As I’ve finally begun to feel accustomed to the ill-fitting costume of adulthood, I’ve noticed a new vulnerability to a kind of pessimism that has never tempted me before. Having spent the first 25 years of my life dreaming and expecting, I have come to the point where the dreams and expectations must be realized or discarded forever. You can guess which of those two outcomes is the more frequent.

I’ve never been a big dreamer. For whatever reason, one of the very most important dreams in my life is a house on a large, flat lot, enclosed somewhere among some mature trees and shrubs.

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Submitted by Amira

The LDS Church’s missionary program is quite different from other Evangelical Christians’ missionary work. One major difference is that entire families will often go to various parts of the world to do missionary work of all types. I’ve had a chance to meet some of these missionary families, especially in Israel and Kyrgyzstan, and they do some good work. We don’t do anything like this and haven’t for a long time (I can only think of a few examples in early Church history). Mission presidents might count, but it’s not quite the same thing.

As I’ve traveled in the Middle East and Central Asia, areas where there are very few Church members, I’ve seen the value of expatriate LDS families living in these places.

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Music, like smells, can invoke memories and bring you back to a different place and time. I want to talk (type?) specifically about hymns that do that.

“Called to Serve” is an obvious one for mission memories, but for me, it brings me back to my pre-mission days. On Sunday evenings, my BYU ward (as seems to be tradition in all BYU wards) would gather in the apartment building lobby for ward prayer (consisting of a hymn, scripture, and prayer). It was a vaguely enjoyable 15 minutes. If I remember correctly, almost half the time the hymn “Called to Serve” would be selected.

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The Salt Lake Tribune continues its interesting look into the numbers that define LDS church membership and growth today, with a look at “lost members.” The story reports on a large number of Utahn Saints that have fallen between the cracks, and cannot be located. All told, the list contains around 180,000 people, or roughly the population of Salt Lake City. The story allows Elder Merrill Bateman a chance to explain the statistics, which he does very candidly:

We really don’t give up on people. As long as they have not asked to have their names taken off the rolls of the church, we have a responsibility toward them and believe in time . . . we will be an influence to help them find their way back.

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Elise Soukup works as an Assistant Editor for Newsweek Magazine. She recently authored a cover story on the LDS Church and Joseph Smith for the magazine, titled
Mormon Odyssey. You can buy the issue at newstands everywhere. Elise is an active member of the Church, and lives in Manhattan.

First of all, congratulations on such a visible accomplishment in journalism. How did it feel to find out you’d be writing the Newsweek cover, and have things gotten any busier since then?

Thank you very much. I can say that this has been a particularly crazy week; I’m not usually scheduling my day around radio–and Mormon blog–interviews.

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