I had the blessing of being raised by my grandparents who understood this division of labor perfectly I think… I am reminded of the numerous times my grandmother taught high priests at our house. My grandfather was the high priest group leader in our ward and he often deferred to my grandmother as the expert or last word on spiritual matters. Many people, both men and women, came to my grandmother for spiritual guidance. After every blessing my grandfather gave me, we would all site down together and my grandmother would lead a discussion about what God had said to me (through my grandfather).

Raquel Cook’s biography so far might read like an adventure novel—living and working in Korea, meeting the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa, studying at Oxford University, surviving the violence of 9/11 in New York City—but  she’d rather you wrote your own adventure. Now a professor of education, Raquel reflects on her unique path and how she encourages her students to get out and see the world. And she explains how her study of world religions helped her better appreciate her own Mormonism. “There is truth everywhere,” Raquel says, “and there is happiness everywhere, and there is beauty everywhere, and people are good. Ugly is rare. People are just beautiful and good.” I pretty much grew up in Utah Valley. I went to high school here and then did my undergrad at BYU. While I was there, I studied language arts and classical civilization. Kind of typical. But then I guess where it started getting atypical was a couple weeks before graduation. I was angry. I’m just going to go ahead and say that I was angry at life. Not necessarily because of the way I was raised, but because I had been witness to some things growing up and I had been the victim of some pretty severe wrongdoing that went largely ignored. When graduation was approaching, I had a lot of options. I had scholarships to law school, I was engaged to a really cool guy, I had job offers, but I was only 21. And then this option came up to go work abroad for a while and so out of the blue I just stepped on a plane and left everything. The motivation at that point was more to get away from here, to get away from the expectations, to get away from the anger, to get away from people. It wasn’t because I had this big curiosity about the world; it was because I wanted to get away. It was because I wanted to leave, not because I wanted to go anywhere. When I left, I think I had just turned 21, and I kind of left the Church at the same time. But I always carried a Book of Mormon with me, and I always paid my tithing, even though I would go months or years without stepping into a church. I always did those things. What was the opportunity to go abroad? My first opportunity was going to South Korea to work for the National Police Academy.  They had selected ten cadets, ten seniors, that were going to come to graduate school in the United States. They already spoke English so my job was to prepare them culturally to live here. We did things like watch movies and practice ordering in a drive-through and learn how to write checks. Things like that. I lived in Korea for a few years, but I ended up staying abroad for probably eight or nine years. It led to some really crazy adventures. I ended up hosting a morning radio show. I wrote for an English-language newspaper. I traveled a ton. I went wind surfing in the Philippines; I rode a motorcycle through Vietnam; I rode a horse across Mongolia; I rode trains all over China. But slowly, after a few years of bumming around, the travel became more purposeful. At first it was all about the adventure. Like, sneaking into Myanmar without a visa, hoping not to get caught. Doing just crazy things. But then the more I traveled, the anger started to dissipate and I started to do more purposeful things. I did a vow of silence to gain audience with the Dalai Lama and I worked in one of Mother Teresa’s hospitals, so I got to meet her. I spent time in a refugee camp. How were you paying for all of this travel? When I lived in Korea, the people that I worked for, first at the Police Academy and then at the radio station, they paid my housing.  And I taught English on the side. So every penny that I saved went to traveling. And then when I’d run out of money I’d run back to Korea and work for a few more months and save some more money and then go travel again. When you’re hitchhiking and staying in people’s homes and sleeping in parks and eating street food, you can spend anywhere from 40 cents a day to a few dollars a day. And when you have time to kill, when you’re walking or hitchhiking, or riding on top of a train instead of in it, you’re not spending hundreds of dollars on airfare. So my money stretched and allowed me to do a lot of really cool things. I went to a temple in southwest China and studied Qigong and Daoism for a while. I went to Amritsar in northern India and spent a couple of weeks in a temple there learning about Sikhism, and I completed the vow of silence with the Dalai Lama and learned about meditation and prayer. The wandering turned from being a series of crazy adventures and anger-venting to soul-searching. I didn’t want to come home because I was curious and I was learning so much and I was loving what I was doing. How did this journey relate to your own Mormonism and your own spirituality from that heritage? That’s a good question. Because at first I thought it didn’t relate. When I was in high school I announced to my family that I wanted to study at Oxford University one day. My father pulled me aside and said, “People like us don’t do things like that.” So that was kind of engrained in me. It was also engrained in me that all of my sisters and friends had gotten married very young and were having children and were doing what they had been commanded to do and they had been doing what’s right. And following that expectation, the boys were going on missions and coming home and getting married and then going to college. And the girls were starting college and getting married, and then dropping out of college to have babies. And there I was, running around for almost a decade, jumping on trains, riding around the planet, eating weird food, climbing in the Himalayas, getting caught in mudslides, getting caught in terrorist attacks, getting caught in markets in Kashmir that were exploding with violence. I was away from the Church for a long time. The Church just wasn’t in the places where I was. I did carry my Book of Mormon with me everywhere I went, but I started finding that I could have spiritual experiences in other ways. I learned about charity and service from a Catholic nun, and I learned how to pray and meditate from a Tibetan monk, and I learned why my parents wore [temple] garments from a Sikh. Was that confusing? It was confusing because I had been told that no one else was right. And yet, here I was learning so much about myself and about my own faith by reading the Qur’an and the Upanishads. Here’s one of my most oft-quoted experiences: Somewhere along the line in my travels, I stopped in England and enrolled at Oxford University for a master’s program. (People like us do things like that!) I lived in a flat with a Muslim, a Jew, and an atheist. It sounds like a bad bar joke. The four of us would sit at night in our kitchen. One was observing halal, one was observing the Word of Wisdom, one was observing kosher, and one was a vegan. So we’d have these conversations about who was eating what and why. And we all just respected what the others were doing. I got to be really, really close with the Muslim gal, Aisha, who was from Pakistan. She and I started reading scriptures together off and on. We’d one night read from the Qur’an and another night read from the Old Testament. Or we would pick a topic, like Mary the mother of Christ, or charity, or tithing, or some topic, and then we’d compare what our scriptures and prophets said about those things. We did that through the whole year. And there was never any attempt to convert. Only to understand. At the end of that year, she presented me with a beautiful Qur’an, and she said, “Thank you for such a special year. You have made me a better Muslim.” I was like, “You have made me a better Christian. You have made me a better Mormon.” It was one of the most profound and gratifying compliments I’ve ever received.   Tell us about your experience on September 11, 2001. After I finished graduate school in England, I moved to New York and started working for a corporate finance firm in lower Manhattan. I wanted to go into teaching. I always wanted to be a teacher but I had some health issues, and I figured I couldn’t afford to teach. I had a lot of bills to pay. So I worked in corporate finance and I was kind of a peon for a few years and then 9/11 happened. I was in the World Trade Center when the first plane struck and I made it to the lobby of the building. I wasn’t working in the towers. The building that I worked in was a couple blocks to the south, but I rode the train into the towers every morning. So I was down in the train station [below the towers]. When I came off the train, all these people were running down the stairs screaming that there had been a bomb. And then when I turned to get back on the train, the train doors closed and the train went away, and then the announcers said no more trains were coming. So people started jumping on the tracks and running along the tracks to get away. I hate rats, so I decided to go up and out through the lobby. When I got up into the lobby there was so much debris falling that no one was going out. There was debris, bodies, shards of glass. You can imagine. So no one was actually running out. But I was standing there in the lobby looking up at all this stuff falling when all of a sudden the second plane appeared and crashed into the other tower. I was literally looking straight up into that when that happened. I don’t want to go into detail of the day, except to say that I spent most of that day curled up in the dark basement of a nearby building with a bunch of strangers. This was Armageddon as far as we were concerned. There was no outside communication, there was no power, no anything. I made it to a nearby building, and the super led me down into the basement. A bunch of people were sitting down in the dark and a couple of supers were walking around with flashlights making sure everybody was okay. But we were close enough to the [World Trade Center] that we could smell it. We could smell the petrol, we could smell the concrete ash, we could smell everything, we could hear everything, we could feel everything, but we couldn’t see anything. And we couldn’t communicate with the outside. We had no accurate information at all. We were down there most of the day until the afternoon when we were finally led out. Somebody found a box of old company t-shirts that we doused in water and wrapped around our faces to cover the smell so we could breathe. When they brought us out, they essentially told us that we had to walk home because the subways weren’t running. We came out and the first thing that I remember was that everything was gray. Everything was covered in this really soft, fine concrete ash. It was all over everything—all over the cars, all over the trees. So there was no color but gray everywhere. It was like a fresh snowfall, except that it was gray. I remember standing there and not wanting to step into it because I knew that there were bodies in that ash. So I was afraid to step; I was afraid to walk. I couldn’t wash my clothes for the same reason. I didn’t want to throw my clothes away but I didn’t want to wash them because I thought it would be sacrilegious. I thought it would desecrate these people’s bodies that had already been desecrated. So I put my clothes and shoes in a bag and just put the bag in the back of my closet and it sat there until I left New York. I thought I was the only person that did that but over the years I have talked to a lot of people that did the same thing. It came to me [after 9/11] that I could no longer afford not to teach. That the only way anybody’s attitudes or paradigms were going to change was through education. So I packed up my daughter and we moved out here to Utah where I could have some help babysitting while I went back to school. I moved out here clearly thinking that I would come here, go to school, and then go back to New York. But I ended up teaching English language arts at the high school I graduated from. I taught there while I worked on my dissertation and when I finished my dissertation I moved over to Utah Valley University, where I now work in teacher education. As a high school teacher, English language arts was my vehicle, but my whole obsession became teaching my students empathy and curiosity. I wanted more than anything, when my students graduated, for them to get on an airplane and leave the country. I wanted to dispel everything that they had been told before about how horrible the world is and how America is the only safe place to be. I started telling them to learn other languages and get ready to travel. Everything we studied—we read Things Fall Apart , The Kite Runner , and Hiroshima —we read all these books to get them curious, we watched foreign films and did community projects and went on field trips to get them curious about the world. My whole focus shifted from me traveling, which I still love to do, to getting other young people to do it. We’d spend the whole year virtually traveling to all these different areas of the world and reading all this literature and watching all these films and having guest speakers and going on field trips and doing all this really cool stuff. Then I would tell them, okay, at the end of the year the final is going to be comprehensive, so you have to remember everything you learned this year. So they’d stress out and study everything and try to get ready for the final. They’d come in for the final and there was a box of crayons on their desk and a blank piece of paper. The final was for them to color and write me a postcard from wherever they were going to be five years from graduation. Anywhere in the world, doing whatever, whether it was service somewhere or study abroad or something. I kept those in this little book. But then guess what started to happen? I still get postcards. I have probably 200 postcards from former students. And I only taught [high school] for four-and-a-half years. Of course some students send me more than one from multiple places: “I’m just riding trains around Europe,” or “I’m working in a orphanage in Chile,” or “I just did this really cool vision project in Malaysia,” or “I’m teaching school in Africa.” I have them from all over the world. I have former students who studied automotive engineering in Japan, dance in China, and cooking in Italy. They all say, “Thank you for letting me know this was a possibility.” My motivation for leaving [Utah] in the first place was to get out of here because I was angry. But now my motivation is that I want other people to realize that people like us do things like that. It’s okay for Mormons to do that. If we’re a global church, we’ve got to get out there and we’ve got to recognize the beauty in other people and we’ve got to recognize what they have to offer us. Not just what we have to offer them. It doesn’t have to be about conversion. It can be about learning and recognizing that other people have things that we don’t have and other people have things they can teach us. You’re a real teacher in the way of interacting with the world. I want the teaching to go beyond nouns and verbs, obviously. I want it to be about people. And about learning to love learning, and authentic learning, and travel. So I’ve become this jack-of-all-religions, languages, countries, and cultures, but a master of none. And I get so much satisfaction now with convincing other people to go, with seeing young people be curious about the world and want to go do volunteer work or study abroad. Tell us a little bit more about your evolution in your relationship with the Church? When did you re-embrace your activity in the Church after you had come back to the United States? I don’t know if there’s a specific turning point. When I left, I was angry and I professed to believe in God so I’d have somebody to blame for different things. I don’t know if there was a decisive shift, other than to say I went from reckless traveling and reckless random experiences, to stumbling upon a group of people doing Tai Chi in a park and all of a sudden making the traveling purposeful. It became purposeful in a spiritual sense. And the more I learned about other religions the more I learned about mine. I probably re-embraced my activity when I went to England and started attending [church] regularly in England. I mean, I kind of went here and there. I went once in Delhi. I went once in China, but of course the gathering was broken up so we only met for about 20 minutes before we were forced to disperse. I went in Korea. I had a lot of Mormon friends in Korea, so I’d go once in a while there. But regular attendance probably picked back up when I was in England and was working through the anger and trying to put all the pieces together. While I was working on my thesis there I was also meeting with a not-active LDS therapist who helped me to see the parallels between what I was working on in school and my own personal life. I was researching the Korean comfort women, the women who had been forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese during World War II, and whose own culture wouldn’t let them speak about what had happened to them. He would ask me these questions like, “What do you think happened in Korean culture that allowed these women to start to speak? What happened in your life that now you’re able to speak?” I think a lot of it had to do with ridding myself of anger and embracing the Atonement and recognizing that the Atonement is not just about overcoming sin. It’s about believing that the Lord’s going to take care of things. That all is fair and just and I don’t need to hang onto the anger, because the Lord’s going to take care of it. Me being angry at something someone did to me years ago is like being angry at a brick wall. It doesn’t affect them in any way. All it does is make me unhappy. But if I can hand that anger over to someone who has already suffered for it, then I can put my energy in a better place. In a place where it’s actually going to be useful. That’s what the Atonement has become for me: a way to forgive other people and a way to deal with trials in life. Just hand it over. I don’t need to carry this burden. It’s not mine. I think if I hadn’t actively practiced Daoism, I would never have fully learned that. I’ll tell you one really pivotal experience. You know how in life, you might have two or three pivotal experiences on which your existence hinges? One of those for me occurred when I was hiking in the northern Indian Himalayas. I was hiking in an area called Triund. At that time I was letting go of this energy and really starting to connect and really think about who I was and where I had come from. It’s kind of cliché to say this happened in India. It could have happened in Des Moines, Iowa, but it just so happened to be in India, after spending time at an ashram and doing a vow of silence. The geography is purely coincidental. I was sitting up at this ledge area called Triund and I remember a very physical feeling. It was very peaceful and very quiet, except for the wind. I remember the distinct feeling of a burden lifting off of my whole soul and blowing away. I remember, after feeling that, walking over and standing at the edge of a cliff and fully, with my whole heart and mind, believing that if I were to jump off that cliff I would fly. That’s how light I felt. It wasn’t because I wanted to go crashing to my death. I simply felt so light at that moment that I honestly thought I could fly. That feeling only lasted about twelve seconds, but I do remember that as a pivot. I don’t think that it’s the only pivot. I do think there were multiple experiences that brought me together. But it was that breeze washing away that heaviness that made me decide that I was going to stop being angry and go back to activity. It was months before I got to England, it was months before I actually set foot in a church after that and before I started working with the therapist. But it was then that I was able to say, okay, I can reconcile things. My life is not so bad after all. But then it was hard because I didn’t dive right back in to activity. I’d get in, I’d be active for a little while, and then I’d realize, okay, I don’t fit. And so I’d leave again and then I’d go back again and, okay, I don’t fit. Why was it that you weren’t fitting? Did you feel your experiences set you apart in unusual ways? Not to say that no one else has valuable experiences. It wasn’t that. It’s that my experiences were different. I had spent years by myself hitchhiking around dozens of countries, having all these amazing experiences, but I didn’t have anything to talk about to anybody. I’d get to church and they’d be talking about their Bunco nights and their scrapbooking parties, and I’d want to talk about the political uprisings in Kashmir. I wanted to talk about meeting Mother Teresa and I wanted to talk about riding a motorcycle in Vietnam and crawling through the Cu Chi tunnels. I wanted to talk about things no one wanted to hear. I didn’t feel like I had anything to contribute or that this culture would accept what I had to contribute. Has anything changed or made a difference in the intervening years? Well, when I moved back [to Utah] from New York, I was a single mom while I was teaching at the high school and working on my dissertation. And originally I was not well accepted. I could tell you some horror stories. Women would just walk up to me in church and say to my face, “Stay away from my husband.” And I’m like, “Who’s your husband?” So I was seen as this threat. I don’t know why they would say those things to me. In one ward that I was in I felt very, very ostracized and one day one of the gals in the ward that I had actually gone to high school with called me and asked, “What are you doing on Tuesday at 1?” I got really excited because I thought, okay, finally someone’s going to include me. Someone’s going to invite me to go do something. I said, “Oh, I have to work but I will be done by 2 or 2:30?” She’s like, “Oh shoot. Because a bunch of us are going to lunch and I needed a babysitter.” I have a dozen more stories like that I could share. And the other thing is people couldn’t understand how happy I was. Why should I be happy? I was a single mom. They couldn’t figure out what I was so happy about. I didn’t need to be married to be happy. That bothered a lot of people and they tried to convince me otherwise.   So you’re married now, with stepchildren? I got married when I was 41 and he brought a few kids into the mix. He has random, crazy stories like I do. He’s traveled all over. So when I met him it was like, okay, nothing’s going to rile him up. It doesn’t matter what I tell him, it doesn’t matter what experience I share, he’s going to have one too. He’s a pretty rare specimen. He’s well-traveled and we have a lot of similar qualities. We’ve been married about a year and a half now. You’re newly married! Yes. Very newly married. It’s been a struggle. As wonderful as he is, it’s been hard for me. I like being alone. I’m not a talker. I’m not a communicator. I traveled for years by myself, so I’m not used to talking about how I feel. I’m used to not having anyone there to tell. So now that there’s somebody there I forget that I can. He has to remind me. And you know what? I wouldn’t do it any other way. Some people think, “Oh, she didn’t get married until she was 41?” My family had pretty much written me off. But I was happy single. I could have been single ten more years. I’m grateful that I found the one I did because I’m very, very happy, but had I not found him, I would be single the rest of my life. He’s the only thing that’s better than being single. It bothers me that some of my students didn’t want to travel because they were afraid that if they left Utah they wouldn’t get married. But you can have it all. You can be educated, you can be well-traveled, you can do what you want to do. People like us do things like that and still have it all. You can travel and have degrees and still have a testimony. I don’t think girls and young women are raised to believe that, still. I think we’ve come a long way in the Church in terms of letting girls know what they can do, but I don’t think we’ve come far enough. Do you have another trip planned with your family? We do, actually. We’re going to Guatemala for spring break. I’m really excited. My daughter’s in an immersion program here so she’s a fluent Spanish speaker. She says, “When I’m done learning Spanish, I’m going to learn French and Hindi and Chinese.” I’m like, “You go, girl!” I love that. We’re going to keep traveling and embracing the world. My goal now? I love seeing good people succeed when they work hard, and I love seeing good things happen to good people. I want to help others succeed and I want to do good things. That makes me so happy. I’ve been there, I’ve done that. I don’t have anything to prove anymore. I want to see the people I love come out of their skin and lose their inhibitions and embrace the world and do fun and amazing things. I want to see people like us do things like that.

As a wife and mother in a part-member family, Peka draws on the inspiration of her mother — who was also a “single parent in the gospel” — to support her husband as he learns about the Church and teach her daughter what she believes. Issues of race have proven challenging for her non-white family, and Peka discusses how much she appreciates member friends who embrace her husband for who he is and not for what they want him to be. You’ve said you think of your mom as being a “single parent in the gospel”. Why do you say that? My parents were both converts to the church as young adults and they actually met on their missions. They were called from California, but they were both called to go back home, which is Samoa, to serve. They served along each other for a long time. But they didn’t date or look at each other like that. My mom always emphasizes that they didn’t date on their mission! Six years after they served my mom was writing Christmas cards to her family and to the people that she served her mission with and one of them was my dad.  At the time my dad had already joined the military. He was in the army. When he received her letter he said, “Hey, I’m away on assignment but I will be home for my R&R and when I come home I want to take you out.” So that’s how they started dating and eventually they got married. They got married in American Samoa and there is no temple there so they just had a civil marriage. The temple is in Apia Samoa, Western Samoa so they weren’t able to afford that so they just got a civil marriage. Shortly after they got married they were stationed in Fort Knox, Kentucky and that’s where I was born. But while my dad was in the military he fell away from the gospel, he fell away from the church. He started drinking and smoking, cussing. You know, the military life just brings that out in some people so he fell away. So growing up I never knew my dad to be a member. I knew he used to be a missionary but I never saw that side of him. All I saw was the inactive side so I basically grew up without my dad going to church. My mom was constantly faithful and took us to church. We sat in sacrament meeting. I always think back at Merrie Miss activities, when it used to be called Merrie Miss and when they would have daddy daughter days. I wished that my dad was there. There was one time we were sitting in sacrament meeting and we were kind of early. My mom looked at me and my sisters and said, “Wouldn’t it be so great if your dad was sitting up on the pulpit in the bishopric?” And I just kind of looked at her and laughed. There was no way. I still remember that because, even though my dad had struggled with the Word of Wisdom and his way of life was the way it was, she still had that faith that one day maybe her husband, our dad, would be up there. That he would come back. Did you feel like church attendance was a source of tension in their marriage?  Was she disappointed and frustrated that he didn’t live up to what she thought he was? Yeah, definitely, because she knew what he was before. When he served his mission he was so strong, and so active, and so when she saw that he fell away and fell so far away it disappointed her because that was not the man that she married. But she still stuck with it. Yes. She said, “This is too hard and too important of a thing to give up on.” She never gave up. When my youngest sister was nine years old, we were sitting in a Family Home Evening. We would always have Family Home Evening and my dad would sometimes be in the room or sometimes be present but not participating. But my mom held it faithfully. Well, my little sister was nine but she wasn’t baptized yet. And she looked at my dad and said, “Dad, I am nine years old, I am your last daughter, I am your last chance to basically get yourself together and baptize me. Baptize at least one of us.” My other sisters and I were baptized either by home teachers or missionaries because my dad couldn’t do it. I think when she said that, it triggered something within him. My mom had been working on him for years, but it was different coming from one of his children. After that, I started to see the payoffs to my mom’s faithfulness: everything she had done to keep faithful and have faith in him that we would be together forever one day. He got himself together. He got a calling. He was able to take the sacrament again. He baptized my sister, which was amazing! And then not too long after that my dad took my mom to the temple and married her. And then us children were all sealed to them. We were sealed on August 11 th , 2001, right before I left for college. A year or two ago, my mom had to write a church talk on marriage and she asked me for my help. I was like, “Mom, you have been married 32 years, why do you need my help? I’ve only been married 7 years!”  But my mom she didn’t graduate high school, so sometimes she feels a little insecure when it comes to things like speaking in front of people or having to teach a lesson. I told her I felt really strongly that she should talk about her own marriage. I felt that there were ladies out there who might be in the same situation and could learn from what she and dad went through. As I was helping her, I said, “Mom, thank you!” And she looked up at me kind of puzzled and said, “For what? You’re the one helping me.” And I thanked her for the example she was to me, because by watching the way she loved and had patience with my dad, I know now that I can do that with my husband Matt, who is not a member of the Church. I told her, “I think you had your experiences for me, because now I have somebody that I can look up to who didn’t give up. I can see you as someone to encourage me. Marriage was something that was so important to you, you didn’t give up on even when he seemed so far away.” That’s kind of where I’m at now. When I was Relief Society teacher, I tried to always share something personal about my own part-member marriage, because I didn’t realize it at the time but there are so many sisters in my ward who are in the same boat. I don’t have a husband who is a member so I feel like a single parent when it comes to the gospel sometimes. How do you talk about that with the other women in your ward?  I know growing up with an inactive dad myself, people made a lot of faux pas with my mom.  She was forgiving and understanding enough to sort of brush them off, but are there any suggestions that you have for people to be more understanding and inclusive of women in your position? Is there a way of treating your husband that doesn’t always make him feel like he is a service project? Yeah, a lot of times he does feel like a service project. The first thing you do when you meet somebody is say, “So, how long have you been a member?” or we always bring up something from the church because that is our commonality. We have some friends who, when I told them that my husband was a non-member, they didn’t look at me like, Oh poor you! They were like, That’s okay, we’ll have him come over, we’ll have dinner, we’ll talk, we’ll get to know each other! They connected on something more than just the church. They connected on music and that’s what my husband does. He teaches music and he is a musician. So they made an effort to really find something outside of church experience to connect with him? Right! Which I totally loved! And usually Matt, my husband, is hesitant when I say there’s a church couple that wants to get together because he feels like he is a service project or they are going to question him about the church and that makes him feel so uncomfortable. He just wants to go and relax and enjoy and talk to people. But these friends totally make him feel comfortable. They get to know him for him and I think that’s wonderful because when he does bring up the questions about the church they don’t judge him or give him the missionary or the handbook answers. They give him something that’s personal and exactly how they feel and not something that will make him say, “Oh I think this is a great church! Maybe I will join it!” What have you two done, if you are willing to share, in the raising of your daughter?  Was there an agreement before you got married or before you had children of the way that they would be raised spiritually? Yeah, well my husband was raised non-denominational, and he has a real problem with religion but he definitely has a relationship with Heavenly Father. He even prays all the time. Whenever I say prayers with our daughter he doesn’t reject it. He is open to that. He definitely believes that there is a God. So when we discussed having kids I said I wanted to take them to church. He said that was fine because usually when there are different religions in the couple, the kids usually go with the mom. There are certain aspects of the church that he absolutely loves. Like he loves the fact that the core unit is the family. He loves the standards that the youth has. But there are things that he doesn’t understand. My husband is black. I am Samoan and he is black. So one of the biggest issues he has is the black men not being able to have the priesthood until 1978. He really has a hard time with that and doesn’t feel like there is a real answer for him. I’m trying to give him my point of view. I told him there really isn’t an answer. That frustrates him. We were talking not too long ago about how I was teaching my daughter the gospel. He said, “It’s fine, but when she grows up, I’m going to tell her the truth.” I was taken back by that. So I said, “What do you mean tell her the truth?” And he said, “I’m going to tell her that Mormonism is racist.” I felt like we stepped back several steps. I tried to not overwhelm myself with that because it will take my goal out of focus. What I am grateful for is that he doesn’t argue with the principles. He doesn’t argue with what’s important about the gospel. What I feel like he is arguing with is what men, human men, back in the day didn’t understand or didn’t do. So that gives me hope that maybe one day I will be able to do what my mom did and take my family to the temple. Matt really struggles with the race issue and hasn’t really found somebody that he is comfortable talking with about it. There was a sister companionship a couple of years ago and they really got to know Matt. We felt really comfortable with them. The sister missionary looked at Matt at one point in our discussions and said, “Hey Matt, you look like you have a question. Is there anything that I can help you with?” He was hesitant but then he said, “Alright, before I ask this question,” he says, “I’m a black man from Texas and you’re a white girl from Utah so I have no idea how you can relate to me with what I’m about to ask you.” He asked about why black men didn’t get the priesthood for so long. She was really sweet. She was like, “I totally understand. I also have a problem with it but it’s something that we don’t understand or haven’t been given any understanding of why it happened. You need to get over it.” And how did he respond to that? It wasn’t until several months later that I found out how he really felt. We were driving home from my parent’s house and we were talking about religion and the temple and he brought that up. He said, “When that sister said we just needed to trust and move on, I wanted to get up and tell her to get the heck out of my house. Because for her to sit there to tell me to just move on….” Since then he hasn’t really said anything.  He does a lot of research online. I’m so glad that he is interested enough that he would want to do research but then I get nervous of where he’s going online to get information. I’ve encouraged him to ask that couple I was talking about earlier, who really like him for himself and not because he could join the Church. It would be good for him to get somebody else’s point of view instead of just mine. And they would be honest with him. He said, “I do want to ask so terribly but I love these guys and if I ask them I don’t want to look at them differently because of their response.” You as a Samoan woman must have had some thoughts or struggle with the race issue growing up yourself? How have you come to terms with it? Is it just through the power of the spirit that you have been able to come to peace with it? Or is there something that has really helped you intellectually? Well, I wasn’t aware of the Church’s history with race until Matt and I started dating. We dated when we were in high school. So I was 17 and he was 18. When we started dating he told me about that and I said what? What are you talking about?  I looked it up. Oh you didn’t know? I had no idea! No, I didn’t know until he told me. Actually, when he found out that I was Mormon he went online and researched about it because he didn’t want to do anything to offend me, which I thought was really sweet. But he told me about the priesthood ban. Once he did tell me I did look it up and I started thinking, well I’m not necessarily white but I’m not black either, but being with Matt and now being married to him I am more aware of this whole thing. I’ve gone on mormon.org just to kind of see what other people have said and it was basically the same thing. I think it may be a personal thing Matt has to work through, but the answers we have don’t satisfy him. And it’s especially hard to help him understand what I don’t really understand myself. And now that we have Lenna, I am trying to figure out what I say or do. Because I don’t even know what to say to my husband. This is definitely, I believe, one of the trials that I have in my life. My mom always encouraged us to go on missions because she said it was the best time of her life ever.  I just never really had the desire to go and I didn’t want to go in half-heartedly. So when Matt asked me to marry him I felt really strongly that yeah this will be ok, and that he is the right man for me. This is my mission. My family is who I am supposed to be teaching. Just recently a black man and a white woman couple just moved into our ward and when I saw them I did a double take because they are somebody that I can go and talk to and just kind of get ideas, and maybe somebody that Matt will be able to relate to. But really I don’t know. It’s such a touchy subject  that I was even afraid to go up to this couple and say, “Hey, I know you just got here but I have this thing…” It’s so wonderful that you had that example of faith from your mother because it sounds like you are carrying on that heritage. Your goal is to have your husband joined to you in an eternal family one day. Are you okay if it never happens? It is my goal for my family to be together forever and that is through the temple. If it doesn’t happen in this life then I am still okay with it. As long as I do what I am supposed to do here to teach my husband, to teach my children and to be the example, I know that they will learn through my example no matter what. I am grateful to know that the Lord is merciful and still gives us a chance on the other side. I am not saying that I am counting on that. I would definitely love for it to happen here. I want to take advantage of the time and the opportunity that we have to do it here. But if it doesn’t happen then I will be okay because I know the Lord knows what I am going through. He knows that my family is important to me and that he will take care of us. I think that if I had married somebody that was in the church that I wouldn’t take my testimony so seriously. But I think the Lord knew what he was doing when he put us together.  And my testimony something that I needed to work on and I wouldn’t have been able to work on my own commitment to the gospel if I had it the “easy route”. As I said earlier, my family was sealed right before I left for college but as soon as I got to college I felt freedom like I never felt it before. I’m the oldest, so my mom always said, “Peka, you need to be an example to these girls, you’re the president of your Young Women’s class. You need to set a good example.” I just got tired of being the good girl. I wanted to have fun too. It wasn’t until college that I realized that I didn’t have a testimony; I was leaning on my family. I was definitely leaning on the girls that I went to Young Women’s with and so when I went away I had nobody to lean on. When we got married, I was going to church every now and then but I wasn’t so active. I knew it was what I needed to do because it’s what I was raised to do, but it wasn’t until Matt and I started talking about having children that I kind of stepped back and evaluated my life and said, “Am I living the kind of life that Heavenly Father would bless me with a child?” Because, like I said, my husband is a musician so we were at the bars, the clubs, and his gigs and there is nothing but craziness that goes on there. Drinking and smoking… It wasn’t until that moment I wanted a child so badly that I just stopped and I made a commitment that I was going back to church. That whole journey of coming back was amazing. I had gone without taking the sacrament for such a long time that once I was able to take it again I didn’t ever want to go without it. That is a wonderful part of your story.  So was that all self-motivated or was there somebody who really encouraged you to get back on the horse? Or was it just the motivation of wanting to have a child? It was the motivation of having a child and having a family. And asking myself questions: how am I going to raise my family? Am I living a life that sets an example to children of ours? And I was definitely not.  So I turned back to what I knew was good and it wasn’t until I started going back to church that I gained my own testimony of the gospel. I am so grateful for that experience because I don’t take the gospel for granted anymore. I absolutely love it. I engulf myself in it. It took me a couple of months to get pregnant. In my head, two months was way too long and I thought it was because of what I had done in the past. My drinking, my smoking, I was partying, I was being crazy… I thought that Heavenly Father was punishing me for what I had done in the past and not instantly granting us a child. So you felt guilt? Yeah oh my gosh! Totally! Totally felt guilty! How did you overcome that? So I have to go back a little bit to explain this. When I decided that I was going to come back to the church, I was living in Austin but my parents lived an hour away. And I hated going to church by myself. I just felt so alone. I’m Samoan and I am in a predominantly white congregation. I’m not married to a white man, I’m married to a black man and on top of that he is not a member. I just felt alone in the ward that I was assigned to. So when I decided to go back to church, when I made that commitment, I drove an hour every Sunday to my parents’ ward. I did that for eight months. And at the time my dad was in the bishopric, and he told me the bishop wanted to meet with me. I wasn’t in his ward; I hoped he wasn’t giving me a calling! So I go into the bishop’s office and he sits me down and he says, “Peka, how are you doing? I noticed that you weren’t taking the sacrament. Is there anything that I can help you with?” And I just started bawling. And told him what was going on with my guilt and trying to get pregnant, and he said to me, “The Lord has already forgiven you.  You’ve already done everything you’re supposed to do in the repentance process and the Lord has already forgiven you. You need to forgive yourself.” That was so eye opening to me because it might have just been a drink here and there but because of what I had been taught and how I had been raised, they felt like such huge sins that I totally thought there was no way I could come back. That’s the hardest thing, isn’t it? Forgiving yourself? The bishop said, “That’s the adversary holding you back, getting you to think that you aren’t worthy when you totally are. The Lord has forgiven you, His arms are open.” While we were trying to get pregnant, I was working on going to the temple. The day of my endowment, that was something that I took with me to the celestial room: talking to Heavenly Father about starting a family and if this was right and if it was the right time and if I could forgive myself. Well, a few weeks later… little did I know… Oh what a happy story! I was pregnant! The Lord is so merciful and forgiving. I know my family will be okay. Things will happen on the Lord’s time, but the thing I know is that my family will be okay.

When Pam Shorr decided to stop attending church, she doubted she would ever go back. She recalls thinking, “I really want to find who I am and what I believe. I just want to do my own thing for a while.” But eventually, Pam found herself prompted to return, and an inspired Relief Society president showed her the way. She describes her reactivation in the Church as difficult, terrifying, and inspiring. “When I returned,” she says, “I was ready for the whole thing, and I have never looked back.” Pam is interviewed here by her daughter, Krisanne. Can you tell me about your experience growing up in the Church? I grew up in Salem, Oregon, in a family that was partly active in the Church. My parents didn’t keep the Word of Wisdom, and I don’t think either of them liked to go to church but they felt like it was the right thing for their three children. They would go off and on together, but mostly off. Toward the middle years of my life my mom took us to church because my dad told her to, but she didn’t like to go. I didn’t really like going because the girls my age in the ward weren’t very nice to me. Many of the parents in the ward got together socially and my parents usually didn’t go to their parties. Inevitably, the kids of those parents were together a lot and they knew each other. They ignored me because my parents weren’t active in the ward or in the social scene. That was my impression. I went to church because I had to, but I never liked it. In high school, I realized I had a choice. I could just refuse to go, and there wasn’t much my parents could do about it. I just said, “Forget it. I’m not going.” During my senior year, a couple of girls moved into our ward, Jo and Janelle. They were ostracized by the other girls in the ward like I was. We banded together, and they became good friends of mine in high school. Jo was the Laurel president, and she always invited me to Young Women’s, and I also really liked the Laurel leader at the time. Her name was Ann Papworth. She made an effort to connect with me. She was fantastic. After Jo and Janelle moved in, I would go to church off and on, but I still didn’t like it much. Was there ever a point when you developed a testimony of the gospel? After I graduated from high school, Jo and I thought it would be kind of cool to go to Ricks College together. Ricks College [now BYU–Idaho] was where I really gained my testimony. It was a hard transition, though, because Idaho was very different from Oregon. I remember I brought my 8-track tapes–Emerson Lake & Palmer, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Jethro Tull. I listened to Joni Mitchell a lot, too. My roommates thought my Dark Side of the Moon album was devil music. They listened to Barbara Streisand, John Denver, the Carpenters, Seals and Croft. Eventually, I did find some like-minded kids, and of course my friend Jo was along for the ride. During those college years, I felt really good about the Church. Jo and I took some time off from school and went back east to New York to spend a year as mother’s helpers. I lived with a Jewish family and nannied their kids. There was a large group of LDS kids in New York, and we had a lot of fun together. All of my friends were LDS kids, and that was good for me. There were also some investigators our age, so I had some missionary opportunities as well. When I got back from New York, I started dating your dad, and we were both really excited about the gospel. He told me how he had read the Book of Mormon in a weekend and had this profound manifestation that it was true.  We dated for about nine months and then got married in the Salt Lake Temple on December 1, 1977. We were married for about two and a half years. Our marriage was really hard even though we were both active members. In hindsight, it’s hard for every newly married person. It’s difficult to make that adjustment from attending a student ward to being married to attending a regular family ward. I didn’t have very good examples of healthy marriages growing up, either. I really struggled with it. I struggled with having to work and then being pregnant and then having a baby and trying to teach Primary and hold a baby in one hand. It got too hard. There were other problems too. Your dad and I decided to separate, but we remain friends to this day. You were a year old when I moved back home to Salem, Oregon. What happened with your involvement with the Church after your divorce? I attended church for a while. I went back to the ward in Salem that I had grown up in, which I wasn’t really happy about because of the painful memories I had there. I was going through a hard time. I was living alone with you and really tried to make it on my own. I got a part-time teaching job and then decided I wanted to get my master’s degree in Special Education. I had a calling in the Nursery, and I remember sitting in the Nursery and thinking about all of the things I didn’t like about the Church and that most of those things revolved around service. I liked reading the scriptures, I liked going to the meetings, but I didn’t like callings or visiting teaching or anything service. Service is what makes you grow, but I didn’t like it at the time because I was extremely busy. I was alone and raising a daughter and getting a master’s degree and working and trying to keep my finances going. Church service was just one more thing to worry about. Additionally, there wasn’t a lot of support for divorced women in the Church that I could see. Even my visiting teachers were nervous to come visit me. They didn’t know what to say to me. Through all of this, I remember thinking, “I really want to find who I am and what I believe. I just want to do my own thing for a while.” I moved up to Portland and decided that I wasn’t going to attend church once I got there. I wanted to see what it was like out in the world. Honestly, I think it was a good thing for me to get away for a little bit. On the one hand, it’s too bad that I didn’t stay active in the Church. On the other hand, I really needed to make a clean break so that I could figure things out. I doubted if I would ever go back because the majority of my time growing up in the Church was painful. I could count on one hand all of the really good years I had in the Church–mostly during my Ricks College and BYU years. You eventually remarried a man who was Jewish. How did that inform your Mormonism? When I moved up to Portland, I knew I wanted to remarry but I wasn’t going to marry a Mormon guy. However, I was very particular and knew that that if I did remarry, the person had to like kids, be a good man, come from a nice family, and be respectful. I met Jack at a teaching conference, and I thought he was a really nice guy. I noticed how fun he was with you and how gentle he was. He liked animals and kids, and I could tell that he came from a good family. I also really liked the fact that he was Jewish. I had always had Jewish friends growing up and was really curious about their faith and traditions. In high school, two of my closest friends were Jewish. When I was in college, I loved reading the Old Testament. I had some friends who went to Israel on semester abroad, and we would make Middle Eastern dinners together when they returned. When I nannied for the Jewish family in New York I would join in their Friday night Sabbath activities. Every time I thought about the religion, I got warm feelings. In fact, my grandfather’s best friend growing up in Brigham City [Utah] was Jewish–the only Jewish person in Brigham City. He owned the store where my grandfather worked. My dad was named after my grandpa’s Jewish friend, Ben Sherman. When I married Jack, I had been less-active in the Church for six years, and I had these feelings that maybe I would return to the Church. I thought that if I ever did return, I would have to be there for the right reasons, though. I knew Jack was a wonderful, supportive guy, and I said to him before we got married, “There is a small chance that I might go back to the Mormon Church. Are you okay with that?” He said, “If that makes you happy, I’m okay with that.” With that said, I never expected Jack to join the Church if I started going back. Even though Jack wasn’t active in his religion, I understood that his Jewish heritage was very important to him. I didn’t and still don’t believe that I should expect him to change that part of him. It would be like saying, “Who you are is not right or not good enough.” I didn’t think that was respectful. Likewise, he wasn’t expecting me to become Jewish, either. Did you return to the Church, then? After we got married, I felt very settled and my life was very happy. We moved to Beaverton, Oregon, and I got a great teaching job and you started first grade. When you were about nine years old, you said to me one day, “Mom, a lot of my friends go to church. Why don’t we go to church?” I was pregnant with your brother Matthew at the time, and I started getting these strong feelings about going back to church, too. My brother Eric was on his mission at this point. My mom and dad were inactive. I was inactive. You weren’t baptized. Eric told us that he had been praying and fasting for us constantly on his mission. It was his desire that we would all return to the gospel. I knew if I decided to go back to the Church, it was going to be hard. I was a little worried about Jack’s reaction. I had received his blessing right before we got married, but he really didn’t know a whole lot about Mormons because I had never been active during our courtship and early marriage, and he didn’t know what a commitment to Mormonism requires. Also, I didn’t know where the Mormon Church was in Beaverton. I looked up the address but I couldn’t figure out where it was located. I wasn’t even sure which ward I was in. I didn’t know any Mormons. I thought, “The only way to resolve this is to pray about it.” While I was saying the prayer, I thought to myself, “All right, this is it. No turning back now. This is going to happen because prayers are answered.” The next week I got a newsletter from the Beaverton 1st Ward. I thought, “A newsletter? Wow! That is a quick answer to a prayer!” The following week I got a phone call from the Relief Society president of our ward, Ann. She said, “I just had a feeling I needed to call you. You’re on the no-contact list, and if you really prefer no contact, please let me know.” I told her that I wanted to talk, so she came to my house, and I told her that I was having these strong feelings that I should go back to church. Ann said, “I just couldn’t get your name out of my head. Every time I looked at the names on the no-contact list, your name just glowed. I had to call you.” I said, “You were inspired. I would like to work my way back into the Church, but I’m terrified.” It took me about a year to get the courage to actually attend the ward. Once I went back, I was so excited. I loved conference. I remember calling my mom and dad and saying, “You guys will not believe this, but I’m going back to church.” And they said, “You’re not going to believe this, but we are too.” They bought me a new set of scriptures and the book, Jesus the Christ. There was just such a wonderful spirit in my life at this time. We eventually had the missionaries over to teach you the discussions because you were ten years old. You were ready to get baptized. You were such a sweet girl and were ready to go to church and be a part of the ward. It’s funny, when my brother Eric came home from his mission, I said, “Guess what, Eric? We’re all going to church now.” He wasn’t surprised. How has your life changed since returning to the Church? Returning to the Church has blessed our family. There is a peace in our home. I always have the neighborhood book group at our house, and the members of the group say that there is always such a neat spirit here. I think that it has blessed Jack and blessed our marriage. Maybe it’s blessed him to be patient with me. I’m learning things every day about that. The gospel has blessed my children and my ability to communicate with them. It’s definitely blessed me as a person. I always felt like I was “kicking against the pricks” when I was active before. When I was reactivated, I had to work through some of my issues. I had to get rid of my hard heart. It was difficult. My faith has grown during this process. Having faith is important, especially regarding service. If you’re extended a calling, you need the faith to say, “Yes, I can do that. It’s going to be really hard, but I can do that.” Or if you get a list of people to visit teach who are difficult you need the faith to say, “Yes, I can do this,” even if what you’re being asked is a little scary or uncomfortable. I learned that service is really the key to everything, and I like it now! I like every aspect of the Church. I like callings, visiting teaching, having visiting teachers–all of the things that I didn’t like before. When I returned, I was ready for the whole thing, and I have never looked back. It hasn’t all been easy. There have been some hard times, but I haven’t lost the faith. I always made the commitment that if things start to slide because of my crazy schedule of working full time as an elementary school teacher, and raising three kids, I will always attend my meetings and fulfill my callings. I know it’s best to go with a good attitude and a willingness to learn, but sometimes you just have to show up even if you’re not feeling like it. Sometimes I wonder where I would be if I had never left the Church. But then I remember that recent talk by Elder Holland where he tells us that where we are right now is enough. It’s enough. Where I am is a good thing. Most of the people I visit teach are inactive. I tell them, “If I can come back to church, you can come back. It’s possible. And it will bless your life when you’re ready.” I go by myself, and I have always encouraged them to call me if they need a ride or if they need someone to go with them. Even though I’ve attended church by myself pretty much my entire life, I have rarely felt alone. I feel like I am fulfilling an important calling. I am more aware of people who sit alone or people who are new or people who look unhappy, because I’ve been there, and I will sit next to them and introduce myself. I don’t go to church now and think, “Oh, I’m sitting alone,” because it’s not all about me. Now I think, “What can I do to help others?” I’ve just grown. It’s about time.

A job loss. A family member’s illness. A cancer diagnosis. All difficult trials, made even more difficult when they all happen at the same time. Olivia Luk and her family faced this unimaginable series of events in 2002. They met their challenges with tears, prayers, and faith—the kind of faith that Olivia had developed when she joined the Church as a young woman in Hong Kong. And she found that Heavenly Father responded to her family’s needs in unexpected ways. It all happened in one day. It was an ordinary day in 2002, two weeks before my son was leaving for his mission. He had been looking forward to serving a mission since he was young. He planned to serve a mission first, and then study at one of the Brigham Young University campuses. But his life and my life were about to change. He had been vomiting and having severe headache for several days. He called me on that day and said that he had a very serious headache and was heading to the hospital. By the time he arrived at the hospital, he fainted. After several examinations and checking, the doctor found a tumor in his brain. Later on it was confirmed that he had cancer. After hearing this tragic news, my husband told me that he was laid off—on the same day—and my mother-in-law was also in the hospital. My husband ran to the hospital after knowing our son’s situation. At that time he was not a member [of the Church] yet. He was yelling and crying out loud, and said to the unknown Almighty, “If you can heal my son, I will accept the gospel!” During that time I did not know what to do besides praying and fasting. I started fasting and my husband fasted as well, even though he did not know the meaning of fasting. It was his first time to fast. We continued to pray for our son and hoped that he would calm down. After several medical checkups, it was confirmed that my son had a tumor in his brain. Arrangements for surgeries were made and schedules were set for chemotherapy. I remember there was one time my son desperately asked me why this happened to him. I did not know how to answer his question. I did not cry in front of my son and I knew that I needed to stay strong to take care of him. But when I knelt down and prayed, I cried and was shocked at how all these things could happen at the same time, not just that my son was sick and my husband was laid off—I was also laid off on the very next day after my son was sent to the hospital. As a mother, it was incomprehensible that my son was suffering from cancer. My heart was broken and I questioned, “Why did this happen to him but not to me?” Even though I could not accept the reality, I continued to pray and plead to God for comfort and strength. When I prayed, I cried, but I knew that I had to face the reality. I had faith that God would take care of my family. I knew he had a plan for me and for my family. God answered our prayers in many ways. We were blessed to have a caring and loving doctor to take care of my son. He told us that we should not give up. He promised us that they would try all that they could do to cure him. They did research worldwide and ensured that my son received proper treatment. When my son was in the hospital, the nurses treated him as family. Also, since my husband had been laid off, he was able to spend more time taking care of him, provide daily needs for him, and support him during his chemotherapy. Financially, as both my husband and I were being laid off, people would think that the burden would increase. However, I received a lump sum of money from my company, which was sufficient for our daily spending until I got another job. As I mentioned, it was only two weeks before my son would report to the MTC. He was upset because serving a mission was something that he wanted to do since he was young. The Lord works in a miraculous way. Even though he was not able to serve a full-time proselyting mission, instead he was able to share the Gospel to the people in the hospital. When he was staying in the hospital, next to him was an empty bed. Patients would come and go and because of that, he was able to share the Gospel with other patients. He told me that he even talked to a prisoner and shared the Gospel with him. They talked about prayer. After that prisoner was released, he returned and visited my son. His experience also partly influenced my husband on his way to becoming converted. During the whole process of my son’s chemotherapy, I went to visit him almost every day. I would help him to do foot massage and make him feel better. My son became very ill after he received the fourth chemotherapy. As a mother, it was really hard for me to see him suffer. I continued to pray for him and hoped he had the strength to overcome what he was suffering. I felt the tender mercies of the Lord on my son, on me, and on my family. The Lord watched over us during this difficult time and helped us along the way. My son received proper treatment and he became better. After he finished the treatment and was released from the hospital, SARS broke out. If he would have had to stay longer in the hospital, he might have been infected by SARS. Fortunately he was released before that devastating virus hit Hong Kong, which caused hundreds of deaths during that time. It has been almost eight or nine years and the cancer hasn’t come back. How did your husband join the Church? I met him before I joined the Church. He has been in contact with the Church through me for many years. He was at my baptism and our sons’ baptisms, but he had no intention to join. On the day when my son was sent to the hospital because of his critical situation, my husband cried out loud and said if God would save his son’s life, he would believe in God. He kept his promise. Later on, during our son’s recovery period, he took the missionary lessons and got baptized. During his baptismal service, he cried and shared a wonderful testimony. His faith in the Lord has been strengthened through all these trials in our family. He was called to serve as a bishop recently. How about you? How did you join the Church? When I was a young kid, I had a schoolmate who walked to the school on the same path. One day she invited me to go to church with her. At that time I went to another church, which was quite far away from where I lived. My friend invited me to go to the LDS meeting place at Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon. The meeting place was a rented place in a very old commercial building. I attended church meetings and found myself interested in the Church. After that I started to follow my friend to go to church. In the Church, I was able to meet a lot of amazing people. They are very talented and faithful. I admired one of the sisters who taught the Gospel Principles class. I wanted to be baptized, but my mother said that it was not necessary. However, my father and my sisters were very supportive. They thought that it was good for me to go to church. Sometimes on Sunday, they would wake me up and remind me to attend church meetings. Even though I was not baptized, I continued to go to church on Sunday, sing in the choir, and serve others. Everyone said that I looked like a member from head to toe. My bishop even tried to extend a calling to me by mistake because he thought that I was already baptized. Finally, after six years of being an investigator, I got baptized and confirmed as a member of the Church. I was baptized a year before my husband and I were married. At that time, my future mother-in-law was not happy about my decision. But I was firm and knew that I needed to be baptized. My husband was at my baptismal service. However, after we were married, I became less active. We moved to a new area in Hong Kong and I did not know which ward I should go to. We lived with my mother-in-law after we were married. Whenever missionaries came to visit me, my mother-in-law turned them away. For the whole time when I was less active, my visiting teachers continued to pay a visit. Every time when they came I gave them an excuse—such as I was busy, I had to take care of my kids, I had to work, etc.—my visiting teachers did not give up. They said whenever I have time, I can bring my sons to church on Sunday. One day an incident happened that caused me to re-think the importance of gospel in my life. It was not a drastic incident that proceeded to a “big” miracle, instead, it happens almost every day in societies. As usual, I took my sons to catch the school bus to go to school. On the side of the road there were two teenagers fighting against each other. There was broken glass all over on the ground. At the moment I asked myself, “Will my sons behave as they are?” I was worried and a lot of thoughts came into my mind. Then I heard a voice that said, “Bring them to church. Bring them to church.” I realized that I should bring them to church and teach them to read the scriptures. After this incident happened, I went home and discussed it with my husband. My husband didn’t like the idea because during that time I was not even going to church, so how would I be able to take our sons to church? He also worried that going to church would take too much time and interfere with our sons’ schoolwork. I promised my husband that I would go to church and manage the time well so that it would not interfere with our sons’ schoolwork. Eventually, my husband agreed to let me bring our sons to church. I think one of the reasons that my husband agreed to let me do that was because he had been to church when he was dating me and he had an idea what the church environment was like. He knew that the teachings of the Church would be able to help our sons. After that I started to bring my sons to church every Sunday. On the first Sunday I returned to church I received a friendship basket during Relief Society. I was welcomed by other sisters and felt a sense of belonging. Sometimes my mother-in-law came to church with me. She had the chance to interact with members. Even though sometimes she heard our neighbors saying that our church was a cult and people there were not friendly, she told me that people in the Church are actually very polite and show respect to others. We invited missionaries to our home for meals and my family enjoyed having missionaries around. The missionaries tried to teach my husband, but he was too stubborn during that time and did not want to listen. He even refused to let our sons to be baptized. He said that we should wait till our sons reach the age of 18 and make a decision by themselves. Our sons were not happy because they could not be baptized and there were things that they could not do, for example, preparing and passing the sacrament. I continued to encourage my sons to follow the example of Jesus Christ and be good boys. One day our youngest son wrote a letter to my husband. In the letter he wrote his testimony and told his father how much he loved the Church and the great desire he had to be baptized. He pleaded for his father to allow him to be baptized. The letter touched my husband’s heart and finally he gave the permission to our sons to be baptized. Is there anything you would like to say to your sons and the youth in the Church? I encourage them to rely on God. No matter what happens in life, they have to remember not to give up. God does answer our prayers, but one important thing that we need to know is He answers our prayers according to His timetable, not ours. He wants us to grow and learn in this lifetime. I have learned that in the life lessons I have had, we must obey Heavenly Father’s will. And most importantly, hold to the rod and endure to the end.

Tina knew from a young age that music was her life’s calling and she is a professional saxophonist in New York. It took longer for Tina to realize that she is gay, but a period of inactivity from the Church didn’t stop her from paying her tithing every month. It was appreciation and practice of Buddhism that led Tina back to the Church in her remarkable journey back into activity. When I was in third grade I had a babysitter, who was in the high school jazz band. Her band played at my elementary school.  I saw her stand up and play tenor saxophone and she was just killing it. She stood up and took a solo. I was like, that’s amazing! Then in fifth grade, I had a choice in public school to be in choir or in band.  I wanted to be in band. I wanted to play tenor saxophone. I really feel like saxophone picked me. It was that thing I just knew I had to do. There was just no question. I grew up in a very musical home although no one was trained. I got some really good negative pushback from my father which made me just want to prove to him even more that I would practice every day. So, I did. I practiced every day. Nobody told me to practice, but it was like a refuge for me. You know, all families are crazy and disruptive, no one is immune to that, and I just found it to be a sanctuary. I didn’t take private lessons, just what I got in school. But I would fall asleep dreaming of orchestrations in my head. I could hear music in my head. And I dreamt of me being in a Jazz combo, just five people. I didn’t know what that was. I just knew that I was on stage performing with a bass player, drummer, piano and a trumpet player. I decided then that that’s how I was going to spend the rest of my life. What was it like to get your first saxophone? Oh, it was magic! Man, I got this instrument, I didn’t know how it worked but I put the reed on and I just started playing the one with the record – like immediately. I didn’t know how to finger anything. It was my big passion. It’s all I wanted to do in high school.  I actually hated high school because I couldn’t do enough music. I was in music zero hour, 3 rd period, 6 th period and then after school.  So, it was four times a day and it wasn’t enough. I didn’t want to learn history, I didn’t want learn biology. I just wanted to know more about music. When I was a sophomore in High School I went to a competition for band and small ensembles held at the University of Idaho (Moscow, Idaho).  The saxophone professor at the University of Idaho approached me and asked if I was taking lessons and I said, “No, my parents can’t afford it.” And he said, “Well, look, if you drive over here (which was 200 miles away) I’ll give you saxophone lessons for free.”  I said, “Okay, you’ve got a deal.”  So, I took his telephone number, I went back home. I was 16 at the time. I said, “Dad, I need a car. This saxophone professor wants to give me lessons for free.” He said, “Well, there are 2 engines in the garage. See what you can do with them.” My dad was a mechanic. So, I had to rebuild my first car engine. With my dad’s help, we rebuilt the car engine so I could drive 200 miles one way to be at saxophone lesson at 8:30 on Saturday mornings. I did this every other Saturday for my junior and senior years of high school. Get up at 3:30AM to be in my car by 4:00AM and drive for 4 hours. Have my saxophone lesson at 8:30AM until 10:00AM. I’d make it home by 2:30PM or 3:00PM with just enough time to be at work at 4:00PM. University of Idaho gave me a scholarship and I went to college there in saxophone performance. Then I went to the University of Washington and got my graduate degree in saxophone performance as well. There’s never been a plan B because if you have a plan B that’s what you’re going to end up doing. So, I’ve always just decided that music is number one. And I’ve always had odd jobs here and there but I’ve always had students and I’ve always been able to perform.  I’ve been lucky enough to perform with lots of big bands and small bands alike, especially in Seattle. Where were you raised? In southern Washington, in the Columbia Gorge. When I was in high school, my family moved to Wenatchee, Washington. I lived in Seattle for my graduate work.  I was there for ten years before I moved to New York City. Music’s been the thing, man. It’s been the driving force.  It’s been the safe haven in my life.  The constant.  The router. Were you raised in the Church? My mother was a convert to the church at age 18. My father wasn’t a member but we went to church every Sunday. And she taught us to pray, follow the commandments and she taught us to follow the Lord. When I was 9, my father finally converted.  When I was 11, we went to the temple which was really neat and we were all sealed together.  So, I grew up being very active in church and I loved it. I love the gospel. I knew it was true.  I’m a true believing Mormon. I’ve always had a strong testimony of my Savior and have just loved having a relationship with the Lord. Let’s switch gears for a minute and talk to you about being queer. Well, when I was 11 or so my Uncle Michael, my dad’s brother, came to my parents and said, “I have found the person of my dreams. We are going to have a commitment ceremony. His name is Tom. I love him very much.” And my parents said, “No, we can’t come to your commitment ceremony because we can’t support you in that. We love you no matter what you do but we can’t support your life style.” Later, my mom expressed that homosexuality was just bad and evil and against God, a very grievous sin – only second that to killing someone, I remember her saying.  Then, when I was 12, I was taught in Mia Maids to pray, to stay on your knees to feel the Spirit and that’s how you receive answers to prayers. So, that night I went home and prayed. I didn’t have anything special I was praying for. I just stayed on my knees to feel the Spirit and the awareness welled up within side of me that I was homosexual. I was so afraid and so shocked, dismayed. It was the worst thing that could happen and I was just like, no! no! no! no! no! no!  I shoved it into the deeps recesses of my body and there it stayed hidden until I was in college. A few people tried to bring it up with me in college, but I just couldn’t handle it. So, other people were seeing this? Oh, yeah. A lot of my classmates saw it. I just kept a lid on it as tight as I could.  I had no interest in dating boys. I was just a baby bull-dyke. I really was. I wore these giant combat boots. I had a leather jacket. I had camouflage pants and always wore men’s T-shirts. No, I was just full on a small dyke. I just couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see it at all. I just couldn’t or wouldn’t see it. I went on one double date when I was 16. I was like, “Oh, I’m 16. I can go on a date now.” So, I went on a double date. It was just lame. I even ended up making out with the other girl’s date who put the moves on me and I was like, “Oh, sure, this is just something that people do.”  The kiss…it was gross, disgusting, yuck. I didn’t like it at all. I wasn’t intrigued. I didn’t have any romantic interest in any boy ever. To this day I haven’t had romantic interest with any boy.  I’m almost 40. I’m a lesbian. Yeah, it’s true. It was in college that I really began to realize that I was falling in love with women. And the first woman that I fell in love with really, she was Catholic and she wouldn’t have it. I went and saw my bishop at home and said, “I think I’m gay.” And he said, “No, it’s not possible. In order for you to be gay one of your parents has to by gay. Obviously neither of your parents is gay because they had you and God would never do that to anyone. He wouldn’t create someone homosexual. No, not possible.”  So, I was even more confused. I went back to college and fell in love with another girl. Then began the crazy wicked battle back and forth: gay or straight, active in the church or not active in the church. So, I did the pray the gay away thing. I worked so hard. I went to the temple. I thought that would make me straight. I thought I could just have enough faith that the Lord would just take it away and that I could will myself into being what everyone else told me I needed to be. I just put myself through the ringer to the point I made myself sick. I had done everything I could think of to do. I convinced myself that I was going to marry a guy. I fasted. I prayed. I went to the temple. I received my endowment. Did everything I could think to do, and at a certain point I just realized that I was unhappy and broken from the struggle to make myself straight. As hard as I tried my homosexuality just wasn’t going to go away. I realized that at a New Year’s Eve dance at a Mormon church. It was just so pathetic. I was looking out at the dance floor at the guy that I had convinced myself that I was going to marry.  And he was dancing with someone else and I realized he had zero interested in me. And I thought to myself, “What am I doing here?” So, I prayed in that very moment and said, “Take this away from me.” The next day I went to my friends’ house where all of my lesbian friends from college were gathered. I knew they would all be hung over so I took over some eggs and potatoes to make everyone breakfast. That was the day I met the woman I would marry and spend the next seven years of my life.  We held a beautiful commitment ceremony two years after we started dating. It was an incredible seven years with her, even though I missed the church, the community, the spiritual nourishment. But eventually, I could no longer live in Seattle and be happy.  The jazz scene of New York City was calling my soul.  So we moved to NYC and she lasted 4 months till she was completely depressed and distressed. We both realized that she had no place in New York City and needed to return to Seattle.  I could no longer live in Seattle.  We had a long distance relationship for one year which completely unraveled in that time.  We tried to keep it together, but we needed such different things.  She needed to have children in Seattle and I needed to make music in New York, so we set each other free.  This was about five and a half years ago. That relationship must have been a great loss. How did you handle that? At the time, I was living with a Buddhist here in New York and he had this incredible library of Buddhist books. He practiced zazen or meditation every day; he taught me how to practice zazen too. We talked a lot about Zen and Buddhist precepts. I began to read these books and the Zen Buddhist approached really helped me embrace the suffering. My mom was also really sick with cancer at that time too. So, I started to redevelop my spiritual side through Zen Buddhism and through music. So, I just sunk deeper into music and my spirituality which was really powerful and wonderful. Buddhism is actually what brought me back to the church. How so? I was reading a book by Thích Nh?t H?nh, who is one of my favorites Zen Buddhist authors, called Living Buddha, Living Christ. In the book, he talks about the jewels of our traditions and how important it is to accept our own tradition. He says, “When we respect our blood ancestors and spiritual ancestors, we feel rooted. If we can find ways to cherish and develop our spiritual heritage we will avoid the kind of alienation that is destroying society and we will become whole again. We must encourage others, especially young people, to go back to their traditions and rediscover the jewels that are there. Learning to touch deeply the jewels of our own tradition will allow us to understand and appreciate the values of other traditions and this will benefit everyone.” And when I read this I was so struck knowing that I had to go back to my tradition, to my Mormon tradition. I was like, oh, crap! Really?  This information sat inside of me for about six months before I had the courage to go back to church, to be whole again, but I knew I had to do it. So, what were some of the first steps you took? I was always a tithing payer because as a musician you always need support. I’ve always had a firm foundation, a total testimony of tithing. I’ve paid my tithing since I declared myself a professional musician in 2003. You paid your tithing the entire time you weren’t going to church? To whatever ward you technically would have been in? Yeah, and I always had my files transferred to whatever ward I was supposed to be in. I would write the bishop a letter and say, “Hey look, I’m in your ward. You have my records. Do not contact me. Do not send the Relief Society after me. Do not send the missionaries after me but here’s my tithing.” And I’d tell the bishop I was gay and in a relationship. So, you actually meet with the Bishop and say, “Look I’m queer, I’m in your ward.  You’re going to get tithing but that’s all you are going to get from me”? Yeah, exactly. When I first got to New York, I had a bishop who tried to tell me I’d be happier if I was a wife and mother and I said, “You are not listening to my words. I am queer. I’m homo. I’m as homo as they get.” But then a couple of years later a new bishop was called. I just knew that cause the name on the tithing envelopes changed. I stopped by the church on Sundays and slipped my tithing envelopes under the bishop’s door. You go to the church house, fill out the slip and put it under the bishop’s door… I didn’t fill out the slips there. I would go in, grab some envelopes and some slips, slide my tithing under the door and get out of there as quickly as possible. Just like, in and out, boom. But, this particular Sunday I slipped it under the door and the bishop, the new bishop, pops his head out and is like, “You! Who are you? What are you doing? Where do you come from?” He was just so earnest, so curious. He wanted to talk: “I’m just really curious. Nobody pays their tithing who doesn’t come to church.” He was so befuddled and he was just so earnest. So, I make an appointment to meet with him and it also happens to be tithing settlement time. It turns out that this bishop is a saxophone player himself! So, we talked about music. We talked about me growing up in the church and being homosexual. And he said, “Well, look the door is open to you any time. Feel free to come to church and you can bring your girlfriend too.” Yeah, I was so shocked. I was like, What??? You just said I could bring my girlfriend to church? Did they change the Bishop’s Handbook? What’s going on? What happened?  It’s been 9 years since I’ve attended church and this guy is inviting me to bring my girlfriend to church. I knew at that point it was time to go back to church. I was going to honor my tradition. I went back to church. The very first Sunday back was fast and testimony, the very first Sunday of the new year (2011). I got up and bore my testimony to my congregation. I said I hadn’t attended the church for nine years but I’ve always known it was true. I just bore testimony that I know that Jesus is the Christ and that this is the restored gospel. I didn’t announce that I was homosexual. I think it was pretty obvious though. You know, I showed up with a tie and a button down shirt and nice slacks on. I bore my testimony and everyone was so kind and loving and I was like, okay this is cool. And I just began to work with my Bishop. I continued to practice zazen and I continued to read Buddhist books. I continued to practice mediation and mindful living but I slowly incorporated reading the scriptures, starting with the New Testament because I felt like I needed to get to know my Savior more. I began to pray more to Heavenly Father as opposed to just mediating or chanting. It only took about five or six months before the Lord showed me that I could totally incorporate my zazen and scripture reading. I still chant. I think it’s something really important that our culture doesn’t teach but it is a very strong tool and I chant what people would praise in church like: “Praise God,” “Thank you, Jesus,” “Thank you, Father in Heaven.” Just chant like that because it is very powerful. So, I still keep that in my personal practice. What benefits does chanting give you? It just opens up my chakras. It opens up all of my channels to feel the Spirit. It gives me groundedness and rootedness in a way that I’m able to feel the Spirit…in Buddhism they talk about “the mirror”. There is a mirror in our minds that reflects life and sometimes the mirror gets really dirty and we need to clean the mirror to see clearly. To be spirit-led, you have to constantly clean that mirror. This is a significant shift, from Buddhism to Christianity. What has that been like for you? Well my return to the Church came at the same time I was ending a relationship. My new freedom allowed me so much space to feel the Spirit, which is the awesome filler of everything, right? It just gave me more mental space, more spiritual space to be calm. It felt so good and the Lord just filled me with his spirit all the time. I was so happy. There were definitely hard, hard days. But I didn’t try and solve it. I didn’t try and fix it. I said – great, I’m just going to love whatever is going through me right now because that’s what the Lord would do and that’s what I’ve been practicing the past several years living my life. Buddhism isn’t a religion, it’s a philosophy. It’s a practice of life. I just put all of my Buddhist practice to work by going back to church. So, during this time that you are getting to know yourself what did you learn? What did you discover? Who’s Tina? I discovered that I really love more than anything to wake up alone and pray first thing. I don’t want to talk to anybody. I learned that I need a lot of alone time. I learned that I’ll put myself way on the back burner for the happiness of someone else and that can be really extreme for me. I don’t take care of myself. It just shows how horrible I am in relationships.  I really don’t need to be in a relationship to be happy is what I discovered and that actually I prefer to be single. That’s what I learned. It’s a happy coincidence that my preferring to be single lines up really with what the Church expects of me as homosexual, and perhaps a more faithful way of saying that is that God blesses me to feel this way. That’s what I think. The Great Creator can make us into whatever he wants of us. If we move ourselves in slightest right direction he will take it and he’ll magnify it for our good. I feel like I’ve been blessed to be at such peace about this. I have this incredible relationship with the Lord and with the Spirit. I’m just so peaceful. Peaceful! Joyful! I will take the gifts of the Spirit over the gifts of the flesh any day of the week.  I’m all about it. What do you think got you to that point? The Lord, I really do, without question. And also my desire to feel the Spirit got me to this point. My desire to know the truth.  My desire to align myself with the Lord’s will. My desire to not be afraid and say – hey, I’m a homosexual. I’m the big bad word. I was created this way.  It’s not an affliction. I was created this way. And I was given the ability not to be afraid of that any more. I reached out to my Stake President and told him I’m a homosexual and if he needs any help or advice on how to help other homosexuals I’m a resource. I’ve spoken to the Relief Society in my ward to share my mother’s faithful experience of how she came to accept me as a homosexual, my faith journey as a homosexual in the gospel, and how much that hurt and how much I had to get over to come back to church. If someone has a question, let’s talk about it and to use the word homosexual . I’ve also joined Affirmation which is the gay and lesbian bisexual transgender organization that’s not affiliated through the Church, but it is member organized and run.  So, now I’m deeply involved the outreach and membership of that work. What have been the challenges for you in this work? I think the biggest challenge is when people question why I’m celibate and they act as if it’s a just phase. Or that I’m hiding behind the Church in a way that makes me less authentic. Or when my gay friends are like, “What are you doing hanging with the Mormons?” So, that’s hard. That’s actually lessening up now. I think the hardest part is when my gay friends question my happiness. When they can’t believe that I’m happy and joyful. Even though they meet me and see that I’m a happy person, they can’t believe that God would ever support a person being happy in being celibate. Everyone just assumes that you can’t be happy unless you are in a relationship and that maybe that is true for some people, I just feel better not being in a relationship. What have been the blessings as you returned to the Church? My mind is more sharp and more clear about what I want to do. It is evident to me that in the past two years God has been directing and guiding my footsteps. I’m blessed with a peace. When I read the scriptures, I’m given revelation on what the Lord wants me to do. I am given the courage and the confidence and the strength to live my life. The Lord has also changed me physically and mentally to be able to do this. I can go to the temple now. I can go to the temple and do the work for my ancestors, which is just such an amazing blessing and get help from the other side. I have full access to all the mysteries of the kingdom of God. If that isn’t a blessing, there isn’t one. I have the reassurance given through the Holy Ghost. I live an abundant life. The blessing of knowing that at any moment I have access to divine energy is just awesome.  I know who I am now. I know who I am. I’ll tell you what – one of the biggest blessings is saying, “I’m a homosexual and I’m a daughter of God. The Lord loves me and there’s a work to be done, brother and sisters. There’s a mighty, mighty work to be done and it’s called building up Zion.” To be able to build up Zion like this and strengthen other people who have had such pain caused from being homosexual is joy and fulfillment in my life. Sometimes it’s very stressful and I get bombarded with emails or things I need to do but it’s such a blessing to know what to do with my life. To have meaning in my life. To know where to put my time and my energy and to be directed in every step is the best blessing that anybody could ever want. Is there anything else that you would want the women reading your story to know? If we try to live up to some ridiculous idea of perfection we totally miss grace, we completely miss grace. Grace is something we need to embrace; the Lord knows us, and He doesn’t want us to be like everyone else. He didn’t make us to be like everyone else. We’re all individuals and he needs us to do his work to build up Zion to strengthen and edify each other. We are all part of the same body but if the body is walking around with the knee thinking it’s supposed to be the nose or the head thinking it’s supposed to be the shoulder… You can’t do your job if you think you are supposed to be something else. Just find out who you are in the Lord and make your space in the Church. I do want to close with saying that I know that the church is true and I know that Jesus Christ is the son of God. And that the restoration of the gospel is the truth and if we seek the truth it will be made known. If we ask, we’ll have the answers. All the answers are available. Even though they aren’t always clear we will get the answer. I say these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Name: Kris Wright Area of Specialty: I research and write about Mormon women’s history, particularly their participation in Mormon healing rituals as well as the material aspects of ritual life.   One of my favorite resources for learning about Mormon women’s history is a book entitled 4 Zinas: A Story of Mothers and Daughters on the Mormon Frontier by Martha Sonntag Bradley and Mary Brown Firmage Woodward. It was published by Signature Books in 2000, and while it is sadly out of print, the entire text can be found at the publisher’s website, making it widely available. 4 Zinas is the matrilineal biography of four generations of Mormon women. It begins with Zina Baker Huntington who converted to Mormonism in New York in 1835, her daughter Zina D.H, Young who married both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and served as the church’s general Relief Society president. We are then introduced to Zina Diantha’s daughter with Brigham Young, Zina Young Card, who along with her husband, Charles Ora Card, participated in the founding of Cardston, Alberta and finally Zina Card Brown who was married to Apostle Hugh B. Brown. Although their husbands are perhaps more well-known names amongst Church members, their story should also be considered vital to understanding Mormon history. While this book tells the story of four women, it illuminates the sweep of Mormon history from the earliest converts through much of the 20th century. It sheds light on the milieu of early Mormons and their conversion experience, the difficulties of implementing polygamy during the Nauvoo period, Mormon migration and colonization, as well as suffrage and correlation. It is a compelling read, told vividly through the use of an extensive collection of family papers including letters, diaries and reminiscences, which allows readers to become intimately acquainted with these four women while remaining grounded in historical evidence. Zina D.H. Young is one of my favorite actors on the stage of Mormon history – her story is both inspiring and challenging. She has been praised for her obedience and sacrifice, for her generosity and compassion, for her hard work and soft heart. The authors of 4 Zinas note that: If Zina Diantha were to recount to her daughter stories of what it meant to be female in nineteenth-century Utah, she would tell about cooking and childbearing, menstruation and pregnancy, gods and heroes, angels and devils. She would tell stories about the land and the sky, of the trail west, of Illinois and Missouri—stories of snakes and spiders, horses and cows. Zina would tell her about dressing and undressing; about herself, her mother, and her sister; about grieving and laughing; about healing with herbs and faith; stories about who she was, where she came from, who she was supposed to be. Through the words she used and the images she spun, she would capture what life was and was not. But most of what she told would not be of the traditional history of great men. (Bradley, Martha Sonntag and Mary Brown Firmage Woodward, 4 Zinas: A Story of Mothers and Daughters on the Mormon Frontier.Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2000, 485.) Because I got to know these women, my youngest daughter is named Zina. Her name is a reminder of both the blessings and costs of a faith-based life. When I brought her to church as a newborn, so many members of my ward asked about her name, thinking it was so unusual and wondering where it came from. This struck me as a tragedy — that so many Latter-day Saints were completely unaware of the rich legacy of the name Zina within the LDS Church. I hope that one day, her name will be familiar to many church members. As we learn and tell their stories more frequently, we can better understand the importance of our Mormon foremothers. ** The Zina Card Brown Family Collection has been digitized and is available through the Church History Library Catalog

Name: Carol Cornwall Madsen Title: Professor Emeritus, History, Brigham Young University and Smith Institute for LDS Church HistoryAuthor of “ Advocate for Women: The Public Life of Emmeline B. Wells, 1870-1920 ” (2006)Author of forthcoming “Woman Triumphant, The Life and Thought of Emmeline B. Wells” (Summer 2015) I can think of no better source than the Woman’s Exponent for the Relief Society sermons by general RS presidents, commentary by readers on women’s issues or their own experiences, statements from life sketches by various women, and editorials by two forward-thinking women, Louisa Greene Richards and Emmeline Wells. Certainly, it has been my primary source in writing about Emmeline Wells, but also in providing context and source material for nearly every other subject dealing with early Mormon women about which I have written over the years. The Woman’s Exponent is available online from BYU and I presume the LDS Church Archives and also in both microfilm and hard copy at the LDS Church Library.

Name: Emily W. Jensen Title: Writer/Editor/Blogger and social media manager for Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought I enjoy learning about our Mormon foremothers in whichever place I can find it (because there is never enough!), be it academic conferences, women’s evenings, books, articles, and well-written blog posts. You’d be surprised how many wonderful online resources there are to be found.Blog posts are especially meaningful because I love the idea of women sitting to type about their ancestors or someone they admire without any agenda except to share what they find with the online world. A few examples of blogs that post often about women are Juvenile Instructor , Keepapitchinin ,  LDS Women’s History ,  Scholaristas , Feminist Mormon Housewives , and The Exponent

" The purpose of the Relief Society Magazine , which began in 1914, was to unite LDS women in a bond of common interest, to educate, and enlighten as well as to be an outlet for Mormon women’s own writing. It was the official publication of the Relief Society organization for 57 years until 1970. The Relief Society minutes of October 1, 1914 state that the magazine will consist of literary, artistic, and practical articles, designed to improve our minds and beautify our homes. It also published fiction, poetry, and plays written by Mormon women. The contents were modified over time to meet changing circumstances. The Index to the Relief Society Magazine includes the major standard categories of material: Lessons, Articles, Fiction, Poetry, Plays, Editorials, Recipes, Notes from the Field (ward and stake RS information), Happenings (about individuals), Images, and Advertisements. " Explore the BYU Library

" Eliza R. Snow, second general president of the Relief Society of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was a prolific speaker and the most influential Latter-day Saint woman of her time. She taught religious doctrine, emphasized practical principles, shared her political opinions, and conveyed love and encouragement for church members in nearly twelve hundred discourses given from 1840 to 1887 in western Illinois and throughout Utah and Idaho territories. Her discourses, captured by scores of secretaries, clerks, and editors in hundreds of record books and newspaper articles, are gathered and published together here for the first time." Read more at The Church Historian Press

Daughters in My Kingdom is a book published in 2011 by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that details the history and purpose of the Relief Society, a women's organization . It emphasizes the divine identity of women as daughters of God, their essential roles in the Church, and their responsibility to strengthen families.  Read the full book