Buy Alex Boye's patriotic album, Calling America, here.

Jason F. Wright, a Mormon New York Times best-selling author, decided to give a classroom of children and their teachers a big surprise. One of his biggest fans, Zack, and his class were reading one of his books. After being asked by the teachers of Monroe Elementary School to Skype and talk with a classroom of children about being a writer, he decided it would be more fun and fulfilling to give them a surprise and actually show up at their school.

The first time I saw the scars on my younger sister’s wrists from where she had been cutting herself, I started crying. A wave of guilt came over me. I had been living away from my family for school, and came home for a visit during the summer. As a protective big sister, I felt like if I had only lived at home, I could have cheered her up enough to beat her depression. I also felt terrible for thinking that her diagnosis of depression several years earlier was just something she could “shake off” or “snap out of”.

I can’t recall any LDS funeral, regardless of where it was held, that did not include something that could be called a “plan of salvation” talk. A very, very few of these may have been given by members of bishoprics, but every such talk I can actually recall individually has been given by a family member, or by someone asked earlier to do that by the deceased herself, or by a general authority invited to speak because of a personal relationship with the family or the deceased. Some have been more eloquent than others. Honestly, I can’t remember a single one that has been inappropriate in any way, or was not personal to the deceased (i.e., something like “Your father was a good man. Among the good he did in this life was x, y, and z. Our knowledge of the plan of salvation suggestions that your father was met at the veil by … and may even now be engaging in … and in time to come will rise from the grave to do …”)