, maladaptive. Most of my clients are LDS women, and one particular belief that I frequently see is the belief that a person can be successful or have love, but not both. It often seems to originate from fathers who at some point started to belittle or disparage the academic achievements of their daughters. My job is to work with Heavenly Father and the Savior to help people uncover these false beliefs about themselves, and to let Heavenly Father heal them, so that they can move forward, healed of these false ideas about themselves and others. You initially wondered if it was okay for you to be doing this work. How did you resolve that question? When I first learned how to do intuitive readings, I prayed about it a lot, because I wanted to make sure it was acceptable to God. I didn’t want to be a “soothsayer” like is mentioned in 2 Nephi. I didn’t want to mess with things that I shouldn’t be messing with. I felt really prompted that I was doing what I should be doing and that I should do it as a gift for people. I went to my branch president before I started testing intuitive readings on my friends. He was a pretty conservative guy, and I didn’t really expect him to warm up to this idea, even though I felt good about it. But he said that his prayerful impression was that I had the gift of discernment and I ought to be using it as a gift to people. My emotional healing work involves working directly with Heavenly Father to heal others. The Atonement is at the center of it. This puts me in a state of compassion; I feel no judgment at all; I just feel love. I understand in those moments why people are doing what they’re doing and that everyone at their core wants to do what is right. I used to be nervous about standing before the Judgment Bar at the end of my life, but now I realize that God understands all of my circumstances, intentions and wounds, and that being before the Judgment Bar of God is the safest place I can be. When I do emotional healing work, I am certainly not in a position of having to judge someone, but I am trying to see how certain actions resulted from other beliefs and wounds. And Heavenly Father will be doing that on an infinite basis, compared to my very limited basis. The thing I’ve enjoyed the most is helping people heal their relationships with their families and with God. Because we equate Heavenly Father with our own fathers and with other men we have known, we often equate imperfect human characteristics with Heavenly Father; we may believe that He is capricious or arbitrary or vindictive. It means that, even if someone is a faithful Latter-day Saint, they might not want to give their all to God, because it doesn’t feel like a safe thing to do. Watching people change their relationship with God over time—because they have seen and felt that He loves them perfectly and only wants their joy and happiness—is wonderful. You recently started a full-time job. How does this impact your intuitive work? I continue to do intuitive readings after work, but I confine the emotional healing work to weekends, because it requires so much energy. I can’t imagine going without this work; it sustains me spiritually. I learn so much every time that I do a session with someone. This work has given me a much stronger sense of the Atonement, because I see it healing people. It has helped me understand that when the Savior suffered everything for us—every slight, insult, wound, illness, trauma—it gave Him perfect understanding of what we experience, which means that He passes no judgment. It has made me trust the Atonement a lot more; I am more willing to turn my struggles and trials over to the Savior, because I realize how much He understands. How do people in the church respond to this work? In my ward, I am not at all skittish about letting people know this is something I do. To me, the work that I do has profoundly enhanced my relationship with my Savior, and I have become a better Latter-day Saint as a result. However, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if some people were to look askance at what I do. In our faith, there is a huge emphasis on personal revelation, and yet we are sometimes wary about it; we really put boundaries around it. I don’t think this happened as much in the early days of the Church. I don’t think my work would be perceived as particularly strange back then, but now I think it is. Because I do this outside of a church format, I think that some people are really skittish about it. The response I most encounter is, “You don’t have the right to revelation for someone else.” But I only do intuitive readings and emotional healing work in response to particular requests; I don’t try to intuit information unless someone has asked me to. We have been blessed with the gift of the Holy Ghost, which is very powerful; we can constantly have access to Heavenly Father’s guidance. I think that members of the Church sometimes try to confine that gift and only use it in particular ways. Sometimes, the way that I use it makes others nervous. But we all have this gift to receive personal revelation. I really emphasize that in my work: I teach my clients that they can turn to Heavenly Father themselves. I try to help them transfer what they are learning in their sessions with me into their own lives. At A Glance Name: Stephanie Soper Location: Washington D.C. Age: 50 Marital status: Single Occupation: I work in Human Resources for a Federal agency and do intuitive readings and healing work. Convert?: December 2, 1989 Schools Attended: Brown University, 1981 Languages Spoken at Home: English and catFavorite Hymn: “How Firm A Foundation”Current Church Calling: Ward missionary Interview produced by Barbara Christiansen. Photos by Nancy Ricks Photography.

As the mother of seven children, the last with Down syndrome, Kathy Soper is known for the emotional honesty of her writing (which includes personal essays and a book-length memoir) and her founding of Segullah, an LDS women’s literary journal. In this interview, Kathy talks candidly about her lifelong struggle with depression and the unique dynamic that exists in her family where mom and several children are working together to stay healthy. I was born in Washington D.C. in 1971 and lived in the suburbs throughout my childhood. My parents divorced when I was five years old. My mother remarried a year later to an inactive LDS man and she converted to the LDS church when I was seven. The bishop visited us to try to contact my stepfather because he’d been inactive for a long time and my mom started talking to him. She ended up getting baptized. Like my three siblings, I had the missionary discussions when we were eight years old and I chose to be baptized. I don’t remember really much about it but I knew that my mom was pleased and I felt good about it. But there was a lot of tension in the family. We would go to church maybe 30 percent of the time (my brother and I would go visit our dad’s house on weekends), so we would miss a lot of church meetings then, and also, we would do a lot of family activities on Sundays. It was hard for my mom because as a new member, she caught the vision of the “Mormon family” ideal but it’s tough when you can’t make that happen. I started to drop out of church activity in junior high. It was hard because the Young Women’s program in my ward was really small—there were only three other girls my age and I couldn’t relate to any of them. I felt like an outsider and would go to Girls’ Camp and couldn’t connect with anybody. I was completely inactive by the time I graduated from high school. So how did you end up attending Brigham Young University? My life fell apart on a number of fronts during my senior year of high school, due to destructive behaviors and relationships I’d developed. I wanted to get as far away from home as possible. I’d only applied to the University of Maryland and BYU because those were the only colleges I could afford. When the acceptance letters came, I was more depressed than I’d ever been, and the idea of getting away from home was more appealing than ever, so I lied my way through my BYU ecclesiastical endorsement interview and showed up as a very troubled freshman at Helaman Halls. This kind of story bothers a lot of people, and for good reason. But attending BYU was a key turning point in my life. At BYU, I started going to church because it was required. I started to feel the Spirit, which I hadn’t felt it in so long, and I felt safety and reassurance. I had a really good experience with my bishop that year when all of my troubled past came spilling out. I met my husband-to-be, Reed, at the beginning of my sophomore year. Having him in my life made a huge difference. We were married in the temple at the end of my junior year. Going to the temple was really meaningful to me, and there I felt peace in a way that I hadn’t felt since I was very small. I felt like I was at home and that was a really powerful experience. I got pregnant with Elizabeth, my first child, six months after Reed and I were married. I was 21 and I was not a “kid person” at all. When I babysat as a teenager, I hated the kids. I never thought I would like babies. But a few months after my wedding, our next-door neighbor in our BYU student apartment building had a baby, and it was the first time I had been around a newborn. The spirit was just starting to blossom in me, and something about being around that new baby was like a magnet. I had never seen anything so beautiful and I wanted a child of my own. I had never felt that kind of desire before. Kathryn Lynard Soper and Her Family Was depression a part of your life during those college and newlywed years? In my junior year of college I was a total wreck. During my engagement, I cried every single night, much to Reed’s bewilderment. That was the first time I was ever seriously depressed. I was in therapy and I started taking medication for the first time. I would cry for hours. I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular, it was just this disconnected sadness and sense of despair and darkness that would descend on me. I’d just weep and weep and I felt like I could cry forever and never be done. It was a terrible, hopeless, awful feeling. And my therapist recommended that I take antidepressants for a short period of time. I took them for a few months before I got married, and then when I got pregnant a few months afterward, I stopped taking them. After Elizabeth was born, the Spirit was really strong. I wanted to be an awesome mom for this little baby and I wanted things to be perfect for her, to do everything right. Seeing Elizabeth struggle with the normal things about being alive was psychically really painful for me. It hurt a lot. I felt sad and worried a lot about the normal things of life. I wasn’t having the bouts of weeping I did when I was engaged, but I was still depressed and I didn’t recognize it. At the same time, I was really into the gospel. I read the Book of Mormon on my own for the first time when Elizabeth was a baby. I stayed up late at night and worked through my college Book of Mormon manual on my own. I was hungry for it. I loved it. For about ten years, I was “turbo mom” and a zealous Mormon. My motivation kind of like wanting to be a straight-A student. It was very externally-oriented and although I felt the Spirit a lot, it was an immature way of approaching the gospel. And I was immature; I was in my 20s and it was just my stage of development. I thought I was being really righteous, but I didn’t realize how far off the mark I was because I focused on my outward behavior and not on my relationships with people and with God. Was there an event that triggered a change in the way you viewed spirituality? Things started to change when I got pregnant with my sixth baby. That was when my toddler Matt, our fifth child, broke his femur. It was the first crisis we had in our family, and it really shook me up to have Matt in a body cast, and to have social services interviewing me trying to figure out if my husband or I had hurt him. It was traumatic. I was extremely sick with the pregnancy and felt very vulnerable and worn out. Then Sam , our sixth child, was born three weeks early and had to be in the [neonatal intensive-care unit] NICU. Sam’s condition was very poor at first. One night, his condition was quickly deteriorating and I thought he was going to die. I had never before experienced such vulnerability. I felt like blinders were being ripped off—I was suddenly aware that people all around me were suffering, and that my family was not exempt. Kathryn Lynard Soper and Her Family Up until that point I knew that bad things happened, because some really hard things happened to me as a kid, but everything was different as a mom. I felt desperate, like I had to keep these bad things from happening to my kids, and I didn’t want them to feel the way I had felt as a child. I didn’t want them to get hurt and I would do anything to try to prevent that. But when there were health crises, I had zero control. I realized that as far as circumstances go, I was not “holding the reins” at all. So how did you cope with this new realization? I wrote my first personal essay, “Shaulee’s Door,” when Sam was about six months old. The first version was awful—very maudlin and emotionally manipulative—but I thought it was great. I made copies for all my friends and family, and was flying high until a trusted friend offered some gentle yet firm feedback. That was at the height of another depressive episode. Over time I revised the essay and submitted it to Exponent II’s writing contest, and was honored to be named a co-winner. Shortly after that Kylie Turley, a close friend from my married-at-BYU days, started talking about founding our own literary journal. The idea seemed crazy at first, but it wouldn’t let go of me. After Sam’s birth I’d hit this identity crisis when I realized I had no idea who I was, what I truly believed or what I knew about life. I was trying to orchestrate a family life instead of living from within myself and relating to people as an authentic person, allowing life to teach me and transform me. I realized I could not be a good parent or a good wife or a good sister in the gospel if I didn’t have that center within myself, that core identity and self-awareness. I was just discovering that writing was a key to that. Segullah was created as a forum where other LDS women could have the similar experiences. So writing brings self-awareness? It can. When we share writings with other people, we become more aware of each other and of ourselves. That realization was a huge turning point for me. Before that, my sense of self was all wrapped up in what kind of mother I was and how successful I was at making things happen for my children. It sounds noble, but if a mother is driven by insecurity she will foil her own best efforts. After Sam was born that focus shifted to developing a solid identity that I could reach out to others from, and creating a community of LDS women who sought similar self-discovery through writing. That shift in focus was really important. I had been trying for a decade to make myself fit the supposed ideal of an LDS mother, and I was very anxious and fearful most of the time. That fear spilled out into my parenting and my marriage and my relationships with other people. How did the arrival of Thomas, your youngest child, change things in your family? I’d been trying to get pregnant for about a year and a half. That was the first time it didn’t come easily, and it really shook me up. When I got pregnant with Thomas, it was a huge cause of celebration for Reed and me. Our marriage had been stable enough all along, but for many years there had been a lot of tension in our relationship. I was in this mode where I was trying very hard (very hard!) to get him to play his role as husband and father a certain way, and that caused a lot of resentment between the two of us. After my identity crisis and resulting shift in focus, I began to let go of my “control-freak” ways, and Reed and I had an amazing renaissance in our relationship. This growing baby became a symbol of our rediscovered love and commitment. I was just delighted. However, from the start it was a very hard pregnancy, much more so than my others. I sensed that my body was worn out from bearing and caring for so many children, and I knew that I was going to have a hard time carrying the pregnancy to term. Even so, I was shocked and frightened when I went into labor at 28 weeks, nearly three months early. Thankfully medication stopped the contractions, and I was on hospital bed rest for two weeks before my water broke and Thomas was born. Due to his prematurity there was a high possibility of severe respiratory distress, so we were very relieved when his Apgar scores were good. Then the doctor came in and told us he thought Thomas had Down syndrome. I felt completely terrified and worried that I wouldn’t be able to love him because of his disability. By the time Thomas was released from the hospital six weeks later, I was in the midst of a full-blown depressive episode, and everything spiraled downward from there. Kathryn Lynard Soper and Her Child Had you been treated for depression in the years in between Elizabeth’s birth and Thomas’s birth? No. Looking back now, I see clearly that I was depressed all those years, but I didn’t recognize it at the time. Mild-to-moderate depression felt normal to me; it wasn’t until I resumed medication that I saw my condition for what it was. For me, during a depressive episode, waking up is a burden. Breathing is painful. It’s a constant stress just to be alive. To have that burden removed, leaving behind only the normal emotional ups and downs…I can’t even describe the difference. I believe medication saved my life, literally. What have you found that helps you the most? I’ve been seeing an excellent therapist regularly for the first time since college and it’s making a huge difference. But I could not be doing the work I’m doing now with her, which requires a good deal of emotional clarity and calmness, if I wasn’t taking my medication. Before treatment I thought, “I want to solve my problems, not mask them with drugs.” Yet treatment is the very thing that’s enabling me to solve those problems. Different approaches to treatment work for different people—medication is not the only option. But a combination of medication and therapy has been shown to be most effective, and that’s what works for me, along with measures like light therapy, meditation, and regular, rigorous exercise. I imagine it was a difficult process for you to realize, “this is something that is going to be with me for the rest of my life.” For the rest of this life at least. I was so proud when I stopped taking that Prozac when I got pregnant with Elizabeth and felt like I could function normally. I didn’t want to be dependent on medication. It’s a terrible feeling to know that in order to be a functioning person you need to take medication—and in my case, it’s not a temporary measure. But I’ve resigned myself to this reality. I used to think fixing myself was the strong thing to do, and that taking medication was a cop-out. Now I understand that the way to be strong is to get treatment, and the way to be responsible is to get better. How has your experience with depression helped you recognize the same warning signs in your children? Once I was feeling more healthy and stable, and I’d gotten over my resistance to having depression, I was able to recognize troubling behavior in one of my sons, and then in one of my daughters, and recently in another son. The biggest symptom for them was deep and abiding sadness that wasn’t attached to anything, a burden of crippling melancholy and fear and anxiety that doesn’t compute. It’s normal to be sad when sad things happen. But it’s not normal for a six-year-old to cry because he’s worried about the fate of his soul, or for a nine-year-old to wish (aloud, and repeatedly) that she could stop living. She would verbalize how isolated she felt from people and how much she despised herself, and wanted to stop existing. Behavior-wise, one of the biggest cues (for my teenage sons, especially) is when they can’t sleep because they are so agitated by sadness and fear. Not being ashamed of depression and not transferring a sense of shame to my kids has been a big help. I’m glad I can say to them, “I know how that feels,” and I think they’re glad for that too. But there’s a flip side. Some people have said, “Oh, it’s so great that you’re depressed and your kids have depression so you can understand each other,” and in many ways that’s true. Yet at the same time it makes life much harder for everyone involved, because a depressed child’s needs increase dramatically but a depressed mother’s capacity to help decreases dramatically. That’s a very poor situational fit. If I’m struggling, I’m that much less able to help my children who are struggling and that is a terrible, terrible feeling. How have your experiences with depression changed your testimony and your relationship with the gospel? So much has changed. I’ve let go of many extraneous beliefs, ideas, and paradigms from LDS culture that no longer fit my experience. But at the same time, the central elements of my testimony have not changed—in fact, they’ve become more firmly rooted. Perhaps the most pronounced change I can identify is that I’m not afraid like I used to be. The most painful things in my life–my mistakes and sins, crises and breakdowns, and wounds received at the hands of others–have proved to be my greatest vehicles for freedom and growth and love, and therefore for happiness. So I don’t believe the idea that the most successful person, the most righteous person, is the one who remains the most unscarred in mortality. I believe that we become who we’re meant to be by allowing life to transform us. At A Glance Name: Kathryn Lynard Soper Location: West Jordan, UT Age: 38 Children: seven children ranging in age from 16 to 4 Occupation: writer, editor and founder of the Segullah Group Schools Attended: Brigham Young University, BA in English Current Church Calling: Gospel Doctrine teacher On the Web: www.KathrynLynardSoper.com Interview by Shelah Miner. Photos by Maralise Petersen and Brittney Oler.

Margaret Blair Young teaches Creative Writing at Brigham Young University. In addition to authoring novels, articles and essays, Margaret co-produced Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons, a documentary film shown on PBS and at film festivals. Margaret is a mother of four children and a grandmother to three. She became president of the Association for Mormon Letters in March of 2010. One of your goals is to recognize international Mormon literature and art. What life experiences have made you reach out to the international community, to go beyond Utah and beyond the United States? I was raised by a globetrotting linguist father and a patient mother, and often had people from various cultures in my home when I was growing up. When I was nineteen years old, Dad took us to Guatemala, where he taught missionaries to speak the Mayan dialect, Cakchiquel. I always had a sense of other cultures and have traveled extensively, usually with my husband and children. Because of this, I recognized that the images we present in most of our church literature and media show white families with a First World context. Jacob Chirwa, a member of the church who is a professor and actor/poet from Zambia, articulated the issue well in an email to me: “I have always felt that there hasn’t been enough encouragement for local artists to showcase their talent. I have noted with concern some performances that some sections of the church have put up when they have activities but the bottom line has been that there has not been a desire to take the work seriously. One reason for this is the belief inculcated in the people that the only approved art manifestations are the ones coming from Utah. And so we sit to watch videos of stories of conversions as our missionaries do their work. This is well and good but I feel that watching a local missionary at work in any outside place would impact positively on our youth. I work in situations that expose me to a lot of challenges vis-a-vis the perception of the church in the eyes of the outside community, but all they see is me with no back up information in both print and electronic media.” In Jacob’s words, I hear a call to do better, to go further and to enlarge our borders. I want to answer that call. You co-produced a film with Darius Gray, who was an original member and past president of the Genesis Group, the Church’s social organization for African-American members. Your film, Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons, has been very successful, airing on PBS and at film festivals around the country. Did you expect this kind of reception? Yes—and we expect still more. The title suggests why: NOBODY KNOWS this story! Mormons, black and white, are often surprised that there has been an African/African-American presence in the Church from the very earliest years. African Americans generally think that Mormons did not permit blacks to join the Church until 1978—or later. The most common response to our books about black pioneers or to our film is, “Black Mormon pioneers—you mean there were some?” We find that audiences who were troubled by the priesthood restriction are eager to learn more about the history, and that non-Mormons—blacks in particular—are intrigued by the fact that blacks participated in the Mormon migration and played a significant role in settling the west. Some of the most successful events when we were publicizing our trilogy, Standing on the Promises, were with non-Mormon African Americans. You are the president of the Association for Mormon Letters (AML). What is AML and why is it important? Our mission statement says: For over two decades, the nonprofit Association for Mormon Letters has worked for a literature by and about Mormons that is both authentic and of high literary quality. We have an annual conference focused on LDS literature. At the conference luncheon, we award the best works in various genres of literature—including film and theater. We also publish a literary journal, Irreantum, drawing some fine stories and poetry from prominent LDS authors and from a literary competition, which yields marvelous discoveries of yet unsung talent. Our aim is to support truly excellent work, not necessarily the most popular works. We honor works by anyone who is now or has been a part of the Mormon tradition, including inactive or former Mormons. Regardless of how they interact with the faith now, their work is still informed by the ways Mormonism has impacted them. What other projects are you currently working on that address racial issues? Several friends of mine are working on re-staging my play I Am Jane, about black pioneer Jane Manning James, (to be performed in the summer of 2010). Darius and I continue to do events in which we talk about blacks in Mormon history and show our documentary. We have also recently filmed an interview with Darius’s uncle, Russell Jones, an African American soldier who served in the segregated army in WWII. Russell told us, in that interview, about landing on Iwo Jima. Black soldiers were stripped of their artillery—all but one clip—and were told to simply pick up more bullets from dead soldiers after the battles. White soldiers were far better armed. Russell also told us about going home on furlough and then returning to the Pacific, and discovering that every one of his fellow black soldiers in his division had perished. They simply did not have adequate weaponry. Eventually, we’d like to film blacks who participated in the Korean and Vietnam wars and further address integration in the military. You served with your husband Bruce at the MTC, sending missionaries around the globe. How has that affected you and your outlook? That MTC calling was the most life changing of any I’ve had. The missionaries I hear from and write to weekly are in Cameroon, Africa. They are truly like my sons, and I have rejoiced with them when things have gone well, and wept with them when they have suffered. The truth is, most of my writing over the past two years (while I’ve been traveling with and publicizing the documentary) has been letters to these young men. They love each other. They demonstrate the truth expressed by renowned sociologist Armand Mauss in our documentary—that the love developed between missionaries and those they serve is “the gift of the world’s people to the LDS Church.” Jacob Chirwa’s son, Chiloba, is one of the missionaries I write to, and is particularly dear to me. In an email, which he wrote while he was suffering from both chicken pox and malaria (though he didn’t know for sure what was making him sick), he spoke of his companion: “I love Elder Wigginton and I am certain the Lord is mindful of him and always will be.” Margaret Blair Young Elder Jared Wigginton is from Riverside, California, but has fallen in love with the African people, and has become a real brother to Elder Chirwa. He wrote about the experience of serving his companion in ways he had never thought he would: “Elder Chirwa is on quarantine for his chicken pox and malaria, and we spent four lovely days and nights at the medical clinic. We spent 96 hours together with him suffering a lot. I felt for him when they came in to inject him with a syrup-looking substance in his leg…the needle being over two inches long. He squeezed my hand and curled in pain as they sent this medicine through his quad. It was a 10 foot by 10 foot room and I had a little cot to sleep on. This time was a unique opportunity for me to really show my fraternal love to Elder Chirwa. It is rare that we are given opportunities to render this kind of service, so when it comes it is special. It was not a random, flowery occasion like a batch of fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies or a shoe shine, but more of like doing everything for him he could not do himself: running his bath, tying the back of his robe, helping him into the bathroom by carrying his IV line, getting his books, etc. It was encompassing and significant for me.” This is one example—there are many throughout the world—of the love missionaries develop for one another. The image of these missionaries—one white and one black—serving each other so selflessly is the most hopeful message I could give. It tells me we have a glorious future. There is no question that we have a history of racism in our church, as we do in our nation. But we have a remedy in place. We have a unique initiation ritual: missionary service. Missions educate our young people, who will eventually be the church leaders, on the gifts of diversity. And it’s not a textbook education, but an utterly intimate, heart-moving one. Though we still find the racist folklore taught in some religion classes, and though right now we do not retain African-American converts well, and though we still find some appalling cases of racist language or behavior among “card-carrying Mormons,” I believe the healing is inevitable. I believe we will see an Elder Chirwa or an Elder Wigginton—and those they represent—in the Church hierarchy very soon. The blight of racism will not endure. And that hopeful message is something worth writing about. At A Glance Name: Margaret Blair Young Location: Provo, UT Age: 54 Marital status: Married briefly to someone else; eternally married to Bruce Young Occupation: Creative Writing Instructor, BYU Schools Attended: Brigham Young University Languages Spoken at Home: English (and some French and Spanish) Favorite Hymn: “Praise To the Lord, the Almighty” Current Church Calling: I teach the 16-18 year olds in Sunday School On the Web: www.blacklds.org, www.untoldstoryofblackmormons.com, www.aml-online.org Interview by Marintha Miles

Robin joined the Church after September 11, 2001, when she reasoned that “if there could be such a force of organized darkness in the world then there has to be an equal opposite force of organized good.” That same year, at age 22, she married a member of the Church and cemented her life to the Gospel. Since attending law school, Robin has worked in energy regulation in Washington D.C. while passionate about resource and environmental issues. How did you first encounter the Church? What factors led to your conversion? I grew up in a small town in California called Bishop, which is a big skiing, fishing town and then I went to school in Los Angeles at Pomona College. I moved to San Francisco right after that. But along the way I had two friends who served missions for the Church and I wrote to them both while they were gone. So, that is probably where the seeds were planted of the Church as an institution that was of interest to me. I got these letters from my friends and I could feel their sincerity, but the last sentence of the letters would always be like, “I know that the Atonement is real and the Church is restored” and I would be like “I have no idea what you are talking about!” The language was so unfamiliar to me! I am sure, knowing what I know now, that for my friends this was the most important part of the entire letter. But I just thought, “That makes no sense. I don’t know what the ‘atonement’ is.” But there was just a spirit that was conveyed with that testimony. Robin Lunt What did you do after college? I moved to San Francisco to take a job up there. One of the missionaries I had been writing was from the Bay Area and he came back from his mission right at the same time as I was moving up there and against the warning of my other friends who were members of the Church, I saw him almost immediately after getting home. He was just so strange! But there was a sort of thing inside of me percolating about the Gospel and the Spirit. I studied philosophy as an undergrad and a lot of continental theory and I was attracted to the existential questions. I had a strong sense that there was a God and there was something more to the world than just what existed, but I was skeptical about any sort of organized religion. But my missionary friends had planted a seed in my mind, so I started going to a couple of churches in my neighborhood in San Francisco and every time I would go, I would just feel that hollowness, like, “This is silly.” I felt closer to God on my own, like walking on the beach, or reading. But that was in 2001 and September 11 was sort of a breaking point in my thought process about the way the world works. I do not know how conscious it was at the time, but it occurred to me that if there could be such a force of organized darkness in the world, like we saw on September 11, then maybe there would have to be an equal opposite force of organized good. The World Trade Center attacks were a Tuesday and that next Sunday, I went to the Latter-day Saint chapel three blocks from my apartment. I was looking for solace and comfort in the midst of all that chaos and heartache and uncertainty. I walked in to the chapel for the first time and literally the second I stepped into the building I felt the same spirit that I had felt in my most personal connected moments to God. So I was like, “Oh man…” and I had mixed feelings. On one hand, I rejoiced that this most intimate fear could be something that is shared with other people. But at the same time it was this horrifying cliff. I thought, “What does this mean for my life? This is not what I was planning.” I called the missionaries and had them meet me in Golden Gate Park and I had the first lessons there. Would you say that the most powerful force in your conversion was the personal witness of the Spirit in your life, more than social aspects or doctrinal aspects of the Church? Yes, I think that that is accurate. I do not think it would have happened otherwise. But it is kind of hard to separate them, right? It was a combination of recognizing the Spirit in my own life and then experiencing it through these faithful members of the Church. It is hard to separate one from the other, but I think that the Spirit ultimately is the only thing that can really convert anyone. How did you feel your life changed at that point? That was a crazy year, because I joined the Church — I started the discussions in September and then joined the Church in January, 2002 — and then I met my husband Scott right after that and then we were married that October. My poor parents! I think there was sort of an increased honesty in my life. Just really wanting to have my being be whole and to be on that journey of progression which the Gospel teaches us is possible from this moment throughout eternity. It wasn’t just, “What am I going to do in my life?” but more like, “Who am I going to be as a person?” If I was going to make such a big shift in my life, it had to be for all the right reasons, and I needed to be committed with every essence of my being. So I finished the discussions and met Scott right at the same time, and the timing made a great courtship, because I had no façade. There was no room for that: if I was going to take this path it needed to be forever. Robin Lunt What were the greatest challenges for you initially after joining the Church? The big challenge was my family… feeling like I was separating myself from them and making a decision that they did not agree with and did not share with me. My sister told me, “I had this dream that we were out riding our bikes and you took a different path than I did.” So it was heartbreaking to feel disapproval from them when I was making the very best decision of my life. They were the people who I had trusted to help me, to reassure me of my decisions. When I married Scott my dad literally said, “This means you will never leave that church.” That was part of the point, yes! Your parents got divorced a few years ago. Do you think your faith allowed you to be a help to them during that time? Or did it remained a roadblock in your relationship with them as they were going through that struggle? I had perspective that my sisters did not: I had already gone through that process of saying,“Your identity is not my identity. I have made a decision to join the Church and let it define who I am,” and that created a separation in my relationship with them. That made their divorce less painful to me because it was less shattering, although still really hard. The Gospel helped me tremendously as I went through that trauma. Also, they then were so preoccupied with their own problems that they were not worried about whether or not I was making good decisions in my own life. So in some ways it shifted the attention off of me, which I appreciated. You went to law school after living in San Francisco. When did your interest in environmental law first become apparent to you? I am not exactly sure. I have always been interested in being outside and the beauty of the earth and traveling and understanding those things. But my interest is more in resources than it is in traditional environmental law such as pollution. My interest was initially in water. I grew up in a small town and the town has stayed small in part because the city of Los Angeles owns most of the land and monopolizes its water supply. That combination of resources and the development of community and society is something that is intriguing to me. There is a book called Cadillac Desert and it is one of the pre-eminent books about water and how water shaped the Western part of the United States. The book begins with the author flying over Salt Lake City and discussing how the Mormon pioneers and how they created a lush landscape out of an uninhabitable place through the use of local resources. That idea was intriguing to me. Can you describe what do you do professionally in your current job? I am the assistant general counsel for an association here in Washington D.C. that represents state utility commissioners. They are the people who regulate essential services like water and electricity, natural gas, and sometimes transportation and I work in the energy sector. So I work on electricity, gas and other resources that are regulated. Do you feel there is a connection between environmental consciousness in our personal, home lives and what the Gospel teaches us about being stewards of the earth? We have been told to “till and take care” of the earth, but too often we just till it. There is a Welsh song that talks about how God gave us responsibility for all of the creatures on the earth because He loves us most. With all of our divine attributes, we have the opportunity to learn how to take care of the earth, to utilize our resources in a way that will not deplete them for future generations and really create an opportunity for future generation to thrive. But we are in consumptive mode. I am too. I think of all the ways that I waste things. It is much easier to use a paper towel and throw it away than to use a towel and then wash it. For me, not wasting is a spiritual principle. I do not think in the Millennium the Savior is going to come and just fix everything. I think He is going to say to us, Okay what should we do? It will be more like the Brother of Jared [a character in the Book of Mormon]. And we will have to figure out how to make the earth full again. I feel strongly that as we come to know the earth better, we will be better stewards of it. I’ve started a project called Engaging Earth to help promote this idea. One day I was chopping celery in the kitchen for a soup and I thought, I have no idea how this grows. I would not be able to identify and pick a celery plant out of a field. If I have a better sense of how food comes to us, then may be I would be get more pleasure from the food I eat. I would think more carefully about how it is grown and who was involved in growing it. I would get engaged in the community that contributed to my being able to sustain myself through eating. How do you feel your identity is shaped today — eight years after joining the Church — by being a professional Mormon woman? I feel that my work is important. My spiritual goals and my professional endeavors need to be married because I am spending so much time at work and I want to be doing something that really matters to me. When I am in the working world, I am often there as an emissary for the Church, especially because I went to Brigham Young University for law school. The first thing they know about me is that I’m Mormon. I thought about that when I decided to go to BYU because I was hesitant about having that be the headline of my professional identity. But it actually offers really interesting opportunities. For example, I was recently at a professional conference and was introduced to a woman who had also attended BYU. The moment we were left alone, she proceeded to tell me her life story and her struggles with the Church and that she had recently divorced and that she struggled with the culture of the Gospel and that she felt isolated and she knew it was true but was not sure it fit into her identity and I just was… shocked. Because here I am in a new job as an attorney in a world apart from my spiritual life, but I have the chance to say to this woman, “I’m so sorry you’re struggling. You know, the Church really is a very diverse place. You should come to our ward in D.C.!” and she and I genuinely connect as sisters. But the other thing is I want to have a family, right? So my professional pursuits are tempered by my desire to have kids and my knowledge that that is an eternal principle and much more valuable than any memo or brief I will ever write. Being a Mormon woman is fabulous. And I know what it’s like to be a woman outside of Mormonism. It’s not so great. There’s a lack of identity. Not being chaste hurts any woman but you don’t realize it and so then it creates this weird confusion and complexity that is unnecessary. I’ve been thinking recently about how Moroni buried the plates, and how that is a little absurd. I mean, it’s impossible to imagine in our modern days something like burying plates. But my husband said, “If you had records and you wanted to preserve them for the future, wouldn’t you bury them?” And I guess I would. And for me, so much of the Gospel is that way: It is much simpler and profound than we make it out to be. I think that is true also of our gender. We make womanhood way too perplexing. Our gender is inherently part of who we are and we’re going to continue to progress throughout eternity. It’s that simple. At A Glance Name: Robin Lunt Location: Washington D.C. Age: 30 Marital status: Married 7 years Children: Due with first in May 2010 Occupation: Attorney Convert to Church: 2002 Schools Attended: Pomona College, Brigham Young University Law School Languages Spoken at Home: English Interview by Neylan McBaine. Photos by Scott Lunt.

A 1983 issue of Reader’s Digest introduced Dominique Lam-Yam to the Church while she was living with an abusive father on the French island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean. She spent the next three years searching for the Church organization, with no success. Finally, two missionaries knocked on her door, launching her on a path of hope and triumph over challenge. I was born in Hong Kong. When I was nine months old my mother decided to take me and my two older brothers to join my father on a French island called Reunion. It’s off Madagascar and Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. My father is a Chinese/French native from this island and his parents had sent him to study in China, in Hong Kong, which is where he met my mother. It was not your normal everyday love story: my father forced himself on my mother and because of that my father’s mother made him to marry my mother. From that, we were born. My older brothers, me and my two younger sisters. My mother decided to join him because she couldn’t stay on her own with three children in Hong Kong even though she didn’t want to be with him. But she was married to him, and she did the best she could. She at least gave us a father. So this is why I became French. It is a little bit of a sad story… Actually not sad because it is what makes me who I am right now. We had a very difficult life with my father on Reunion because he wasn’t gentle or kind. In our home, even if we didn’t have that much money, my father and my mother always wanted us to have some books, some magazines. I came to know the Church because of a magazine called Readers’ Digest. We had subscriptions to it in French and in English. My mother couldn’t really speak French, only Chinese and English, so she read it in English but my brothers and I read it in French. Dominique Lam-Yam I remember the date — the month and the year — of the Readers’ Digest in which I read about the Church. April 1983. I remember the date because the story was so amazing. It is printed in my brain. The story was about a Mormon family from Utah and their young son who had an accident and needed to have a blood transfusion. At that time we didn’t know about the AIDS illness. Now of course we know much better. The story in the magazine was about how the blood in the transfusion completely destroyed his immune system and because of a simple cold, he died. A little part of this story was straight out of the mission discussions. It was about where we came from — a bit about the preexistence — and then it talked about how, when we’re here on earth, our bodies are like a glove over our spirits, and then when we die the glove gets left behind and our spirits still live. Reading that story was the first time I ever heard about the Mormons. I was thirteen years old. I actually wrote to Readers’ Digest to ask for more information about the Mormons. I looked up Mormons in the encyclopedia, and unfortunately encyclopedias didn’t say very positive things at that time, talking mostly about polygamy or getting confused with the Amish. I was baptized Catholic as a child. My mother used to be Protestant and my father was kind of Buddhist and kind of Catholic, but he was really confused in his mind about his spirituality. I didn’t choose Catholic but it was what was available to me on Reunion when I was a child. I am so grateful that my mother always taught us that there is a God and that we can pray. I learned how to pray because of the Catholic form of prayer, repeating the same words every time. One day I decided — I was about six or seven, our family life was so bad and my father was really beating at my mother and I was really sad and I was trying to pray — I decided that I should talk to Him, and not just repeat the same Catholic prayers. I remember when I started talking I said, “Forgive me, God, for talking to you this way.” I started to really communicate with Heavenly Father that way, allowing myself to really talk to Him and not just repeat the same words every time. Readers Digest never replied to me. Maybe I didn’t put the right amount of stamps on the letter. I saw the address in the magazine but it was in France and I didn’t know how much it cost to send a letter to France from Reunion. I don’t know if my letter ever got to France. After that, I was always looking for the Church for a long time. I learned about other religions — I read the Koran which I find really interesting and beautiful. In the French islands, there are lots of unbelievably mixed religions: witchcraft and Catholic together, or some native religion with Buddhism. I don’t know how they do it and mix all those gods together! I was curious about all these religions, but I was always looking for the Mormon Church from the article. I almost gave up. I looked for three years, from 1986 when I was almost 13 to 1989 when I was almost 16. I waited quite a long time, and I almost joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They were very kind. I decided that if I couldn’t find the Mormon Church, I would stay a Catholic and become a nun, or I would not want to live anymore because life was so bad. Heavenly Father heard my prayers and the missionaries came. I remember it was a Wednesday and my older brother was shirtless because it was very hot. My parents were finally divorced by this time and things were getting better. The missionaries knocked on the door and my brother invited them in. I was curious, but I hid when they first came. Did you know when they came to the door that this was the church you had been looking for? No, not yet. They came a few times after to teach my older brother and they asked me to join the discussions. When we got to the second discussion, they told us about where we come from and they actually brought a glove and explained that our body is like a glove over our spirits. And I said, “I know this! I read it!” I told them, “I want to get baptized now. I accept with everything I am!” The missionaries teased me and told me I couldn’t eat pork anymore, lots of silly stuff… And I said, “Whatever I have to do… It’s okay. I’ll do it.” I wanted to have the all the lessons the same day and get baptized the next day. I read the Book of Mormon and I knew it was true. I had my first lesson on Monday and I was baptized the next Saturday. The missionaries were the ones who slowed me down because they wanted to make sure I had a testimony of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. But when I read the Book of Mormon, I knew it was the church I had been looking for for so many years. Heavenly Father saved my life by bringing the missionaries to my door on my island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. They came! They came, they were the ones who knocked on the door. I was so happy. I am still happy. Did the rest of your family join the Church as well? Yes, all of my brothers and sisters. My mother was the last to join. My mother took more time because she had an experience when she was young: after World War II, her family was so poor that she was put away to live with her grandparents and she was treated very badly. Several times, she was crying as a little girl and somebody in white came and put her in his arms. She thought that if she joined a church she would betray the God who had sent those people in white. She had so many missionaries teach her! Even the president of the mission and his wife came to teach her. It was really hard for her. But she knew there was a God and that Jesus was real, and she still knows it now. Unfortunately, she cannot go to the temple anymore because she is too ill. She is handicapped now, completely physically dependent. It’s very hard for her. My brothers served missions and are married. My younger sisters are not active in the Church anymore. I went to San Jose, California, on a mission in 1996. I was 23 years old because I had an accident with my motorbike and unfortunately couldn’t go on my mission till later. I wanted to go to Russia because I knew we had some ancestors from Russia so I wanted to learn the language and do my genealogy there. But San Jose is much warmer than Russia! Your whole family is now in France. When did your family move there? We moved to France in 1989, about twenty years ago. I live outside of Paris. I work part time, and I spend my other time with my mother. I am not sure how much longer she will live. I am also trying to get ready to leave for four years, to go to Brigham Young University – Hawaii to get my bachelor’s degree. I never knew that I was dyslexic. I was only tested last year. I had some head injuries as a child from my father, and reading and learning has always been really hard for me. Unfortunately, at school I didn’t do very well because of my poor reading and writing. So at BYU- Hawaii will study special education. Because I know that dyslexia… you cannot be healed from it, but you can find ways to work with it and not let it be such a problem. I know that in the United States there are many things that can help dyslexia, but unfortunately in France there are no treatments for adult dyslexia. When I have my diploma, I will be able to help children in France treat dyslexia early. Is it a challenge for you being a Mormon woman in France? I am really excited to be a representative of the Church in France. I know that the French people have a very different culture and, for some members, it is hard for them to talk about the Church and be proud of being a Mormon. I have a lot of good friends who are gay. They are close friends and we talk a lot. They know my standards. I believe they are still children of God. But I believe that a child needs a father and a mother, and I keep telling them that. I hope that I help them be more sensitive to the needs of children, if not now, then in the future. There are such good things about so many different people. Just because I keep my position as a member of the Church doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have friends who do things differently. I don’t sustain them in what they do or go to their parties. I’m not afraid of saying I’m a member of the Church. I’m really proud of it. I’m really proud of having a testimony of Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ, even though I’ve had some bad comments from people who don’t know me. In France, we have a law that we are not allowed to talk about religion at work at all. So with my friends from work, I invite them to go to Institute or a church party in the evenings and we can talk about it there. They can also see that we have fun in our church! There are members here in France who don’t speak up loud because they don’t have personalities that are comfortable with inviting friends to church. I understand that, it’s hard. But I’m not one of them. At a Glance Name: Dominique Lam-Yam Location: Hong Kong Age: 36 Schools Attended: Brigham Young University - Hawaii Interview by Neylan McBaine. Photos by Bonni Bohn.