Latter-day Saint Insights - Need a lightbulb moment?

Building the Courage to Stand Alone

In 2011, Thomas S. Monson counseled us all to “dare to stand alone.” What can we learn from his words 15 years later? My high school in San Diego, California, had nearly two thousand students. Around 15 of those were members of the Church, including my brothers and me. Throughout...

What We Ought to Know About Eternity

What does the gospel of Jesus Christ teach us about our life’s purpose and eternal destiny? Familial bonds don’t end with mortality. There are millions of pop culture portrayals of the afterlife and speculations about what it’s like. For instance, I recently watched a movie with a depiction of an...

Faithfully Acting on Revelation

Faith is what allows us to hear the Lord’s voice and act on his will. I packed my backpack for the first day of class after changing my major for the third time. I felt excited to begin the semester, convinced I had finally found my calling. However, as the...

A Gift More Precious Than Rubies

Despite its miraculous origins and exquisite teachings, we sometimes forget how important the Book of Mormon is in our lives. What is it worth to you? One way to realize how much we value something is to remove it from our lives. President Russell M. Nelson encourages us to engage...

Start Where You Are

Being a disciple of Christ doesn’t need to be complicated, and it doesn’t come with a list of prerequisites. In his October 2015 general conference talk, “It Works Wonderfully!,” President Dieter F. Uchtdorf emphasizes the Savior’s grace in the journey of discipleship. He asks us to consider whether we are...

When Friends Leave the Church

When your friends leave the Church, you don’t have to leave them. Read these five tips for maintaining great relationships with friends who are no longer Latter-day Saints. Several of my friends have recently left the Church. Even though I love and care about them, I have really struggled to...

Uprooting Negative Body Image

Seeing ourselves as God sees us can improve our “body image resilience” in an objectifying world. We’ve all been there. We’ve all looked in the mirror and found things we disliked about our bodies, be it our height, weight, hair, glasses, braces, or acne. We’ve wondered why our appearance isn’t...

Improving Your Family by Improving Yourself

Happy marriages and families don’t happen overnight. They’re built through personal daily acts of compassion, selflessness, and love. Marriage isn’t easy, and families aren’t perfect, no matter how much we wish they were. Although we like to believe that family life will always be blissful, that’s not how life—or marriage—works. Difficulties...

Joseph Smith’s Seer Stones: Coming to Grips with Troubling Information in Church History

Paradigm shifts can rock our world, but they can also bring greater understanding. Before 1697, Westerners believed the idiom “all swans are white.” But when a Dutch explorer discovered a black swan in Australia, his discovery “instantly demolished an apparent reality while also enabling a new, more informed state of...

From Imposter to Imperfect

We can easily fall prey to imposter syndrome, but Christ can show us that perfection is more than we think. Starting a new job, going to a new school, or even returning to daily life after a vacation can make someone feel like an imposter in their own life. Personally,...

He Will Heal Us

Even though we may have suffered the damaging effects of abuse, our spirits can be lifted and healed and our burdens can be removed when we rely on the Savior. Many of the challenges we face in this fallen world arise not from our own mistakes but from the mistakes...