Real Life in Jesus Christ's Church

I have felt anxious about  tests, job interviews, parent/teacher conferences, going to the bedside of very ill family, driving in bad weather, even going to lunch with friends. This event-related, temporary anxiety is beneficial. It has helped me focus on the task at hand, avoid dangerous situations, recognize others’ needs, prepare well for presentations, ask for help, and be motivated to act in ways that minimize unpleasant consequences.  Anxiousness turns into a medical problem  “when it extends beyond logical worry in an unreasonable, unwarranted, uncontrollable way. Situations that should elicit no negative emotions all of a sudden seem life-threatening or crushingly  embarrassing .” A nxiousness becomes a mental disorder if hangs around after the test, interview, conference, visit, weather, or lunch is over. Like winter snowstorms, anxiety can accumulate as snowflakes, piling anxiety upon anxiety until there is no place to shovel it away to clear an em...

When I was eleven, my maternal grandparents David F. and Emma Geneva Huish Haymore who lived in Arizona came for a visit to our home in Salt Lake City. One evening Granddaddy asked me if I would like to go to General Conference with him the next day. He told me he had been asked to give one of the prayers. He showed me a letter notifying him that he was to pray and telling him that he could bring one person with him. “Doesn’t Grandmother want to go?” I said. “No, he answered. “We think it would be a good opportunity for you.” And it was. I sat beside him on the front row in the Tabernacle. I felt honored but nervous as I sat under the kind and powerful gaze of President David O. McKay.  October 2015 yielded an entirely different conference experience. A thousand miles from home some of our family—grandparents, parents, grandchildren—crowded into a hotel room to watch General Conference on a computer. Perhaps it was the closeness in physical proximity, the girls sat on one bed ...