Is God’s love ‘unconditional’? What the scriptures teach about feeling His presence

The following story originally ran on LDS Living in June 2016 but has been updated to celebrate the last year of the Mormon Miracle Pageant.

Tan France, fashion expert for the wildly popular Netflix series Queer Eye, spoke to a sold-out audience in Salt Lake City on June 12. The purpose of the event was to discuss his New York Times best-selling memoir, Naturally Tan, but he also took the opportunity to encourage love and tolerance between the religious and LGBTQ communities.

From Luke's inspired description, we begin to comprehend that the Savior's anguish and suffering was unrelenting. In fact, it increased and increased— more pressure, more torture, more agony. "And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly" (Luke 22:44). Here the Savior of the universe teaches us through his experience that all prayers are not alike, nor are they expected to be. A greater need, a more intense life circumstance, calls forth from us more earnest, faith-filled petition and pleading.

It's an unlikely conversion story. Calyann Barnett initially wanted a Book of Mormon so she "could argue with me and prove me wrong about religion," Latter-day Saint Clarke Miyasaki posted on Instagram. Barnett added, "When I made my list of things I would NEVER do last year—believe in Jesus, join a religion, and get baptized as a Mormon—were at the top spots on that list."

Ardis E. Parshall became tearful as she walked across the cemetery lawn to see the new monument honoring William and Marie Graves. Although she knew their story, it was like she was meeting them in person for the first time.

As part of the Church's Special Witnesses of Christ series, Elder Gerrit W. Gong and Elder Ulisses S. Soares share their testimonies of God's love, covenant belonging, loving one another, temples, and peace.

While we have no way of definitively knowing the identity of the angel who visited Jesus in Gethsemane, here are some fascinating insights from Andrew Skinner's book Gethsemane.

I often overhear people talking about their fears of being more than one thing. One side of the conversation regularly goes something like this: “I can’t be both _____________ and a member of the Church.” And if they’re not saying it about themselves, they’re talking about somebody else. Sometimes it comes in the form of a question: “Can you be gay and still be a member of the Church?”

Hanna Barrott, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Ooltewah, Tennessee, has a condition called lamellar ichthyosis. Defined by firstskinfoundation.org, ichthyosis is “a family of genetic skin disorders characterized by dry, scaling skin that may be thickened or very thin and sheds as a result.”