The Very Best Gift to Give and to Receive

A dear friend of mine’s husband was recently diagnosed with brain cancer. The terminal kind. The life-changing your-time-together-now-has-a-deadline kind. I found myself desperately racking my brain for how to best help her. Clean her house? Watch her kids? Pray? Yes, yes and yes, but would be the MOST meaningful gift to offer? Also, when I see my husband going through a rough patch, I’ve often asked myself, “How can I be of best service to him here? What can I say? What can I do?” As fellow humans, we all at some point come upon hard times. Eventually, we all… Read More

Spiritual Sunday: Am I a Success?

Happy Sunday everyone! This month for my spiritual Sunday post, I’m going to re-post something I wrote for lds.org that got published a week or so ago. When I submitted the article I called it, “Am I a Success?” In publishing it was changed to “How I Learned My Worth Isn’t Measured By Checklists” which is totally fine since admittedly my title-writing skills are mediocre at best. I’ll just say that this article deals with measuring success. I discuss measuring worth in this article (note: our worth is innate and not dependent on our measurement of it). That said, here’s… Read More

Spiritual Sunday: Why Do I Need Jesus?

Happy Easter dear readers. My thoughts today have been on the question: why do I need Jesus?  Not, why do YOU need Jesus, but why do I need Jesus.  This isn’t an essay to convince you to accept Christ (that essay would look very different), but rather to boil down what purpose He serves to me that I can’t find elsewhere. Which is a little difficult to test since I don’t have a control group of me without ever knowing Christ. So our starting point is the FAITH I’ve already gained in Him, which is may be a bit of a… Read More

Spiritual Sunday: Family Council Meetings

family council meeting

The Beginner’s Guide to Family Council Meetings. Happy Sunday everyone. So I guest posted on the lds.org website last month all about family council meetings.  Family council meetings are particularly relevant and so, so helpful for marriages so I’m going to re-post it here for my monthly Spiritual Sunday post. Even though it is on the lds.org site, the advice certainly isn’t LDS specific.  Family council meetings don’t discriminate- they welcome all 😉 But first a break down of some Mormon lingo for those of you not accustomed- every six months our church holds a general conference where our prophet… Read More

How to Pray in a Way God Can Answer

How to Pray in a Way God Can Answer

Ever wonder why we don’t always get what we pray for?  It could be because we’re asking for the wrong things. Time for another Spiritual Sunday post! Again coming at you on a Wednesday.  Spiritual Sunday does what it wants. I wrote an article for LDS.org that went live last week.  It was all pretty exciting stuff- I’ve never had something I’ve written reach so many people (55,000 likes so far on the Church’s Facebook page- crazy!).  If I had to have one thing I write be so far spread, I’m glad it was about something as powerful and uplifting… Read More