Sheri Dew is an inspiration to many, particularly we ladies who wonder how to navigate a Church whose culture seems to value achievements other than the ones we have attained.

In this new book, Worth the Wrestle, Sheri Dew speaks of the need we so often have to truly wrestle to know God and His will for us. Sheri Dew is often asked questions as a prominent Mormon woman, one whose unmarried and childless status invites questions married mothers might not be asked:

• How do I know if I’m receiving revelation?
• Will the Lord forgive me after what I’ve done?
• Why can’t we seem to get ahead financially even though we faithfully pay our tithing?
• What if the Church’s position on gay marriage bothers me?
• Will I be able to provide for my family?
• Why can’t I find ‘the one’?

Sheri writes, “May I answer these questions, and any questions you may have, by posing a different question: Are you willing to engage in the wrestle? In an ongoing spiritual wrestle?”

Sheri does not provide answers to these questions, even after describing the struggle she or others have engaged in to reach peace. Where someone like me might scream from the rooftops regarding the meaning of certain Mormon doctrines, Sheri knows that her status as “an authority” would cause some to push the “I believe in Sheri” button. And she knows we need our own wrestle with God, not merely accept answers we might infer from the printed version of her understanding. We need to ask our own questions (Questions are Good) and engage in the dialogue with God that provides answers.

Let me relate three elements of the book, seen through the lens of my experience.

Sheri relates a challenge she faced in her youth. In her case, a college course exposed her to a fundamentalist woman, and Sheri realized she did not know enough to counter the woman’s claims that plural marriage remained a commandment of God for the Mormon people. In my life, the most similar challenge was reading a book written by my great-uncle, Sam Taylor, which laid out Nauvoo “polygamy” in a manner that destroyed my youthful faith in the religion of my childhood.

Sheri speaks of one young lady who claimed to no longer believe. But this young lady allowed Sheri to work with her, to try to find her way again. As I read about this journey, I was reminded of a time when I told my visiting teachers that I wasn’t sure I had a testimony. I asked them to help me. In my case it wasn’t the rigorous dialogue described in this book, but it was these lovely women giving me a copy of a book by Elder Neal A. Maxwell discussing the City of Enoch. The support of these women strengthened me enough to commit to be a missionary for the Church. Yet I and others have seen those who went a different way when faced with doubt.

While I am now happily married and even a grandmother, there were many years when I despaired of anyone ever marrying the Mormon-half-Asian-engineer with dry skin that I am. Before I ever married, my grandmother even gifted me the wedding china she’d purchased years earlier, saying she wasn’t sure if I would ever marry. After I separated from my first husband due to his infidelity, physical abuse, and financial ruination, my greatest dread was returning to the “single scene.” Top this off with a spurned would-be lover who told my bishop and ex-husband and all single men in my future singles’ ward that I was an amazing lay (with fabricated and exotic details). I spent more years wondering if I might remain alone until the last day of the final resurrection (though my bishop suggested solitude might not be my most pressing concern, given the tales that had been told).

I can’t imagine Sheri ever having to deal with the more colorful of my past challenges, but I can vividly imagine her pain when an LDS authority figure insisted during a training event that “every woman is a mother.” I can imagine an alternate past where Sheri Dew asked to be released from her calling and added her voice to those decrying the patriarchal culture of the Church. But Sheri turned her pain around and discovered the truth in the phrase that had torn her soul, giving us her hard-won wisdom in an address to the General Relief Society, “Are we not all Mothers?” As Sheri said in October 2001:

Have you ever wondered why prophets have taught the doctrine of motherhood—and it is doctrine—again and again? I have. I have thought long and hard about the work of women of God. And I have wrestled with what the doctrine of motherhood means for all of us. This issue has driven me to my knees, to the scriptures, and to the temple—all of which teach an ennobling doctrine regarding our most crucial role as women.

Throughout this volume, Sheri expands her invitation, asking us to wrestle with what the doctrines of the restoration mean for us, inviting us to seek rather than give up, to find the ennobling doctrines underlying the matters that might initially cause us pain.

A delight of this book is the cover and internal illustrations by James C. Christensen, who passed away January 2017. I recognize myself in the overburdened traveler too laden to grasp the iron rod, as well as the other whimsical characters who grace the pages of this book. I like to imagine James reading Sheri’s manuscript and sketching out images to be inserted every few pages, bending over the illustrations with Sheri during his final bout with cancer. At least the images seem too pertinent to the text to have merely been lifted from James Christensen’s lifelong body of work.

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For those not familiar with Sheri Dew, she is a native of Ulysses, Kansas, and a graduate of Brigham Young University. She has written a number of books, including biographies of LDS Presidents Gordon B. Hinckley and Ezra Taft Benson. From 1997 to 2002 Sheri Dew served as Second Counselor in the Relief Society General Presidency. Since March 2002, Sheri Dew has served as the Chief Executive Officer of Deseret Book Company. She also now serves as an executive vice-president of Deseret Management Corporation.

Available: April 1

If you pre-order Worth the Wrestle, you will also get the audio download of “Amazed by Grace” by Sheri Dew for free. The order link (for those who don’t like clicking on unseen links) is:

https://deseretbook.com/p/worth-the-wrestle