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“The Family: A Proclamation to the World” contains only one direct quote from scripture:  “Children are an heritage of the Lord.” 

The word “heritage” stands out as somewhat unusual in current usage. Some translations use “gift,” while others use “inheritance.” The children themselves are the gift. Although the opportunity and responsibility of parenthood can feel daunting, the understanding of children as gifts from the Lord emphasizes both their divine origin and the blessings of bearing and raising them. 

As I have written previously, our society often emphasizes the challenges of rearing children. I can hardly consider myself an exception, since I am the author of an article on the challenges of raising a child with special needs. However, even as I acknowledge the challenges of parenthood, I believe that faith in the Lord and His teachings about the family calls us to recognize its blessings. I hope that such a focus can help change the narrative about raising children, giving those considering parenthood a fuller understanding of its rewards and demands. 

Not every interaction with children is pleasant. At times, children disobey, demand a great deal just when parents have no energy, and make it clear, both visibly and vocally, that they have not yet mastered basic manners and etiquette. It seems that whenever I start an in-depth or important conversation with my wife, at least two other voices immediately begin begging for our attention. These instances are trying, but they also provide important teaching opportunities. Finding the most effective way to teach my children is a rewarding challenge, like finishing an elaborate puzzle, but more satisfying. 

I recently read Psalm 127 to my sons, and I was struck by the final verses: “As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.” The language here is figurative. The image of arrows speaking with enemies could mean driving enemies away by force or threat—or, as my son said, “Speaking with them in ways they understand.” But I also see the enemies at the gate as more than rivals or thieves: they can represent the struggles of mortality. They include the perceived meaninglessness of life and frailty of human efforts that lead the writer of Ecclesiastes to remark that “all is vanity.” Children help us defeat these enemies because they are an eternal legacy. Our work with them extends beyond our lifetimes into the lives of our children and their descendants, and into eternity. The gospel gives us the promise of an eternal family, meaning that when we treasure our children, we are choosing “treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal” (Matthew 6:20). 

Another indirect blessing of raising children is an increased ability to prioritize. This clearer sense of priorities stems partly from the fact that raising children requires significant time. There simply isn’t as much time for other things. Although having less free time can be inconvenient, it also brings the compensatory blessing of a change in perspective that makes minutes and hours more valuable. 

Furthermore, raising children has led me to reflect on what is most meaningful. These reflections have given me the clarity I need to live deliberately. The changes I have made have been so meaningful that I ended a poem about my oldest son’s birth with the line “I have to wonder who gave life to whom.” At the same conference, I heard similar comments about prioritizing from my colleagues with children. They said that raising children has helped them eliminate less important things that previously used up their time. They expressed gratitude for the increased focus that comes with parenthood. 

One of the most important lessons I have learned from raising children is how much my spiritual growth depends on relationships. The growth, attributes, and strength that I seek spiritually do not come solely through personal effort or even solitary communion with God. It is in growing together that we follow the Savior. When challenges have pushed me to my limits, I have often found sustaining strength in family members. And increasingly, I find it in my children. Sometimes simply knowing that they trust in and depend on me is enough to sustain me. At other times, their pure faith and willingness to learn inspire me. 

The blessings of parenthood deserve more airtime. For me, paying attention to those blessings is not merely a matter of optimism but of faith in God, whose children we are raising. When we speak honestly about what raising children has given us, we offer those considering parenthood a fuller picture of the life they might choose. These blessings deserve a place in our public conversation as well as our private gratitude. 

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Before he bravely gave his life helping people escape the World Trade Center, Welles Crowther helped his father clean the fire truck. 

Welles’ mother remembered him going to the station on weekends with his father. Welles was small enough that he could get to parts of the truck that the adults could not. 

So he would come help shine up the truck for parades. The adults gave him meaningful work. And as a teenager, he trained to fight fires. 

Welles chose a career in equities trading. But on September 11, 2001, when the South Tower of the World Trade Center, where he worked, was hit, he got to work. He led strangers out of the building and helped the injured down the stairs. He carried one injured woman down several flights of stairs, then ran back upstairs to help others. 

He died when the tower collapsed on top of him. 

Those he helped rescue remembered that he carried a red bandanna, a habit he learned from his father.

Today marks the 25th anniversary of Welles Crowther’s sacrifice, and the sacrifices of hundreds of other heroes like him. His courage still moves me. But perhaps just as important as the hero he would become was that little boy at the firehouse.

A Person of Character

We usually discover heroes at the crucial moment of their heroic action. The danger arrives, they act, and we marvel. 

Who raised these kids, and how did they do it?

Talat Hamdani remembered her son Salman Hamdani as a 12-year-old. He brought sick pigeons home to nurse them back to health. As he grew older, that instinct turned into capability. He was trained as a New York City Police Department cadet, then decided to try to attend medical school. He began work as an EMT while he studied. Salman developed a habit of following up with the patients he brought to the hospital. 

On September 11, he was likely traveling to work on the elevated No. 7 train when he saw the burning towers. He never reported to work that day. Because he was a Pakistani Muslim, suspicions began to grow after he disappeared that morning. But those who knew him never wondered. Officials identified Salman’s body months later. He had gone to the North Tower, and he was found clutching his medical bag. 

A Child Who Has Something to Contribute

There is something important about children being given useful jobs among adults. The children can admire the work of the adults. They can discover that their contributions matter, that other people depend on them, and that becoming more capable will allow them to do more good. 

Each of these seemingly ordinary moments gives children an opportunity to care for others. 

But as parents, we can accidentally ignore or undermine those opportunities.

It is often faster to just do the job ourselves. Teaching a child how to do the dishes is, in my experience, more difficult than doing the dishes by several orders of magnitude. 

We may prioritize our children’s individual pursuits to a degree that leaves little room for the people and communities that need them. We may not ask a teenager to help us cook dinner for a neighbor recovering from surgery when doing so would upend the entire schedule. 

Or we may reach for rewards, giving children an answer to “What’s in it for me?” before they even ask, in turn denying children the opportunity simply to serve those around them. In a small experiment with 20-month-olds, children given material rewards for helping subsequently helped less when rewards stopped than did children who had received praise or no reward. Our incentives can sometimes interfere with a willingness already present. 

Heroism and Personal Fulfillment

So, with this in mind, how can we create a family and a culture (or perhaps even a society) that produces self-sacrificing heroes in an environment seemingly obsessed with personal fulfillment at the expense of everything else?

Even when we explain the reasons for sacrifice and service, we can keep the attention on the self. Volunteering can strengthen a college application. Generosity makes us feel better. Church will provide a good social environment. God will reward sacrifice with greater blessings.

Instead, we can cultivate the belief that another person’s need is itself a sufficient reason to act. We can explain to them why the tasks we give them matter, and they can watch us work alongside them. They can observe us keep our commitments when it is no longer in our own narrow self-interest.

Religious life is a particularly rich arena for children to learn this lesson. King Benjamin teaches that parents should teach children “to love one another, and to serve one another.” A congregation gives them people to practice with, including those who are inconvenient. It provides them with a community and obligations they can show up for. And it provides a structure for putting these lessons into practice.

We should expect our service to bring us joy. We should believe that God will bless us for our sacrifice. And we should learn to act for others without making those benefits the reason we act. “What do I get out of it?” cannot be the organizing question of a life that we hope could lead to the kind of heroism displayed by Welles and Salman. 

Ordinary Courage

Children need adults in their lives who model useful service that they can admire. Adults who have learned skills and use them to fulfill their responsibilities and to serve others. Welles had firefighting experience. Salman had medical training. They both had compassion, cultivated by thoughtful, purposeful, and loving parents, that caused them to put those skills to work.

Every single parent reading this article wishes that those two young men had come home that day. And thankfully, most of the service and sacrifice our children and we perform will go quietly, leave no public record, and end with us back with our families. 

On this anniversary, we can tell the stories of those who didn’t. Then we can turn to our own children and invite them into the work waiting around us, so that they can grow into the same kinds of people. 

Long before anyone knew that Welles Crowther was a hero, a boy went with his father to the firehouse, and the men there found a job for him to do. 

The post How Heroes Are Raised appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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In Disney’s “Up,” the quiet love story of Carl and Ellie captures the essence of fidelity and integrity within marriage. Their journey—from childhood friendship to lifelong partnership—is a testament to enduring love, mutual commitment, and shared values.

Integrity and fidelity are central to flourishing marriages. In fact, the virtues of integrity and fidelity were recently described by one research team as the “twin virtues” of marital commitment that represent not only sexual exclusivity but also emotional devotion, honesty, and accountability. The American Families of Faith project—a qualitative study exploring exemplary Christian, Jewish, and Muslim married couples across diverse races—sheds light on how these values are cultivated, sustained, and lived out in everyday life. 

Drawing on findings from this study, the present article explores how these racially and religiously diverse couples define and practice integrity and fidelity, offering four insights into how these principles strengthen their marriages.   

Integrity and Fidelity Matter in Marriage

For many American Families of Faith participants, fidelity involved more than refraining from extramarital relationships—it included emotional and spiritual unity. In “Up,” Carl and Ellie’s life together showed that fidelity encompasses more than sexual exclusivity—it also includes emotional devotion, honesty, and alignment in life’s core vision and goals. Their shared dream of visiting Paradise Falls, while never realized in the way they envisioned, symbolized their mutual commitment to one another.

 Similarly, Ron (pseudonyms are used to protect participant’s identity), a white Jewish husband from the American Families of Faith study, reflected on how honesty shaped his marriage:

I don’t hide anything from her, and that means that I can’t do anything that I need to hide from her, ’cause I won’t hide anything from her. … That influences every moment of my marriage. How many times a day [do I think], “Is this something I would not want to tell her?” … It’s really part of my consciousness all the time.

Sebastian, a Hispanic Christian husband, similarly emphasized the ripple effect of fidelity:

[One] thing that is very important in marriage is fidelity. When you’re not faithful, it doesn’t matter what [else] you can do or how sweet you can be or how loving you can be. … [If you are] cheating on your wife or vice versa, no matter what you do, it’s hard to put the pieces back together. For me, I have to know how to be faithful [while I’m] … at home and [when I am] not … at home. So, fidelity, integrity has a lot to do in the relationship of the couple. Also, in the relationship of the children, if they see [your faithfulness to each other], they will want to emulate the example, they will want to live it—because they will see that regardless of the challenges and problems, there was fidelity.

Integrity as a Core Marital Value

In their in-depth interviews, American Families of Faith participants repeatedly described integrity as essential to the health of their marriages. Beatriz, a Hispanic Christian wife, succinctly stated, “Loyalty, fidelity, integrity are key.”

Couples discussed a wide array of challenges related to stress in their work or personal lives, in-laws, conflict, parenting, illness, and even family deaths. However, their ability to navigate these hardships together demonstrated the resilience that fidelity helps foster. Idris, an African American Christian husband, said:

Character and integrity in a marriage is everything. [They are] … the most important source of strength [to our marriage]. ’Cause if you really don’t have that, you don’t really have a relationship. … You [could] just be an aimless wanderer [and] be blown in the wind anywhere when something comes along. When you have character and integrity in a relationship, then you’re trustworthy. Then your mate, your spouse, has no worries, no hang-ups about where you’re at, what you’re doing. …[T]rust is crucial in a relationship.

The Role of Religion in Teaching Fidelity and Integrity

For most of the wives and husbands interviewed, religious faith reportedly played a critical role in shaping their understanding of fidelity and integrity. Many couples, for example, emphasized that their religious beliefs and practices motivated them to remain faithful and honest with each other. Tanner, a white Orthodox Christian husband, explained how his faith helped him resist temptation. Discussing his job, he said, “I spend two weeks a month on the road. There are temptations out there that I’ve never succumbed to, and one of the reasons is my faith gives me the strength not to do that.”

Enoch, a white Presbyterian husband, elaborated on the promises he made with his wife:

We made vows to be a couple, to be true to each other, so I have a commitment to monogamy and fidelity. I think it would be easy to rationalize out of that if a person didn’t have some beliefs to base that on.

For other participants, fidelity was tied directly to accountability to God. Fu, a Chinese Christian husband, shared, “To keep your marriage holy is your responsibility to God; otherwise you are ashamed to face God. Betray[ing] your spouse is betraying God.”​

One white Latter-day Saint couple described the role of a covenant with God and each other as follows:

Evan: When we were married, we covenanted with each other that we would be faithful to each other and that we would also look to God … and remember Him, and so a covenant is a very vital part of our relationship.

Tara: It’s … a three-way partnership, with God being … a party to making this marriage work.

Coming together by remembering the promises that they made to each other before God reportedly put fidelity and integrity at the forefront of these couples’ relationships. 

Challenges to Integrity and Fidelity

While the majority of participants described fidelity as a source of strength, some acknowledged challenges. Orlando, an African American Christian husband, noted the pressures of living up to marital vows in a world filled with distractions and said:

This world … has a way of testing if you mean what you said [when you got married] or were you just sitting up there ’cause everything was rosy that day … Are you going to hold your sacred vows [when it gets hard]?

The question posed by Orlando does stimulate reflection within marriage—including (and especially) when the challenges come. If marital fidelity is defined by one question, perhaps Orlando nails it with Are you going to hold to your sacred vows when it gets hard?

Imperfect But Striving

The animated story of Carl and Ellie in “Up” illustrates how integrity and fidelity create a foundation for enduring love. However, the American Families of Faith project documents the experience of hundreds of couples who view these virtues as essential for marital stability and satisfaction in their own marriages. These couples have been married for an average of more than 20 years.

In a touching moment from the film, Carl says, “You’re my best friend, Ellie.” Similarly, a father in our project said of his wife’s integrity and fidelity, “She was married to marriage long before she was married to me.” The same father also wrote of his wife of more than four decades, “I can imagine no heaven without her … and with her, even hell would be tolerable.” 

The insights from the imperfect but exemplary marriages studied in the American Families of Faith project reveal that fidelity and integrity are not just ideals but lived virtues that sustain many strong marriages through a sacred sense of shared purpose. For many couples, these virtues are deeply intertwined with their religious beliefs and practices, which provide both motivation and practical tools for navigating challenges.

 The imperfect but striving women and men in the American Families of Faith project underscore that fidelity and integrity are more than individual actions; they are the cornerstone of enduring, meaningful partnerships. By striving to live out these ideals, couples create relationships that not only withstand life’s trials but thrive in their shared commitment to each other.

The post The Virtues That Sustain Marriage appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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Increasingly, people are turning to AI for some of life’s most personal and consequential questions.

I write as the founder and CEO of the largest cross-faith AI spiritual infrastructure platform currently in operation. So I have a unique view of how people use AI. We see people using AI not only to plan a Halloween party or check the time in another country, but also to pose questions about guilt, identity, grief, betrayal, doubt, salvation, and meaning.

Faith seekers of the next generation are not waiting for denominational guidance. Pew found that 72% of adults under 30 had not participated in a service during the previous month, while Gallup found that only 22% of 18- to 29-year-olds attended weekly or nearly weekly in its 2021–2023 surveys. Instead, young people are forming personalized spiritual identities using today’s most accessible and compelling digital tools.

When a generation learns to process suffering, shame, and moral ambiguity inside an always-available online chat interface, that habit is hard to reverse. This poses a literally existential challenge for traditional religious institutions. Can faith communities harness the power of AI in a responsible, ethical, and even “faith-based” manner?

AI Already Has a Moral Compass. You Just Didn’t Set It.

Every secular AI model is trained on choices: what data to include, what to weight, what counts as a “good” answer. Someone made those choices. For the select handful of companies whose models now field a meaningful share of the world’s questions, that someone was a data engineer optimizing for helpfulness and engagement, not for doctrinal accuracy or a questioner’s eternal welfare.

Elder Gerrit W. Gong addressed this phenomenon directly at the Athens Summit on Ethics and Artificial Intelligence on May 26, 2026. He warned that AI “is concentrating information, technology, and capital and thereby centralizing power,” and that this concentration “undermines the sovereignty of individuals, companies and countries.” 

He was speaking about AI’s effect on power generally, not chatbots specifically. But the principle applies with particular force to the pattern of chatbot spiritual guidance I have described. If a small number of companies shape how over one billion people receive answers to their most vulnerable questions, and some meaningful share of those questions are religious and theological, then a small number of Silicon Valley engineers are quietly shaping how faith gets explained to the world. As Elder Gong put it, “neither profit-motivated technology companies nor politically motivated governments can be left to determine society’s AI moral compass.”

To be clear, these general-purpose models aren’t “lying” to your teenager in the sense you and I might mean, and in fact, they don’t actually “hallucinate” (i.e. generate random inexplicable gibberish) anywhere as often as the popular press sometimes conveys. These models are actually doing exactly what they were built to do: predicting the words that are most statistically likely to come next, given everything they were trained on—which is, in practice, most of the internet. That means scraps of religious doctrine get blended with whatever else exists on the topic—pop psychology, Reddit posts, secular therapeutic language—into something plausible, even morally conversant, but often subtly wrong for a specific tradition or belief.

For a recent example, take the controversy when the U.S. military re-classified Pentagon “faith codes” and in doing so determined that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints should not be officially designated as “Christian.” Following outcry from Utah Senator Mike Lee and others, I immediately checked more than 5 secular LLMs and not a single one responded with an unambiguous response that Latter-day Saints should be considered Christian. DeepSeek, for example, stated, “it depends.” My personal AI query from June 8 with DeepSeek went as follows: 

This is a debated topic, but the short answer is: **It depends on the definition used.**

– **From the LDS (Mormon) perspective:** Yes. They believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and Savior.

– **From traditional Catholic, Orthodox, and mainstream Protestant perspective:** No. The main reasons are that Mormonism rejects core doctrines of historic Christianity (the Trinity as defined by the Nicene Creed) and adds its own scriptures (Book of Mormon, etc.) that are seen as contradicting the Bible.

So there is no universally agreed-upon “yes” or “no.”

What’s worse, AI-generated answers typically arrive with total confidence, even to the point of self-serving affirmation to an embarrassing degree; this is what people in the industry characterize as “sycophancy.”  A model rarely hedges the way a thoughtful bishop would (“I’m honestly not sure, let’s find out together”), because uncertainty isn’t what it’s optimized to produce. And because most consumer models are tuned to be agreeable, a lonely or doubting person is more likely to get validation than the kind of loving correction or religious perspective that actually produces growth. Anthropic’s own research on Claude reveals—surprisingly?—that within the domain of “relationship guidance,” spirituality has the highest percentage of responses scored as sycophantic (38%). 

None of this makes the technology inherently malicious. But it is, without question, structurally unsuited to handle every job that it’s being asked to do at scale. We also risk losing some of the messy connections that make us human. As Elder David A. Bednar said at a worldwide devotional at Brigham Young University–Idaho on November 3, 2024, a danger of AI is that it may “replace meaningful human interaction.” 

This is where the need for what my company, Solace, calls “governance” comes into play. Let’s define that term more clearly, as well as map out some of the associated challenges and opportunities.

So What Would Governance Actually Mean?

I would define “Governed AI” in the specific context of the broader faith space as follows:

An AI system that a religious community has deliberately constrained to answer only from its own approved doctrinal materials rather than the open internet, that is theologically reviewed and auditable so a specific accountable person(s) can trace and correct its errors, and that is designed to recognize the edge of its own competence and redirect people toward real pastoral relationships and in-person fellowship as appropriate.

In practice, a governed AI policy like this one is not one single decision but a fluid living stack of them: what gets ingested; who reviews for theological accuracy before an answer reaches a member; how the system is audited on an ongoing basis, not just at launch; and what happens automatically when a conversation crosses from doctrinal information into a personal crisis.

That final question is the one most conversations on “AI and religion” skip entirely, and it’s the one that matters most. A governed system that just gives more accurate doctrine quickly without a deliberate mechanism for recognizing its own limits and redirecting to a bishop, a friend, or a real conversation hasn’t solved the problem Elder Bednar named. It’s created a more polished version of it.

Governed AI also helps to clarify accountability in a way that matters. When a general-purpose model gets theology wrong, no one anywhere is positioned to notice, let alone fix it; it’s just one wrong answer among billions and billions, invisible by design. When a community-governed system errs, an accountable person or team within the faith community who understands the material and the people it serves is designated to trace the problem, correct it, or refine it. That’s not a minor operational detail; it’s the whole difference between a tool a community can be responsible for and one it has simply adopted.

Here, the Church has a structural advantage worth naming plainly. The Church already has the content infrastructure (what we sometimes refer to as “proof texts”). Correlation, curriculum approval, and a defined chain of doctrinal authority already exist, built for exactly the purpose governance requires: deciding, deliberately and centrally, what counts as an accurate representation of the faith. That doesn’t make building a governed system easy. However, these structures address one of the single hardest problems other traditions have had to solve before they could even start.

The Honest Difficulty: This Isn’t Something Most Wards Can Build

Building this kind of governed system is hard. A curated, auditable, continuously reviewed body of content with real theological oversight, and based on a sophisticated and scalable technology stack, is not a weekend project for a single ward’s tech-savvy service committee member. According to research jointly commissioned by Solace and Harvard Business School, most congregations across faith traditions spend less than 2% of their total budget on technology infrastructure, so they lack access to the tools and expertise for such an undertaking. A well-meaning staff member uploading a stack of talks into a public chatbot interface isn’t governance.

The answer can’t be that every ward should build its own AI system. This is a decision too consequential to leave to individual improvisation or to default entirely to commercial platforms – which means it belongs, at minimum, at the level of the Church with the resources and doctrinal authority to do it carefully, or through partners who submit to and supplement that oversight rather than replace it. Naming this scale problem honestly is more persuasive than pretending it doesn’t exist.

As Elder Gong said at the Athens Summit, “we will not fulfill AI’s full potential until we make it as morally good as we make it powerful. And we will not reach our full human potential until we, and not any technology, take responsibility to chart our best future.” 

We will share additional research, real-world insights, and case studies in future Public Square Magazine articles. Our goal is to help sharpen both the imperative and the path forward for the Church to explore the frontier of “governed AI” without compromising the values of the faith.

The post When the Faithful Ask AI for Help appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

I was a bit nervous going into the tour. Because Latter-day Saint teachings and practices are often mocked in the popular media, I wasn’t sure what assumptions my fellow interns might already hold. Would I be the weird coworker now?

Despite my initial fears, the experience could not have been better. During the tour, my fellow interns asked me all kinds of interesting questions. Some of them were deeply touched by our doctrine of eternal families. Others were impressed by the striking portraits of Christ, particularly the giant painting “His Return” by Dan Wilson. They were fascinated by our lifestyle, doctrines, and ordinances.

Their questions also helped me look at the truths of the restored gospel with new insight. As a lifelong member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I had taken many of these truths for granted. For instance, the enormous endeavor to provide every person who has ever lived with the opportunity to receive the gospel and its ordinances is a startling project of divine love and justice that I sometimes forget in everyday worship. My colleagues’ questions and perspectives illuminated my own beliefs, making them even more meaningful to me.

I have often reflected on how the temple open house sparked a summer of dialogue and helped me gain greater insight into my own faith. As the 2027 Salt Lake Temple Open House Celebration approaches, I hope we realize how significant this opportunity is, whether we visit in person or virtually. I believe there are several things we can do to make the experience more meaningful.

5 Ways to Make the Most of the Open House

1. Invite friends to attend.

Inviting people to visit the open house might feel uncomfortable, especially if they do not share our beliefs. But I found that many people are genuinely curious and thrilled to have the opportunity to attend. As I learned from my own experience, touring with friends of other faiths offers new insights.

2. Learn the layout and plan the trip.

While the temple is the focal point, there are lots of other things to do, see, and experience on Temple Square that you won’t want to miss. Many buildings will be open to the public; I’m personally looking forward to visiting the Relief Society Building. Temple Square will also be full of performances throughout the celebration. You might consider identifying the exhibits, multimedia presentations, and performing groups you can see during your visit.

3. Participate in and learn about all the temple ordinances.

Participating in all the ordinances of the temple, where possible, can help us to remember the powerful sequence of the covenant path and the vital importance of each part of the temple. For those who have not yet received temple ordinances (and even for those who have), studying each temple ordinance can help us to better appreciate the symbolism and sacredness involved in the ordinance rooms.

4. Study and practice teaching gospel truths simply.

During my temple tour, friends frequently asked me questions about the temple and our beliefs about Jesus Christ, the priesthood, ordinances, and the plan of salvation. Sometimes we become so accustomed to teaching these concepts to fellow Latter-day Saints that we forget how to be conversant with friends of other faith backgrounds. During a temple tour, when friends ask questions, they probably don’t want long or complicated answers. We can practice teaching our beliefs in a simple, accurate, and sincere way in advance to make the temple tour a better experience for those who join us. The lesson outlines in chapter three of Preach, My Gospel can be great to study and discuss during Family Home Evening or in gospel study groups.

5. Focus on Christ.

With all that’s going on during a temple open house, it’s easy to become enamored with the architecture, artwork, and landscaping. But all of these beautiful elements are there to invoke remembrance that the temple is the holy house of the Lord.

In every room, symbol, and painting, we can ask ourselves how we see Christ there. The open house celebration theme “Rejoice in Christ” reminds us that this is not just an open house; it is a celebration of what Christ has made possible.

During the launch event for the theme and tour reservations, I had the chance to ask Relief Society General President Camille N. Johnson about the theme. President Johnson also serves on the executive committee for the Salt Lake Temple Celebration. She said, “Rejoice in Christ . . . beautifully says, in just a few words, what we’re hoping people will feel when they’re here.” She went on to say, “We hope they will feel to rejoice in Jesus Christ as they learn more about the love and the peace and the hope that he offers each one of us.”

I look forward to rejoicing with Christ with friends and family as we tour the Salt Lake Temple in 2027. I hope you’ll join me. 

The post 5 Ways to Prepare for the Salt Lake Temple Celebration appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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In the 2015 movie “Cinderella,” Ella’s mother tells her to “have courage and be kind.” Ella, later known as Cinderella, endures cruelty yet responds with kindness and forgiveness, inviting us to reflect on our own capacity to find the courage to forgive. Her struggle to forgive her stepmother and stepsisters might be more dramatic than most family conflicts, but it still speaks to even the most ordinary family relationships. 

Adapting the counsel in “Cinderella,” we focus on a related invitation that helps families thrive:  “have courage and forgive.” In religious families, forgiveness is both a demand and a blessing. Drawing on interviews with members of about 200 families from diverse racial and religious backgrounds, we uncover why forgiveness remains central to reconciliation and relational healing, despite how challenging it can be.

The findings come from a study of relational reconciliation in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim families in the American Families of Faith project. We consider both why families choose to reconcile and the processes through which they do so.

Why Families Reconciled

Participants described three key reasons for reconciliation: (1) their religious beliefs, (2) their ability to see a “bigger picture,” and (3) their own experiences of God’s love and forgiveness. 

Religious Beliefs

Many participants said their faith created an expectation that they would forgive and reconcile, shaping their responses to conflicts. Briana, an African-American Christian wife, reflected on how scripture motivated her during disagreements with her husband:

Scripture tells us, you may get angry, but sin not. Because we are different, we’re not going to always agree, but being in the church, that’s a benefit for us. We’re able to hear something in Bible study or Sunday service … . God is always going to bring a word back to our memory that makes us realize and ask Him for forgiveness. Then we come back and ask each other for forgiveness.

Cynthia, a teenage daughter of Latino and Caucasian Latter-day Saint parents, shared:

Through the hard times … we’re all kind of going our separate ways, but then I know that each of us think about [our] religion and we’re all like, ‘Yeah, we’re supposed to make up—that’s what we’re supposed to do.’ That’s what we do, and we feel better about it.

Seeing the Bigger Picture

Participants frequently described how their faith helped them see beyond immediate conflicts to a “bigger picture” or a “long-term perspective.” Saul, a Caucasian Jewish husband, highlighted how religious observances like Yom Kippur encouraged him and his wife to reflect on their relationship:

Both of us always have something [in our Yom Kippur goals] about being a better spouse—stop yelling at each other or whatever we do. There is some sense that a religious observance helps us to keep our focus on the big picture and reminds us of things we want to change. If we didn’t do that ritual, I don’t think we would have the opportunity to say, ‘These are things I want to do better.’

An adolescent daughter named Alecia, a Caucasian member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, explained her perspective:

If we fight here, it’s like we fight and get over it in like an hour. Most people in our family don’t stay mad at each other for weeks and weeks. Knowing that our scriptures say we are going to be together forever … that we are bound forever, that we have that bond, fighting here seems trivial when you think about it.

God’s Love and Forgiveness

Participants also described experiencing God’s forgiveness as another powerful reason to reconcile within their families. Many said that recognizing God’s grace in their lives inspired them to extend forgiveness to others. Chen, an Asian-American Christian husband, reflected: “I am a forgiven sinner by God—and if God can forgive me, I can forgive her.”

Similarly, Shawn, a Black Baptist husband, connected God’s forgiveness with his approach to marital conflict:

We intend that God … be the center of our marriage, so that our commitment to each other is an outgrowth of our commitment to Him. Also, in the practicalities of living together, needing to exercise forgiveness and grace toward each other, because we receive grace and forgiveness from God—we can extend that to each other.

Having discussed three reasons why families forgave, we now turn to four processes that reflect how they forgave.

How Families Reconciled

Reconciliation involved four interconnected processes: spiritual, personal, relational, and practical. These processes often overlapped, reflecting a dynamic approach to resolving conflicts.

Spiritual Processes

Prayer emerged as a foundational spiritual practice that guided families toward reconciliation. Participants often turned to prayer to seek clarity and guidance and to regain calm. Angela, an Italian-American Catholic wife, described resolving conflicts with her husband as follows:

In times when we have conflict about anything … we both are always open to either one of us saying, ‘Let’s just pray about this.’ … That ability to come together in prayer and ask for each other’s forgiveness or God’s forgiveness and discernment and direction is something that, again, I don’t know how people can get through without having that.

Prayer also helped individuals acknowledge their own mistakes. Yul, an Asian-American Christian husband, said, “Prayer is very helpful. When we have conflicts and arguments, prayer can calm us down … . God leads us through prayer to recognize our sin and to improve our marriage.”

Personal Processes

Participants described self-examination and admitting mistakes as additional personal steps toward reconciliation. These actions often required humility and introspection. Bekah, a Caucasian Jewish wife, emphasized the importance of personal responsibility:

I think one of the strong points of Judaism is the sense of personal responsibility and certainly in any conflict we’ve had, it’s been really important to own up to whatever part we have in the conflict. And that’s something that comes straight from Judaism.

Apologizing was another key practice. Brent, a Caucasian Jehovah’s Witness husband, described how saying “I’m sorry” often helped resolve conflict in his marriage:

I’ll have regrets afterward and say, ‘Why am I making such a big deal of such a little thing?’ And she’s having the same feelings of regret. And then we’re like, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ And then it’s over.

Relational Processes

Participants frequently described forgiving and being forgiven as relational acts that fostered understanding and acceptance. A Caucasian Latter-Day Saint husband named Stewart shared:

I think one of the basic teachings of the Savior is forgiveness. So … if you want to be forgiven, the Bible teaches that you need to forgive other people. And obviously, we’re imperfect and we want to be forgiven, so I think both of us bring that idea or that principle into our marriage relationship. We see that we have to be willing to forgive the other person. I think that influences our ability to … forgive a little bit sooner than we normally would have, because we know and we believe that forgiving is a good thing.

Parents also modeled forgiveness for their children. Shawn, a Black Baptist father, said:

Our kids … see Emily and I not always get it right and we have to hash things out, but then extend forgiveness to each other. I’ve had to ask my kids for forgiveness. So I hope they see that we’re real people, we haven’t got it all together, but we can accept and love each other because we extend forgiveness of God and the grace of God to each other. And we each know that we need it desperately. 

Practical Processes

Families often took practical steps to repair relationships and prevent conflicts from escalating. These steps included communicating thoughtfully, using strategies to de-escalate conflict, and making amends. Aashif, an Arab-American Muslim husband, described how he and his wife approached disagreements:

At the beginning of our marriage, we had so much more conflict. The religion part is that we say, “It is okay, let’s stop here and discuss it later. Let’s go to pray or leave things for later.” We control ourselves by the faith … so we do not exaggerate the problem and make it like a snowball and make it bigger and bigger and reach the point of disagreement that makes us two parts. We definitely say, “We need to stop, we need to think about it.” We have this limit that we do not cross.

For others, practical action meant repairing ruptures quickly. Jeffrey, a Caucasian Christian husband, explained:

While I am quick to explode, I’m also quick to try and heal that explosion. … I think that a lot of that has been key in our relationship because a lot of times things boil over. Being quick to try and come back and fix the rift is important.

Together, these overlapping processes illustrate the dynamic and multifaceted nature of reconciliation in families. Each step, whether spiritual or practical, contributes to repairing and strengthening relationships.

Our adaptation of the counsel in “Cinderella” to “have courage and forgive” echoes the experiences described by participants in the American Families of Faith project. Motivated by faith, a focus on the bigger picture, and the experience of divine grace, these families seek to make forgiveness a core part of their family dynamics. Through prayer, personal accountability, relational repair, and practical action, participants described forgiveness as fostering healing and deeper connections. Just as Cinderella chose kindness over resentment, these families show that the courage to forgive ultimately strengthens relationships and brings peace. 

The post The Courage to Forgive appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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One of my earliest memories at a chapel of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is of walking around its exterior. The building had a detached steeple. I stood at its brick base, looking up to the tip of its spire. The sun was high, and I squinted at how bright it was. 

Growing up, my closest temple was in Los Angeles. My sister once got down on the grass to take a picture. The bottom of the picture was dark and shadowed. Toward the top of the photo, near the peak of the steeple, it brightened. She turned it into a painting I keep in my house to this day.

No one ever told me the steeple was important. It wasn’t addressed in lessons. No one asked about it in temple recommend interviews, but since those earliest days, I have associated it with lifting my eyes, light, and the Church. 

And I didn’t just associate the steeple with my own faith’s houses of worship. I came to instinctively feel a sense of peace and hope whenever I saw a steeple, as it represented people in my community seeking their God.

Where Do Steeples Come From?

My experience with steeples is not revolutionary. In fact, for hundreds of years, religious architects have understood the steeple’s symbolism and used it to create experiences like mine. 

As a result, Christians have learned to read the vertical line of a church as an invitation to look beyond.

The steeple developed from several distinct elements of medieval architecture. The first was the bell tower. Bell towers were built tall so their bells could be heard across the town. Over time, those bell towers were incorporated into the church building, and many eventually received roofs topped by increasingly slender spires. As that silhouette became associated with worship spaces, it was integrated even in the absence of a bell tower.

In 12th-century France, Abbot Suger oversaw the rebuilding of the church at Saint-Denis. The project included what he called “high and noble towers” and helped establish what became known as Gothic architecture.

On one of the church doors, Suger inscribed a poem:

Marvel not at the gold and the expense,
but at the craftsmanship of the work.

Bright is the noble work;
but, being nobly bright, the work
Should brighten the minds,
so that they may travel through the true lights
To the True Light where Christ is the true door.
In what manner it be inherent in this world
the golden door defines:
The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material.

Suger understood his work to be explicitly symbolic. He saw the material forms he used as a means of directing congregants’ minds to the truth.

It was a century later that the bishop of Mende, William Durandus, wrote an extensive treatise on church architecture and its connection to Christian worship. He wrote of the steeple, “The pinnacles of the towers signify the life or the mind of a prelate which aspireth heavenwards.” Durandus saw the vertical architecture as a symbol of spiritual ascent.

The symbol became ingrained through repetition. No declaration was needed: for generations, the appearance of the steeple was the first visible marker of what the building was. 

St. Paul’s Church in Harlow, Essex, England, was built in the 1950s. It included a low, detached bell tower, but the main building also bore a spire that the architects described as a “symbol for the church.”

The tower’s practical and symbolic functions had become fully separate. 

Latter-day Saint Architecture

The steeple was an early feature of Latter-day Saint architecture.

Despite the Church and many of the early Saints experiencing poverty, the Kirtland Temple, the first temple built by Latter-day Saints, featured a white tower spire and weather vane. Similarly, the Nauvoo Temple’s steeple was finished in the midst of the exodus. The decorative element was finished just five days before the early Saints left the city. 

President George A. Smith, who served in the First Presidency, said of the Salt Lake Temple’s spires, “Every one points to a moral lesson, and all point to the celestial world.”

Folk stories have also developed around the importance of steeples. As the St. George Utah Temple neared completion, Brigham Young Jr. wrote that his father was unhappy with the tower because he believed it was too short. Soon after Young Sr.’s death, lightning struck the steeple. And when the workers rebuilt it, they made it taller. The folk interpretation has long been that Young Sr. directed the lightning after his death. 

Every temple completed by The Church of Jesus Christ in the first 89 years of its history included a steeple. Then, between 1919 and 1927, three temples were built without steeples. 

Every temple once again included a steeple for 90 years until the 156th temple was dedicated in Paris, France, in 2017. Today, 97% of temples include a steeple.

The exceptions are also illustrative. The three temples in the early 20th century were each built to suggest Solomon’s temple in ancient Jerusalem. Hyrum Pope, one of the architects of the Cardston Alberta Temple, explained that the architects wanted to evoke a sense that the design was “ancient as well as modern.”

At the time, a new movement in sacred architecture was emerging, typified by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple. 

Pope drew on this language to communicate the power of God. But the symbolism of ascent remained within the structure. Each ordinance room was placed half a story higher than the previous one. The temple was also precisely aligned with the four cardinal directions, symbolizing spiritual orientation. The other early 20th-century temples without spires followed similar designs, communicating religious symbolism in a language appreciated by the people worshipping there. 

While Wright’s design style for churches eventually faded, the longer tradition of the steeple has remained. And according to some estimates, about 80% of Christian churches in the United States have steeples. 

Steeples and Worship

As a small child, I had the kind of experience that generations of architects sought to create. I saw a steeple, I looked up, and I saw light.

But it is more than just decoration.

Worship has never been limited to the minimum physical actions required to make an ordinance valid. Worship forms our attention, memories, and imaginations. 

The steeple encapsulates a temple’s teaching and purpose. It transforms the temple’s work of bringing us closer to the divine into a material form, a visible movement. 

There is a reason why steeples appear in drawings, wedding announcements, flyers in the foyers, family photographs, and in the memories of millions of Latter-day Saints. They are a part of how we imagine our interaction with God. 

We don’t talk about them because we don’t have to. A church has pews so we can sit, and it has a steeple so we will look up. 

Today, there are occasional conflicts about the steeples on our temples. And we should work to make sure our temples fit into their communities. But steeples are worth defending. And we should be grateful for the legal protections that enable us to build them. 

The post Steeples Are Worth Defending appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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Earlier this year, I spoke at Georgetown University on artificial intelligence and faith. Around the same time, Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas, an encyclical arguing that AI use must be guided by human dignity, was published. Elder Gerrit W. Gong, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, one of the highest governing bodies of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, spoke at the Athens Summit on Ethics and Artificial Intelligence. Shortly afterward, the Church of Jesus Christ released the six-episode video workshop series Faith, Dignity, and Human Flourishing: Hearing God’s Voice in an Age of Artificial Intelligence, featuring Gong.

Their thoughts touched my heart and helped me better understand my relationships with God and other people. Pope Leo focuses on the public systems governing AI, while Gong focuses on the relationships affected by it; both offer a similar warning: technology should support human dignity, moral responsibility, and healthy relationships. Reading and listening to the teachings of these religious leaders pushed me to examine my life and ask: Is my use of AI improving my relationships with God, my friends, and my family or weakening them?

Whom Will This Technology Serve: Insights from Pope Leo

Pope Leo places a distinctly human question at the center of the debate over artificial intelligence: Whom will this technology serve? In his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (a formal papal letter whose title means “Magnificent Humanity”), he argues that AI must advance human dignity and the common good rather than concentrate power in the hands of a few. 

Pope Leo insists that “technology is never neutral” and that human responsibility must be clearly defined at every stage of AI development, from design to deployment. He highlights the risks of AI exacerbating inequality, unemployment, and social isolation. He urges governments and corporations to ensure fair access for all people and manage data as a common good rather than a commodity.

The pope also addresses challenges in education and concerns about young people, emphasizing critical thinking, digital literacy, and moral discernment as safeguards against these risks. He warns against subtle forms of social control enabled by AI and calls for educating everyone about these dangers. 

Understanding these concerns will strengthen freedom, truth, and our relationships with others. One of the encyclical’s most striking warnings condemns delegating lethal decisions to AI systems. He asserts “no algorithm can make war morally acceptable.” 

Four Relationships AI Must Not Replace: Insights from Elder Gong

Like Pope Leo, Elder Gong approaches the same question through the lens of relationships. In previous AI discussions and in the church’s AI video series, Elder Gong based his thoughts about AI around the four core relationships of human life:

1. With Deity (Thou): AI cannot answer prayer or offer divine truth on its own.
2. With Self (I): Each person is a child of God, not a data point.
3. With Others (They): AI should deepen, rather than diminish, our trusted human relationships.
4. With the Environment (It): Technology should honor the natural world. Individuals should seek communion with nature.

At the Athens Summit on AI Ethics, Elder Gong urged faith leaders, scholars, and technology experts to anchor AI with moral principles drawn from global ethical and religious traditions. This, he said, would ensure that AI serves the common good rather than privileging a small group of people or a single religion. “I want AI to have moral compass that can inspire and enable anyone anywhere with the gift of possibility to do good and become their best self,” he said.

While in Greece, Elder Gong visited Mars Hill, the same place where the Apostle Paul talked about the “unknown god.” As an apostle of Jesus Christ, Elder Gong expressed his concern that AI was becoming modern society’s unknown god. “In our day, too glibly, some people say that artificial intelligence is god or speak of god-like artificial intelligence, but God created man and man created artificial intelligence,” he said. 

Biblical Lessons

Both Pope Leo and Elder Gong reference the Tower of Babel as a cautionary tale. The downfall of the people of Babel revealed the limits of any effort, however grandiose, that arises from humanity’s selfishness and pride. Aspiring to reach heaven, the people sacrificed human dignity for worldly goals without seeking God’s blessing or the common good. They used their tools and ingenuity to build something impressive, but their motives were self-exalting rather than God-centered. Because of their pride, their community fractured, their language was confounded, and they were scattered. 

Religious devotions can offer an antidote to Babel while improving covenant belonging, divine communication, and human relationships grounded in love rather than algorithms.

Pope Leo uses the Bible story of the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls under Nehemiah as a foil to the lesson learned from the Tower of Babel. The builders of the walls of Jerusalem rediscover community and harmony. Even during trials, the Jews who came back to Jerusalem rediscovered community and harmony. Through humility and seeking the Lord’s help in their work, these people recognized that their strength came from the Lord God. They looked to God for help, knowing that they could not accomplish their task without His support.

Becoming Weavers of Hope

Neither Pope Leo and Elder Gong reject AI, but they both ask how AI can be used as a positive tool for good. 

Pope Leo invites us to become “weavers of hope” in our world, sharing who we are and what we have with others. Even the AI era can become a time where the Holy Spirit brings love into our lives. He invites us to be wise architects who are driven by hope for the Kingdom of God and “committed to building the world for the common good.” He encourages all to be faithful to truth, invest in education, and love justice and peace.

Elder Gong focused on being present and experiencing the people and natural beauty surrounding us. Real experiences in the real world will bring us greater love for the world we live in. That love will improve our relationships with God and with others. Finally, he challenges us to rely on the Spirit rather than technology, practice wisdom by applying wise judgment, and choose trusted sources, anchoring our understanding in holy scripture.

My love in each of Elder Gong’s core relationships should be improved by my AI use. When it takes me away from that love or separates me from those relationships, then I need to stop and evaluate my AI use. I am grateful for religious leaders who are not afraid to teach how to keep life human. Their mandate for all of us is to use AI to further human dignity throughout the world.

The post Keeping Our Relationships Human appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

No one likes feeling negatively judged. For a few years, I ran a website called LDS.net. We had a robust internship program. Three semesters a year, I would welcome between four and ten college juniors and seniors and teach them how to write at a professional level. 

About a week into the semester, the interns would begin brainstorming their first article. In their first batch of proposals, about 90% wanted to write about how their coreligionists should stop judging them.

In the beginning, I was curious about these experiences and what had happened. The interns usually told me about something they felt defensive about—often, a lifestyle choice that was within the bounds of Latter-day Saint doctrine but outside the norm. 

I asked them how this judgment played out in their lives. There were two main sources of these young authors’ certainty that they were being judged. One was nonverbal signals. They would notice another person’s eye movements or hear an unusual breathing pattern. 

The other came from things that didn’t happen. They were certain that they were not asked on dates, or given certain callings, or included in friend groups, because they were being judged.

Here are a few examples I heard over the years. 

One writer complained that a group of women in her ward regularly judged her body. As an example, she recalled a conversation at a ward activity in which one of the women mentioned going on a morning run. My writer was sure the woman meant the comment as an implied criticism.

Another told a story about going to church with an older sister. This older sister had decided to wait to have children. A friend from their childhood, who was the younger sister’s age, was at church that day and mentioned she was “finally” expecting. My writer said that the friend’s emphasis on “finally” conveyed judgment about the older sister’s decision to delay having children.

One writer told me that he was judged by a young woman in his ward for having facial hair. He based this conclusion on an encounter after church. When he approached her to chat, she spoke abruptly and then left, but only after her eyes fell on his scruff. He assured me that her downward glance was “pointed.”

What interested me was that these stories were aggregated and presented to me as a common experience. My writers felt judged, or more often, believed that the people around them were judgmental. The details were subsumed in that description of the experience.

I know inappropriate judgment exists. People are fallible, even the ones I go to church with. But I also noticed that many of the specifics my writers used felt thin to me. I admit I didn’t know the context or the nonverbals, but most of these interactions seemed innocent to me as an outsider. Yet in the minds and hearts of these interns, these incidents amounted to such a strong and persistent problem that they warranted an essay directed to the general church membership. 

My purpose in approaching this subject is not to tell my former interns that I think they were wrong. Honestly, I don’t know. Negative sentiment is often communicated subtly. People can be cruel, status-conscious, self-righteous, gossipy, and exclusionary. Latter-day Saints are not exempt from these behaviors. And I’ve witnessed instances of pervasive and inappropriate judgment.

But part of me wonders if, in addition to the many real cases of judgment, something broader is happening that makes the experience feel more pervasive than perhaps it is. 

What if much of what we experience as “feeling judged” arises from the interaction between another person’s ordinary effort toward a goal we share and our own unresolved insecurity? 

For example, if I feel insecure because I know I can be thoughtless, and I assume other people recognize this about me, then, when someone thoughtfully offers me a kind favor, I may begin to interpret the person’s tone or volume as a signal that their offer was actually a form of judgment for my own shortcomings. 

Or if I feel defensive because I am not shaving as often as I believe I should while a student at BYU, and someone doesn’t want to talk to me, I may begin looking for signs that my shaving is the reason. 

Because we are intensely aware of ourselves, we assume others are intensely aware of us, too. And because our coreligionists share so many of our aspirations, it is common for us to encounter people we judge to be doing better than we are. And we project our own judgments onto their sighs, comments, and eye movements. 

Our Own Judgment

Insecurity is unreliable. It can interpret difference as disdain. It can interpret excellence as accusation, silence as contempt, and conviction as diagnosis.

I felt this keenly in the wake of my divorce. Although the cause of my divorce was rather obvious and entirely beyond my control, I felt like a massive failure. My children suffered daily as a result of my failure to keep my family together. And I was certain that the many happy families and successful husbands in my new ward would note this failure in their assessment of me. 

And one truly thoughtless comment, such as “Divorce is usually two-sided,” would then take on a life of its own, confirming in my mind that whenever people walked into the chapel and sat somewhere else, they must have been thinking about my failures. 

I interpreted everyone’s behavior in relation to me. 

In many ways, I was fortunate. I determined early on that Jesus could not be taken away from me by anyone. So I decided to try to ignore what I saw as everyone else’s judgments, because, in my case, they weren’t going to affect my behavior.

As a result, I became less hyperaware of others’ judgments. And soon it began to seem that there was much less judgment. Many of the acts (or lack of acts) that I had previously attributed to judgment, I now ascribed to people being busy, or self-consumed, or any of a million other reasons that had nothing to do with me. It soon seemed that almost no one was really judging me in a sustained, cruel, or unfair way. 

I still think there was some judgment. There are a few people whose patterns of statements make me think they still see me as less than. But once I had learned to limit the problem, it didn’t seem very big. What did I care if a couple of people in a ward of two hundred people didn’t like me? 

My feeling of being judged was real and pervasive. But within about a year, I felt the judgment was largely in my head. 

The feeling of being judged is internal, but it attempts to explain the external world. When I felt shame, my mind searched for the cause. And there were lots of sighs and eye twitches I could point to as signs of judgment.

I don’t think every instance of feeling judged is imagined or self-imposed. But in my case, I eventually concluded that was most of what had happened. 

Social Spotlight

Feeling more judged than we are is actually a pretty well-known phenomenon in social psychology.

Researchers use the term “spotlight effect” to describe the tendency to overestimate how much other people notice our appearance and behavior. Relatedly, researchers have identified what they call a “liking gap,” in which people underestimate how much their conversation partners enjoyed their company. We tend to remember our awkward pause or failed joke more vividly than others do. Adults readily recognize an exaggerated form of this tendency in teens, but it continues into adulthood. 

This doesn’t mean every fear of judgment is misplaced. Genuine cruelty, self-righteousness, exclusion, and gossip exist. I’ve witnessed instances of pervasive and inappropriate judgment. But it does mean our social perceptions are not nearly as neutral or accurate as we think. We may be poor judges of just how often others judge us negatively.

The therapeutic tendency to validate others’ observations can create a cycle. It starts when we feel judged, and others in our circles then validate that observation in their efforts to make us feel better. In turn, we double down on the narrative our circle has validated, which can make us even more certain that we were judged. 

This tendency is a form of self-focus, but not necessarily selfishness. We each live within our own consciousness. Our anxieties are loud to us, while other people’s anxieties are mostly hidden. When we enter a room, we are preoccupied with what people are thinking about us, while they are also thinking about what people are thinking about them. We can interpret this distraction as disapproval, while they may be concluding the same. And a room full of people worried about being judged may well be a room full of people too busy to judge anyone else.

Leaving the Imaginary Courtroom

Latter-day Saints are in many ways yoked together in a great work. We are not adversaries trying to outdo one another. 

Just as judgment can be corrosive, so too can the rhetoric around judgment.

The next time we feel judged, perhaps we can start by wondering whether the source of that judgment is internal. What insecurity do we have—what in our own lives do we feel defensive about—that we are putting into the minds of others without their permission?

This does not mean our experiences of judgment aren’t real, but given how many pressures there are to see judgment where it doesn’t exist, perhaps an honest gut check in the other direction can help us see things as they really are.

I am unaware of any comparative evidence suggesting that Latter-day Saints are any more judgmental than any other group. But there are reasons why we might feel that they are. Part of the project of The Church of Jesus Christ is personal improvement, which gives us many opportunities to recognize the gap between where we are and where we strive to be. 

Ultimately, I succeeded in pushing through my own feelings of judgment in my new ward by redirecting my attention. Rather than being concerned about what they thought of me, I started thinking about who in my ward needed my friendship and attention—who was lonely or in need of help. I stopped complaining that I was the one lost sheep, wondering why no one was coming to minister to me as Jesus would, and I started looking for the other lost sheep around me. I started inviting other rather than wondering why no one was inviting me. 

One of the greatest freedoms Jesus offers is a secure identity. We no longer have to appoint everyone around us as judges that we have to please. Human approval matters, especially within relationships, but it does not create or destroy our divine identity. 

That understanding releases us from the impossible task of managing and worrying about every opinion in every room. 

Most people aren’t judging us. They are worrying about their own lives. Their own groceries, deadlines, bodies, disappointments, and families. 

And once we can grasp that, we realize that we’re not going to church with a jury, but a congregation. A bunch of imperfect people, trying their best. Just like you.

The post Maybe They’re Not Judging You appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Drawing on a study from the American Families of Faith Project, we explore how women from Abrahamic faiths navigate marital challenges. The study consisted of 113 wives from highly religious Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities across the United States. Based on this study, we identified two ways faith in God shapes their responses to conflict. 

Theme 1: God Is Central to The Marriage

Our participants shared that a central focus on God in their lives contributed to positive outcomes in their marriages. Like Ruth, who chose loyalty and faith in God over familiarity and personal security, Halimah, a Muslim wife, emphasized that religion guided her toward wise and compassionate decisions in marriage. She explained, “Religion encourages both partners to take decisions wisely and not degrade the other person. That’s how I think religion helps us not to have conflict.” Other women of faith in the study said that God helped them to work through difficulties. Yi, a Christian who had been married for more than two decades, said:

Now, our conflicts are fewer and fewer. There were more conflicts before … much more, before we came to believe God. We always thought of ourselves and tried to argue, even if we were wrong. After we came to know God, our life has been different. We have fewer and fewer conflicts now because … we think in a similar way. Sometimes we have different opinions … okay, no problem, but we let it go, and we don’t want to argue.

Wachiwi, a Protestant woman, explained that God held her marriage together: “I don’t think you can hold a marriage together alone because there are times we hit a hard spot … and God was our salvation. He was always the way to work through things. Without Him we would fall apart.”

Similar to Ruth, who chose God even when it meant stepping into the unknown, these women showed that placing God at the center of their lives made a difference in their marriages. Their stories, whether of hard conversations, quiet sacrifices, or decisions to stay when it was difficult, point to the same source of strength. In moments of tension or uncertainty, they turned to God.

 Theme 2: Belief in God Leads to Internal Changes That Benefit The Marriage

Many of the women we interviewed described faith-inspired changes—sometimes significant transformations—in themselves, their partners, and their marriages across time. Joelle, a Christian said:

I think you have to trust God. You have to be able to hear His voice and practice that above anything else. Practice that [even] more than praying, practice that more than going to church, practice that more than singing [and] praising. Learn to hear His voice so He can always talk to you and tell you what He really wants you to do.

Learning to understand God and hear His voice was a focus for many of these women. Belief in God also seemed to deepen the women’s commitment to their marriages. A member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints named Sarah said:

Well, the fact that we were committed from the outset to make it work was, I think, an important factor. Obviously, all couples have conflict in their marriage, and that’s part of the package. You cannot expect to have a marriage free of conflict, or any relationship free of conflict. But the commitment we had for each other, and believing that we had an eternal marriage if we abided by the contracts we’ve made, I think helped a great deal in overcoming any conflict that we had. Being able to discuss any conflict that we had certainly was helpful to us as a couple.

These women also emphasized the importance of covenants and vows made in marriage. An Orthodox Christian named Alisia said,

For me, my religious beliefs … it reminds me of my commitment with my husband that I married in the Church. And of the blessings God blessed us with. It helps me to think about the meaning of our relationship and our commitment to one another. What did we say on that day that we were going to do, regardless of the health and illness and the good and bad? We do all of this just to obtain, to try to solve conflict, with the idea of maintaining and preserving this family together.

These women viewed marriage through a lens of faith and saw it as a divine gift. Li-Fen, a Christian wife, shared her perspective that:

God created marriage, let no man separate. We would not think about divorce, no matter how big the difficulties are. We must work out and resolve the difficulties in the Lord. We would not address divorce easily. This idea [of divorce] cannot emerge into my mind.

Other participants echoed the belief that divorce is typically not an option to overcome marital hardships. Their faith also inspired these women to willingly work on their shortcomings and to cultivate virtues. Charlotte, a Christian wife, recognized that marital growth takes significant time and effort. She reflected:

One of the deepest things that has come to me as I’ve struggled with developing a relationship into a better relationship is … not to be discouraged with what your spouse isn’t, but to realize that they have eternity to develop into who you know that they could be and who you want. Nobody is going to have every quality. You don’t have every quality, so be patient with your spouse and be patient with yourself.

This mindset also led women to realize their need for self-improvement. They viewed personal flaws as opportunities to develop humility and to become more faithful. Jennifer, a Jehovah’s Witness, said,

If I had a problem with temper, and I got married, and I found myself getting irritated with my husband, part of handling that would be, God doesn’t want me to have temper tantrums. You know? In fact, I should have been working on that. I would have been having to work on that as a single Witness, right?

These internal changes led to outward actions, such as deliberately forgiving their husbands, repenting to God, and saying, “I’m sorry.” A member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Consuella, said:

I just feel like the Lord comes to me and tells me, “You gotta at least say, ‘I’m sorry.’ You cannot be good with me,” the Savior will say, “if you are not good with your husband.” It is better to solve those confrontations … God has taught me that it’s okay to say, “I’m sorry,” and it’s okay to change.

        A Catholic woman named Amy also shared her view that her relationship with her husband was dependent on her relationship with God. She said:

If my relationship with God isn’t right or if I don’t keep trying to make that better, then I’m not as good with my husband. There’s times … when I’m not being [my best], I’m not focused, I’m not centered. My relationship with God is very important to be able to be a good spouse.

Like Amy, Consuella, Charlotte, and Jennifer, many other women we interviewed in exemplary long-term marriages similarly attributed their marital success not to an easy path but to divine guidance as they faced ongoing challenges.

Ruth chose to follow God amid difficult circumstances and eventually built a new life in Bethlehem. Likewise, the highly religious women interviewed for the American Families of Faith Project looked to God for direction, comfort, support, and strength as they navigated hardships in their marriages. In both ancient Bethlehem and in modern homes across diverse faith traditions, a recurring pattern emerges: when women center their lives on God, they find strength to serve, courage to grow, and grace to endure the inevitable struggles of married life.

The post What Faith Changes in Marriage appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

The article has ignited a strong response on social media. Some have called the article anti-therapy. Many have claimed that therapists are neutral and do not impose their ideas on their clients.

Therapy has taken on an outsized role in our culture very quickly. But in many ways, it remains a very under-explored arena. And, naturally, most of those who do research in this space are themselves therapists. It was an area I wanted to know more about. So, in 2022, I spent over 100 hours interviewing more than 50 Latter-day Saint and former Latter-day Saint therapy clients about their experiences to better understand the client side of therapy. I sought out perspectives from individuals who worked with religious and non-religious therapists throughout the United States. The interviews were intimate and insightful, yielding many observations about how clients feel about the therapeutic process. 

That being said, I have noticed a stark difference between how my interviewees described the therapy experience and how therapists themselves describe it. There seems to be a gap between what therapists think they are doing and how their clients experience what is happening. And this does not seem to be limited to poorly trained or unethical therapists. 

I believe these conversations have given me some insights into the client experience and how bias operates that may be missing in the critiques of those pushing back on the Deseret News piece.

Most People Experience Their Therapist Giving Them Advice

Many therapists insist that they do not give advice in therapy sessions. But most of the clients I spoke to experienced the opposite. 

I would characterize most people’s experience in therapy as their therapist telling them that what they were doing in their lives was good, that they were on the right side of any conflicts they were in, and that they would be happier if they made minor adjustments. 

Those adjustments were usually in the direction the clients were already inclined to pursue. So therapists might simply see themselves as merely helping clients talk themselves into a position. But the clients saw these therapists as trained, neutral third parties agreeing with their position.

Of the people I interviewed who believed their therapists gave them advice, many said their therapists had told them during intake not to interpret their takeaways as endorsed by the therapist. Others said their therapists frequently stated during sessions that they did not necessarily agree with or endorse the course of action the client had chosen. 

A handful of those who believed their therapists gave them advice also said their therapists made disclaimers that they were not giving advice. I remember one man I interviewed who held this view. When he mentioned the disclaimer, I pushed him to explain why he believed his therapist was giving him advice, even though his therapist had explicitly told him the opposite. The man shrugged and said, “Come on,” as if the answer were very obvious. He explained that the therapist’s disclaimer sounded legalistic and was intended only to protect the therapist, not to reflect the therapist’s actual feelings. 

One effect I saw repeated in many of my conversations was that clients intensified their conflicts. They left therapy further convinced they were in the right because their therapist advised them to either continue what they were doing or intensify a course of action they were already inclined to take. 

Who Believes Their Therapist Is Neutral?

Among those I spoke with, there was much broader disagreement about whether their therapists were neutral, with quite a few saying they did not know.

Among those I spoke to who said their therapist was neutral, there was a common pattern in their experience of therapy. They had a major conflict in their life (such as divorce, faith transition, parent-child conflict) and made substantial changes in their life near or during therapy. They were also much more likely to believe that their therapist was giving them advice that aligned with the path they were pursuing.

I found it interesting that many people said they were unsure whether their therapists were neutral. And those who said they did not know didn’t fall into the same pattern as those who said their therapist was neutral.

Among the people I interviewed, there was a pretty strong gender divide, with men more likely to believe their therapists were biased than women. 

The most common pattern involved individuals with conservative social, religious, or political values who believed their therapist did not share their values. Surprisingly, this was common even among those who sought out Latter-day Saint counselors, although I spoke to quite a few people outside Utah who sought out generically “Christian” counselors, and none of them reported this experience.

Even though these individuals believed their therapist was biased against their worldview, most still felt they benefited from therapy but simply had to account for their therapists’ biases. Interestingly, these individuals often said that the discussion itself was ultimately valuable, even though the advice their therapists gave them was less valuable.

How Bias Functions in the Therapy Room

In my conversations with therapists, they often use the phrase “client-guided therapy.” Therapists seem to view their clients as having the power in the interaction and their own role as simply guiding clients in the direction those clients choose.

Among the clients I spoke to, almost no one viewed therapy this way. They saw their therapists as having almost all of the power in the space. They believed or hoped that their therapists had either the answers or the tools to help them address what was troubling them. 

Many of the people I spoke to said they felt directed by the therapist, through nonverbal signals, into which areas of their lives the therapist wanted to discuss. One client mentioned that whenever she complained about her parents, the therapist would sit up and lean in. This individual was a teenager forced into therapy by her parents. She was trying to manipulate the therapist so she could quickly get out of therapy, and she found that responding to those nonverbal cues made it much more likely to get a good report from the therapist to her parents. 

Most participants, of course, were not trying to manipulate their therapists. But they also described similar responses when they discussed parents, childhood trauma, and religion. Several told me they consciously recognized these signals and believed it was their therapists’ way of communicating which issues they should discuss to get to the root of their problems. Almost none of them resented their therapists for doing this or saw it as a harmful practice. 

One of the people who described her therapist as neutral also told me that the first time she mentioned her religion, the therapist’s follow-up question was “When did your religion first make you feel guilty?”

As you might expect, people overwhelmingly reported that their therapists asked questions aimed at finding problems. But my conversations suggest that the combination of therapy’s problem-focused framework, paired with therapists’ specific areas of interest, leads many clients to find problems in those areas at elevated rates. Most of those who reported their therapist being interested in those areas of their life believed the actual problem that needed fixing was in those areas. 

When I used a word other than boundary, I did get a handful of people who described limits around what they would discuss with their therapists: Two women explained to their therapists early on that they had no problems with their spouses, and had no interest in exploring those relationships; one client said something similar about her mother; and one said the same thing about her faith. Still, only a small minority specifically directed their therapist away from parts of their lives they believed were working. 

If the clients do not make their value systems explicit, therapists have no framework for their questions. When interviewees described their early therapy sessions, they reported being asked questions which often presupposed a value system grounded in Rogerian humanism and expressive individualism—most commonly, questions aimed at identifying what was preventing the client from expressing their most authentic selves.

So it’s not that therapists retreated to a truly neutral position (if such a thing exists); there appears to be a default value setting that therapists revert to when they are not directed otherwise by their clients. Questions from this worldview appeared among the questions asked to every person I interviewed, regardless of whether they believed their therapist was neutral or not. While I don’t personally believe those worldviews are inherently antagonistic to parental relationships or religion, there is also no legitimate therapeutic reason to replace a client’s value system with those worldviews. 

I have not had nearly the same breadth of conversation with therapists as I have had with clients. But I suspect it’s these mechanisms that allow therapists to honestly say they are neutral and don’t direct their clients, even as their clients report a very different experience. 

Although many people see therapy as “settled science,” there is relatively little research that supports the kinds of therapy most people engage in. Therapy has significant potential, and it has done much good for many people that I spoke to. These conversations I have had with therapy clients should not be taken as anti-therapy, but instead as useful insights that therapists can integrate into their work. The field is still largely exploratory. Asking these kinds of questions and looking for how therapy impacts other arenas of life is exactly what good researchers and journalists should be doing. You can believe that therapy is a net good for society, and still believe that, given its incredible influence in our lives and its rapid ascent in our culture, therapy deserves more attention and critique, not less. 

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Questions are curious things. They bring us into dialogue with others—this one, with Deity. 

This particular question is still one of the most important. This question is meant to save. Adam and Eve didn’t discover their nakedness on their own. Lucifer told them about it, and he reframed their relationship to their bodies. In that reframing, he also shifted their relationship to God. For the first time, they were ashamed of the very bodies God had given them. Their aprons of fig leaves represented a self-made identity—what Adam and Eve constructed when they accepted someone else’s story about who they were. But for Adam and Eve and for each of us, God’s question is not an accusation. It’s an invitation to examine whose story you are living in.

Someone handed you a story about your body, about what it means. You’ve been living inside that story ever since. You probably didn’t notice. Today, there are three stories about our bodies that tend to be prominent. The first is the oldest and, in many ways, the hardest to shake. It begins not with a question but with a verdict.

Cover Up: Self as Born Evil

Verdict One: You are born evil. What is it like to believe that? It must be exhausting. Every bodily appetite is a threat. Every desire is a battle. It starts with the belief that the physical world, which includes your body, is but a shadow of a truer reality. That better reality is the afterlife. Your body is a shadow that holds you back. This is where we get the idea of “mind over matter”: the mind is pure, but the body is deficient and requires mastery. The logic goes like this: if the body is unholy and you come into this world with a body, you must be born unholy and in sin. This sets the stage for infant baptism; you are born evil and need immediate redemption. (The scripture most often enlisted for this verdict, “the natural man is an enemy to God,” is not a bodily verdict; when read in full, Mosiah 3:19 is a call back to childlike faith, not a condemnation of the flesh.)

This story creates a schism between your mind and your body. You are not to trust your body. You, in fact, live in the enemy. So you are tempted to hate it. You wish it were different, or you wish it away. You certainly don’t trust it. You may start to think your body is “the enemy of God” or “the natural man.” And since your body is drawn physically to other bodies for comfort or connection, you become suspicious of other people, too. 

Viewing the body as the enemy creates an unhealthy relationship with yourself, your body, and others. You feel suspicious and wary of physical connection with others. You start to think of others as temptations. Statements like “She is the great temptress” and “He is just a pig” begin to feel normal. You simply don’t trust yourself or others, and the story gives you reasons for that: many have fallen into the pleasures of the body and found it hard to recover. The verdict hardens into some kind of lived certainty. Your body cannot be anything other than evil.

Your worship becomes marked by discontent with yourself and with others. That discontent creates suspicion in every relationship, including your relationship with God. When God places people in your path to nurture you, you may dismiss them because closeness feels dangerous. This is the path of loneliness. Your orientation toward God comes from a place of necessary shame. You reject the gift of mortality as inherently evil; the very instrument God gave you to experience life becomes, in this story, a weight pulling you under.

In this story, you externalize goodness and internalize evil. The downstream consequence is that you lose confidence in God’s presence. The short message is “Cover up; you’re shameful.”

And here is the thing about serious psychological damage: it also generates its opposite. When a story produces enough casualties—in this case, people who learned to hate their bodies and came to God already ashamed—a counterstory rises to correct it. The second story is that counter-story. For many people, it is the first time they feel free. And that’s exactly why it’s so persuasive and exactly why it’s worth examining carefully.

Nothing to Cover: Self as Born Good

Verdict Two: You are born good. Every person is essentially good and cannot be anything other than good. This is a revolutionary idea. And for people who grew up ashamed of their bodies, that verdict feels like a breath of fresh air. Think about it. Someone finally says, “The problem was never you.” Any guilt you may have felt was handed to you. In fact, you didn’t arrive broken; rather, you were made broken by the system, the institution, or anyone who wanted to make you manageable. Now, however, you stand taller. You stop apologizing for being you. That feeling matters more than anything else you have felt in a long time.

If you’ve ever been labeled “bad,” this story says the badness actually isn’t in you. Whatever “badness” exists comes from the outside, from societal ills imposed on you. What are those societal ills? Whenever groups of people, hierarchies, patriarchies, or institutions want you to act a certain way, this story says they are attempting to control you. Controlled behavior is inauthentic behavior. But because you are born good, whatever you want to do with your body, regardless of external pressures, is also good. As long as you’re free to be yourself, you’ll flourish. 

So who are you, truly? According to this story, you are whoever you choose to be. You are the source of good. Whatever you choose must also be good. That is the essence of the authentic self: the self that fully trusts itself to create its own identity. Because you are the ultimate authority on who you are, no one else will ever fully get you. The absurd end of this line of thinking is for billions of selves, each fundamentally different, to be fundamentally alone. Alone because no one else can ever fully be you. Your self is only truly comprehensible to yourself. This type of expressive individualism is sung from the rooftops with pop lyrics such as “I can buy myself flowers…I can love me better than you can.” But this is not so much a pop lyric as a philosophy of life.

In the 2022 worldwide devotional “Choices for Eternity,” President Russell M. Nelson, then president of The Church of Jesus Christ, addressed these premises directly, teaching that your identity is not whoever you choose to be. He identified three enduring designations—child of God, child of the covenant, disciple of Jesus Christ—and taught “no identifier should displace, replace, or take priority” over them. 

And yet, if you scroll far enough, a counterorthodoxy appears: “No one gets to tell me who I am.” “Cut the toxic people out of your life.” “You are enough, just as you are.” “Your only obligation is to yourself.” These aren’t just slogans. They are popular expressions of a serious philosophical tradition. That’s precisely why they need to be answered seriously, not dismissed.

But this liberation is false, for one simple reason: it is lonely. In your desire to be free, you free yourself from everyone. You internalize goodness and externalize evil. You stop seeking to change. The short message is “There’s nothing to cover.” Notice what both stories share. One says you are broken; the other says you are complete. One says, “Trust nothing in yourself”; the other says, “Trust nothing outside yourself.” They are mirror images. They produce mirror outcomes: isolation dressed in different clothes. Those who hate their bodies and those who worship self-expression can end up in the same place: alone, with an identity that doesn’t quite fit. You wonder why neither shame nor self-worship has made you feel whole. That is the hinge. Both of these stories begin with a verdict. The third, however, begins before the verdict.

Clothed by Another: Self as Born Innocent

The third story is that the verdict is not out yet. The restored gospel of Jesus Christ teaches that you are born innocent. You have the potential to be both good and evil. You are neither fixed as good nor condemned as evil. You are open. That openness is the space where agency lives. This is not a revolutionary idea; it is a restorative one. From this perspective, your body is a gift from God, a temple, and an essential component of the plan of salvation. As with Adam and Eve, you begin making choices between good and evil after a period of innocence. You arrive in this world with no verdict against you, only a readiness to be in relationship. Mormon declared plainly, “Little children are whole, for they are not capable of committing sin,” condemning the notion that any child comes into the world under condemnation. Doctrine and Covenants 93 further declares, “Every spirit of man was innocent in the beginning.” 

Every person in your life shows you part of yourself. But no one shows you all of it. And what lies in the unseen parts is not always comfortable. A man who spent years in a Soviet prison camp put it better than most. In “The Gulag Archipelago,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the line between good and evil passing through every human heart:

Gradually, it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil. 

Here is why this matters to you right now: good and evil are not relative terms because a power outside you brings knowledge of both. As Mormon taught: 

The Spirit of Christ is given to every man, that he may know good from evil; … every thing which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ…But whatsoever thing persuadeth men to do evil, and believe not in Christ,…ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of the devil.’

This Light doesn’t just help you choose between good and evil. It also orients you toward the relationships through which your choices help you become most fully yourself. Emmanuel Levinas spent a career arguing that it is the face of another that calls you into responsibility. That call draws forth a self you couldn’t have assembled on your own. He was right about the structure, even if he didn’t have the full theology to complete it. You discover who you truly are in a covenant relationship with God, with a spouse, and with a community. That is your true identity. Elder D. Todd Christofferson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles taught that “the highest and deepest sense of belonging is obtained through keeping covenants with God.” Thus, the self is not found by looking inward but by being drawn outward into relationship.

Think of your best friend. Now imagine that person disappears from your life. You would grieve the loss of that friend, of course, but that’s not all you would lose. You would also lose a particular version of yourself that only that friend could bring out. You may have stood in front of a mirror trying to summon that version and found that it doesn’t work because this person is, in a very real sense, a partial owner of your personality. They have access to dimensions of you that you yourself cannot unlock, and that is precisely why you love your friend. You didn’t just love the person. You loved who you became in their presence. And that loss you just imagined—that’s not just grief for a person. It’s grief for a self.

Different people draw out different parts of you, some of which may genuinely surprise you or even frighten you. This is why surrounding yourself with a diverse group of people is one of the most powerful paths to self-knowledge, not because they tell you who you are but because in their presence, you discover who you are. You discover your possibilities for doing good and evil. But no human relationship, however rich, shows you the whole of what you are.

Consider what it means to be seen completely by Christ. Not just dimensions. All of it. The parts you perform for others, the parts you hide from yourself, the parts that haven’t emerged yet because you haven’t been in the right presence to call them out. If every human relationship reveals you partially, then complete self-knowledge requires a relationship with a being of complete knowledge. No human relationship, however deep, gives you back a complete self. Only one relationship does. That is why the covenant isn’t a transaction. It is the condition of your fullest becoming. And if that is true (if you are only fully yourself in His presence), then the question is no longer whether to surrender. It is only whether you are ready to do so. 

So what does innocence ask of you? It asks you to stop hiding. The fig leaves were never just about nakedness; they were about control—about managing what God and others were allowed to see. To receive the covering He offers, you have to release that control. You have to come out from behind the identity you constructed for yourself and stand where Adam and Eve stood: seen, vulnerable, and waiting. That is the surrender. His purpose has never been to expose or condemn, but, as He declared to Moses, “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.”

So here is the question He is still asking—not as an accusation or as a test, but as an invitation. Who told you that you were naked? Whose story have you been living in, the one that says you are broken, or the one that says you need no one? Neither story is His. He has a different one. It begins with innocence. It moves through covenant. And it ends with you, clothed by Him. 

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