Sandra began visiting The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when she was about 10 years old with her Grandma, a kind woman who was searching for something better after two painful divorces due to partner infidelity. What both Sandra and her Grandma found was not perfection, but they did find a context where two “peculiar” standards were explicitly named and idealized: (1) the law of chastity that required that sex be kept inside the bounds of traditional marriage, and (2) the word of wisdom forbidding the use of alcohol and illicit drugs.

At only 10 years of age, Sandra had found the faith she desired. She wanted to be baptized and become a member. Her Dad, a man of deep integrity and honesty who believed in keeping promises, asked her to wait to make baptismal covenants until she was 18. So, she attended church for eight years on her own with the help of her Mother, who lined up rides for Sandra with a friend who belonged to the faith.

Sandra applied to BYU while not yet an official member of the church she had come to love. She was admitted to BYU, then turned 18 and was baptized. With hair almost literally still wet from baptism, Sandra chose to attend BYU. As valedictorian of a large high school in Spokane, Washington, she had scholarship opportunities elsewhere, but she wanted to see and learn about how her new faith worked “up close.” Sandra remembers, “My first ever Family Home Evening was with other BYU students and included prayer, a devotional, and a fun activity.” It was a far cry from the sex, drugs, and booze scene she had witnessed at her Pacific Northwest high school. Referring to her Family Home Evening group and BYU Singles Ward, she asked, “Where else could you go school-wise and step into an immediate, organized, and socially structured group where college boys and girls serve each other and are served by each other?”

Upon arrival at BYU, Sandra remembers that there were a few BYU students she knew who did not honor the law of chastity and the word of wisdom. Sandra saw her share of both hypocrisy and self-righteousness. However, Sandra also saw roommates who imperfectly but honestly strived to live out their faith’s ideals and BYU’s aims. She saw roommates who studied their scriptures, prayed privately, and served others when they believed no one was watching. During her first week at BYU, one of her roommates, who missed her family prayers, recommended that the roommates have “apartment prayer” together each night. Sandra recalled, “At first, I thought it was peculiar and strange, but when I heard my roommates praying personally for me, I felt a closeness and a kinship that really lifted and helped me.” It would help set a pattern for the family prayers Sandra now has with her own children and husband each night.

During an early bout of homesickness while at BYU, Sandra said, “My Family Home Evening group of three guys and four girls asked me to go to Moab with them for some hiking and mountain biking. It was a platonic and uplifting experience.” A life-long friend named April, now a cancer survivor and mother of six, resulted from this group.  While having a ball on the Moab trip with her Family Home Evening group, Sandra found herself asking, “How many college camping trips involve zero sex and alcohol?” Many young adults might yawn thinking about a G-rated adventure. However, given the significant fallout Sandra had witnessed from unbridled sex and alcohol abuse, the context was a peaceful contrast.

In BYU classrooms, Sandra had a few forgettable, lukewarm professors, but she also had some exemplary professors who “bathed” their respective subject in “the light of the Gospel” and then went further and learned Sandra’s name, some of her story, and strengthened her budding faith.

As a recent convert who had only one semester of Seminary (daily religious education for Latter-day Saint high schoolers), BYU’s religion classes were often meaningful for her. Sandra did not care for the occasional focus on pedantic details instead of on the expansive scope of the Gospel she had come to love. “I thought that approach was dumb then, and I still do,” she said. However, she loved Professor Camille Fronk Olsen’s “passionate” approach to faith in general and the New Testament in particular. Twenty years later, Sandra bumped into Professor Olsen, who recognized Sandra and warmly greeted her. It is something Sandra will always remember.

“Being a convert with no home-based religious experience and almost no Seminary experience, my religion classes taught me how to study and learn from the scriptures. My testimony of Jesus grew.”

In addition to Camille Fronk Olsen, another woman who had a lasting impact on Sandra was (then) head women’s basketball coach Sondra “Soni” Adams, who was inducted into the University of Utah Hall of Fame in 2023. “Soni did not just teach a ‘class,’” Sandra recalled, “she gave me personal feedback as a person, teacher, and coach and emphasized character above all else.” Sandra has since coached a number of teams ranging from six-year-old beginners to varsity high school squads, where the same emphasis on character has remained central.

Sandra has never forgotten that the vast majority of her undergraduate tuition and 100% of her tuition as a graduate student at BYU was paid for by tithing funds from her sisters and brothers in the faith—a truly unrepayable mountain of sacred debt.

How has Sandra tried to repay her unpayable debts? She has been able to serve in the lay-member-operated Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in four states over the last 30 years, including service in Primary (Children’s), Young Women, and Relief Society (Women) presidencies at both local and regional levels. In these efforts and experiences, she has drawn heavily on organizational skills she saw modeled during her early and formative BYU years, by faculty and her peers, and by BYU ward members whose influence remains in her life three decades later.

“Why did I want to teach at BYU?” Sandra asked. “Because of the positive influence my teachers and peers had on me … I wanted to be a part of that again, this time from the teaching end. I wanted to pay it forward.”

The second Sunday of most months is “BYU Sunday” in Sandra’s kitchen,  when Sandra serves up a home-cooked meal to anywhere between a handful to 30 students. These gatherings often include the children of her old BYU friends like April, who has had three of her own kids come to BYU from Oregon. Sandra explained, “I want to return the friendship to these students that their parents gave to me.” There are often other dinner attendees as well—students from her classes who may have had a rough week or month. “I want them to know that they are loved and belong.” She said.

In terms of ideals, Sandra finds it intriguing that the very ideals of the law of chastity and the word of wisdom that powerfully drew her initially to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and then to BYU are the same ideals that often draw fire and ire from others. Sandra understands that her beloved church and school may not be the love or choice of others, but they have blessed her deeply, and she hopes that she can relay similar blessings to others.

Sandra’s life experiences have led her to be grateful that BYU does make some peculiar demands. She readily admits that is a university that asks a great deal—but as she has learned, so does excellence in any endeavor. Sandra holds a hope that students and faculty who come to BYU will remember and embrace its “Christ-centered and prophetically directed” mission and that they will be beneficially challenged in life-changing ways as she has been.

Sandra is not the only student who feels an “unrepayable debt” to BYU and to the faithful tithe payers who subsidize the vast majority of this educational experience. Of the nearly 700K alumni across BYU’s three campuses, most are grateful for their time in these unique and even sacred settings. Like Sandra, many present and past alumni have seen ripple effects in their own lives—and in the lives of those they “go forth to serve.”

As we finish our time with this remarkable convert student turned professor, we can justifiably ask for a confessed fatal flaw or two. “Well, my husband tells me that I am a BYU Creamery ice cream addict,” Sandra admits. Her rebuttal? “I tell him that ice cream is my osteoporosis prevention program … but you better not put that in the article.”

The post Bright Days at BYU: The Story of a Convert Student Who Became a Professor appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

We should defend the importance of the family as a stabilizing force in society—a spiritual and emotional respite. However, paradoxically, there is another argument for why we should be grateful for the influence of the family: there is no respite from your own big brother, and there is little stability in your relationship with your moody little sister.

Think back to your childhood. You hopefully have fond memories of laughter and play. I hope that those memories are the most vivid for you. However, for the sake of my argument, try to remember the reality of daily life with your family. Maybe your big brother ignored you, your sister was hyper-sensitive, or your dad was hard to please. But the reality of familial discord does not negate the good times. In fact, I argue that it makes them all the more miraculous.

But why would we want to defend families if this is the case? As we learn in Romans 5 and hear so often over the pulpit, suffering breeds character. “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.”

Chesterton emphasizes the conflict implicit in family life not as a discouragement against family but as an enticement to those of us who genuinely want self-improvement, “The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind (to test his goodness) would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And this is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.” 

Why Familial Loyalty is Crumbling

Modern thinkers often reject the family because of the conflict and clashing personalities that are so often found there. They say it thwarts happiness and dampens freedom. Many feel we should be able to choose our associations rather than have to deal with unfavorable family relations. This is why we see more people breaking away from family. Indeed, one in four adults now say they are estranged from a family member. A recent article in the New Yorker discusses the reasons why an increasing number of people are having “no contact” with their parents. This is due in large part to shifting political or religious ideals or the inability to get along. Rather than condemning this trend, the author seemed to conclude that there is no way out for many families. One secular estranged daughter said of her religious parents, “Reconciliation, for me, would mean them doing a bunch of work, and I don’t think they’re going to, so I just need to move forward like it’s not going to happen.” And so, the estranged move into like-minded communities, read their favorite political pundits, and become comfortable with their chosen clan. 

Family reconciliation demands work—work that is continual and difficult for all involved. Many don’t seem willing to make that sacrifice anymore. The Christian values of forgiveness and humility seem outdated and we would rather just have a life of ease. But a life that is surrounded only by people who make us comfortable is a small world indeed. As Chesterton says, “We make our friends, we make our enemies, but God makes our next-door neighbor … That is why the old religions and the old scriptural language showed so sharp a wisdom when they spoke, not of one’s duty toward humanity, but one’s duty to one’s neighbor.” 

“Progress” is one of our favorite words, but we just don’t hear much about “becoming a good person.” Yet, if we want progress, surely the only path toward it is for individuals to improve themselves and become virtuous. Throughout human history, the quest for “goodness” has been the driver of great minds as well as common men and women. Great thinkers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle spent their lives seeking to define and comprehend virtue and to teach us how to live a “good” life. Their intellectual descendants in philosophy, theology, and literature have long tried to work out the way to virtue. Guiding children onto the path of goodness was once the backbone of education. Plato even defined education this way, “Education is teaching our children to desire the right things.”

Our children are now being schooled without the benefit of McGuffey Readers. Many of their lessons would seem judgmental or overly prescriptive to our modern relativist viewpoint. School curricula rarely mention “virtue” or overcoming adversity but instead focus on achievement and happiness. The traditions and morals of our ancestors crumble, and children are left with endless choices and no clear expectations of life. Children unschooled in virtue may decide that the struggles of family life impede their achievement or happiness. Therefore, we should not be surprised by free-falling marriage and birth rates.

“There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues, the most dominating virtues of human society, are created, strengthened, and maintained.” Winston Churchhill

As Christians, however, we seek after virtue, accept suffering as part of mortality, and desire much greater ambitions than a mortal life of comfort. We want a life that demands things of us, that stretches us—we want an adventure. Chesterton explains, 

Adventure is, by nature, a thing that comes to us. It is a thing that chooses us, not a thing that we choose. The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something of which we have not dreamed before. Our father and mother do lie in wait for us and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush. Our uncle is a surprise. Our aunt is a bolt from the blue. When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family, we step into a fairytale.

If we take control over our lives, free ourselves of pesky relatives, and create a society for ourselves, we will block ourselves from any humbling relationships that aid our virtuous progression. As Chesterton says, we may create a society “for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises. It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge.” 

The “Thrownness” of the Family

German philosopher Martin Heidegger describes our birth into this world as being “thrown” into our lives. We didn’t choose the place or circumstances of our birth nor our relatives and culture. Although there are some theories that premortal souls may have had some choice in their ultimate destination, there is no clear doctrine on this topic. Therefore, we will assume that the ‘throwing’ was done by our Heavenly Father. Seeing that we are often thrown into situations that are difficult and with people with whom we don’t naturally get along, comfort doesn’t seem to be His goal for our lives. Instead, God wants us to become good, to prove we can take the life we are thrown into and turn it into a hero’s epic. 

The home is where most of our heroism must occur. There is a special kind of annoyance that happens in the home, a more potent offense and a more stinging rebuke than found anywhere else in the world. We could travel around the world among diverse cultures and never encounter anyone as incomprehensible as our own sister. We can seek and attain honor and glory on Wall Street but find no one whose opinion matters more to us than our own fastidious father. We may debate opposing ideologies throughout the nation but will find no one’s politics more upsetting than our own Uncle Bob.  

“The family is a good institution because it is uncongenial. It is wholesome precisely because it contains so many divergences and varieties. It is like a little kingdom and, like most other little kingdoms, is generally in a state of something resembling anarchy.” ~ G.K. Chesterton

Perhaps we listen to sweet and idyllic descriptions of the family and think our own family is unique in its chaos and conflict—it isn’t. But that’s okay.

Taking Heidegger’s concept, who has been ‘thrown’ at us that we must learn to deal with? Who were we ‘thrown’ at? More than likely, we were thrown some curve balls. Considering the shared genetics, environment, and culture, it is miraculous how different members of a family can be from one another. Perhaps this diversity was purposely orchestrated by a loving Heavenly Father who knows what we need to progress. 

It’s a sad irony that we would never have been as neglectful of our high-school teacher’s instructions as we were of our beloved mother’s. Our brother would never have treated his friend’s little sister the way he did his own. But, because we deeply loved our mother and, despite his denials, our big brother cherished his little sister—there was, and is, a persistent power present in the family sufficient to enable a deep and lasting change to our character. 

I remember well as a child that my best friend was my sister, who was two years older than me. She was also my worst enemy. She was sweet, quiet, and sensitive. I was overconfident, pushy, and insensitive. This led to some hardship. I remember feeling like she always thought the worst of me. She remembers my rudeness. Years into our adulthood, we would still get into arguments. But I have changed, and so has she. I am less brash and sarcastic than I used to be, and my sister is more resilient than she used to be. It seems reasonable to assume these changes came from varied life experiences, travels, or extensive reading of scripture, psychology, and philosophy. 

But honestly, I think the change came because of our relationship and the slow chipping away of each other’s rough edges. I began to choose not to say things because I didn’t want her to take it the wrong way. She chose to let things go. I believe I am a better person because I had to go through the difficulty of adapting to my sister. We got through our trying and wonderful childhood and are still best friends, but we are no longer worst enemies. 

If we believe this life is a grand adventure—a place to prove ourselves, develop ourselves, and prepare ourselves for even greater tests in life—what better place to become “good” than those places that God “throws” us? In the relationship we did not choose, we will find inconvenient people who help us stretch experiences and grow. The family may be the harshest and most demanding of all tests. 

Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, written 2000 years ago, is full of a Roman emperor’s philosophical rumination on how to be a good man and how to deal stoically with our fellow humans. It’s almost humorous to read how the ruler of a huge empire, whose daily life was filled with conquering armies, political strife, and exotic adventures, has to repeatedly reassure himself he is capable of dealing with everyday interactions with family and associates. He writes, “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. … And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower.”

Goodness is Built at Home

Of all the quests we may take, there is none more primed to lead us on the path of goodness than those inside the walls of our own homes. It is in our home that we become true heroes. It is in our unchosen environments that we test our virtues. If we want to prove ourselves as disciples of Christ, emissaries of love and forgiveness, we must succeed on the battlefield of our own home.

As a mother of five, it is easy for me to be profoundly grateful for my beautiful children and my life full of loving moments. The greatest joys in life come through my family as well as the greatest miseries and strife.  If I can, through the lack of peace and pleasantness, find reconciliation, patience, and love, perhaps I have found the path toward goodness and adventure.

If we ponder the many things we have to be grateful for this Thanksgiving, perhaps we could consider the hardships found in our own homes. Let’s pray for peace and work towards harmony. But let’s also teach our son that if he could just learn to get along with his little sister, ruling Rome would be easy.

Link to the essay for Heretics by G.K. Chesterton, which is quoted at length.

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