Personal

On December 1, 2013, software executive and pilot Dale Smith took off with his son, Daniel, Daniel’s wife Sheree, his daughter, Amber, and her fiance, Jonathan. He was flying the group home from Thanksgiving celebrations when disaster struck. After reporting engine troubles, he was directed to land at a remote Idaho airstrip. The plane never arrived. The official search for …

It really was an ugly little tree. Its faded green branches shed pine needles like flaky skin, and it had absolutely no trunk to speak of. My roommates had gotten it from the lot right across from our apartment complex. I hadn’t even known that a tree lot existed there. The tree was placed in a white mixing bowl with …

My wife, Cathy, and I returned this past summer after serving for three years in the California Fresno Mission.  It was a life changing experience.  As a mission president I was asked many questions by the missionaries.  There were three questions, however, that were the most frequently asked, with the first question being by far the most common. Question #1: …

Last week I was not even close to being in the mindset to serve a mission. Then, everything changed. Every able young man in the LDS church is asked to serve a mission. I never wanted to. I made choices that kept it from being an option. It was never something I planned on doing. Especially not now. I figured …

When I was in high school, my most influential teacher once said, “Great writers don’t write for money. They write because they have something to say.” It’s stuck with me, and now that writing has become my career and continued to be my passion, I constantly ask myself: “If I only had one chance to express my feelings, if this …

CAMDEN, N.J. — A piece of Camden’s criminal past is making way for a more righteous future. The former home of Milton Milan, a mayor who went from City Hall to federal prison in December 2000, will be razed to provide parking for a planned Mormon church in East Camden. The meeting house is set to rise on an adjacent …

I can remember it like it was yesterday.  It was August 2000 and I had just bought a cabin in Idaho and I was working on it with my dad before I had to go a City Council meeting for a project in Rexburg.  My wife called and when I answered I could hear the fear in her voice. She …

Motherhood was something I never sought after growing up in the culture that I did. I was adamant that we would not have a baby until at least two years after Ben and I got married, and he agreed. I never grew up around kids or in a big family so it was never an urgent passion of mine, and …

I recently took a fall.  Isn’t it interesting how we construct that statement? I took a fall. Kind of like I took a trip or I took a journey. I took a fall. And in many ways, my last fall was a type of journey. It started with only a split second, the  knowledge that I had stepped on  snow-covered …