As the Taylorsville Utah Temple groundbreaking began on Halloween morning, the sun was just rising, warming the backs of the handful of attendees. It was a beautiful, crisp October day, complete with blue skies and a few Canada geese flying overhead. People who lived nearby perched on backyard shed roofs to view the proceedings or watched through the chain link fences from a distance as the freeway traffic roared by on one end of the field.

Shortly after I was born, I was baptized as a Catholic. Even though my parents weren’t practicing members of the Catholic church, they still had some belief in God and felt it was the right thing to do.

“I knew in whom I had trusted, and with the fire of Israel’s God burning in my bosom, I forsook my home.” So wrote Jane C. Robinson Hindley, who was one of about 90,000 European converts who gathered to an American Zion in the mid-19th century.

To My Relief Society President, This is a very hard letter for me to write. The desire and need to confide in you has been bouncing around in my head for a while and I can’t ignore it any longer. This has been a trying year for me. Actually, it has been one of the hardest of my life and yet also the most spiritual and comforting. I found out at the beginning of this year that my husband has struggled with an addiction to pornography since he was a teenager. There were long periods of sobriety, sometimes years long and many bishops and feelings of “I’ve got this.” He would continually follow his priesthood leader’s guidance to “study your scriptures more, pray more and attend the temple more,” in an effort to conquer this trial. He first told me about his “problem” a year or two into our marriage, but it wasn’t until earlier this year that we recognized this “problem” as an actual addiction – not because of the intensity and escalations [a common symptom of addiction], but rather due to the cycles [unhealthy, repeated patterns can also be symptoms of addiction]. Once we started treating it as an addiction, or an illness, then we both began to heal and recover.

We’re just coming off a spiritual high from General Conference weekend. And sometimes, despite our best efforts, this weekend isn’t always the relaxing, sit-in-front-of-the-TV and let-the-rays-from-heaven-pour-upon-you kind of weekend. There’s fitting in Saturday’s errands and activities, getting family members together, learning to bake rolls as good as Grandma's once were, and trying to take notes and ponder on all the words of wisdom you receive. In short, it's sometimes exhausting! But here at Magnify, we’re focusing on the joyful messages we heard and reflecting on the glimmers that came through.

Helmuth was a 16-year-old boy who, after gaining access to British radio channels, became convinced that he had to do something—anything—to stop Adolf Hitler. As the secretary for his local Latter-day Saint congregation,

Perhaps one of the most discouraging struggles women endure is that never-ending battle with our own bodies. A woman’s attitude toward her own body is fraught with misconceptions fueled by a world that celebrates an almost prepubescent female body as the ideal norm. Unfortunately for most of us, time moves on. We are no longer seventeen, a number of children have made their way through our birth canals, and gravity is exerting its inexorable pull. Whenever we look in the mirror, we are reminded of what we are not. Satan would have it just that way. He would have us think that because our bodies do not look a certain, supposedly desirable, way, they are not worth having at all. Thus, we enter into a war with our bodies, hating the very tabernacle our Father has given us, despising the flesh. If Satan can get us to fixate on our bodies, either in vanity or self-loathing, then he has caused us to misunderstand completely the role our bodies play in our salvation.

Acts 10-14; 15:1-35

Dear Dave,