Segullah Journal

Film Review During an early scene in the documentary, Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons, Darius Aidan Gray sums up the line he’s walked since he joined the LDS Church in the early sixties, years before he was eligible to hold the priesthood: “I am a proud black man … yet I embraced [...]

Co-Winner, Heather Campbell Personal Essay Contest A STEALTH SNOWFALL has coated the world overnight and muted the usual traffic noises, allowing us to sleep in a bit too late on a Sunday morning. My three sons bring news of the snow as they pile into our bed and climb over us to open the blinds. We [...]

SOMETIMES I LOOK AT MY HUSBAND and I think about him dying. I really don’t want to think about such a thing, but the thought crosses my mind a few times a week. I can be driving to the grocery store when I pass a tree with a big yellow ribbon tied around its trunk, and [...]

First Place Winner, Poetry Contest Luke 1:25 Thus hath the Lord dealt with me in the days wherein he looked on me, to take away my reproach among men. He wrote, “My prayer was heard!” I thought,       Which one? Can faithless prayer be answered? Or do old prayers carry old faith’s fervency, like remnant [...]

I CLUTCHED THE METAL sidebar of the hospital bed and dug my nails into the cold steel. My body posed rigidly as each contraction swelled and crashed over me like the surf at high tide. Sweat poured down my back. It left a salty pool above my lip, which I bit to stifle a groan. Bile [...]

MY BREASTS ACHED WITH THE TENDERNESS of sudden milk, and my first baby—my Chloe—stirred in my arms. Our bishop was over for a visit, and I felt tired. And frazzled. And overwhelmed by unfamiliar motherhood. He knew this and reassured me with a pat on the shoulder that he would hold off in giving me [...]

“ . . . and the APs will put your passport in the safe.” My first evening in the mission home, I was introduced to so many new rules, inspirational thoughts, pieces of advice, and types of raw fish that I hardly heard this. In fact, by the time I left for the chilly reaches [...]

AN ENORMOUS PLATE OF RICE sat in front of me, a mountain of rice, rice mixed with peas, an unidentifiable meat, and . . . ants? Yes, ants, the ants that marched many by many in Guayaquil, Ecuador. My food had already been blessed, but I blessed it again, fervently: ”Heavenly Father, I’m a missionary [...]

They cut desire into short lengths And fed it to the hungry fires of courage. Long after, when the flames died, Molten gold gleamed in the ashes; They gathered it into bruised palms And handed it to their children And their children’s children.1 “This is what the Lord has been preparing you for,” said the [...]

I FOUND OUT my husband was sleeping with another woman by doing my laundry. The proof was in the pockets of his work pants—the ones he wears Monday and Tuesday, I wash on Wednesday, and are clean and dry in his wardrobe by Thursday. Well, I WOULD have found it. If he’d been having an [...]