Are you sharing Emergency Preparation articles? Last month we talked about evacuation and this month there have been dozens of evacuations due to floods and fires. Do you know anyone who was evacuated? Were they prepared? Did they have things they regretted after evacuating? Share what you learn, you never know who may need it.

As floodwaters recede in Utah, Colorado and the Midwest, the Southeast watches anxiously for a new hurricane season. Now is a good time to be better informed about the huge task of clean up that follows the flooding of your home. Floods can and do happen everywhere from time-to-time, so nobody is immune to that risk. Floodwater is both dangerous and destructive after the initial threat has passed. Starting clean up immediately is the key to preserving health and saving property.

When homes flood, the water can wreak havoc on the structure of your home, …

“Dad, I would really like to go on the band trip to the amusement park this year,” my daughter informed me. I looked at our budget and it was squeezed so tight that I didn’t think we could get one more cent out of it. With the number of children we have, myself on a teaching salary, the concept of free education is a misnomer. If my daughter signed up for band it was only free if she didn’t play an instrument or go on any of the band trips. If my son played football it was only free as long as he didn’t need any pads or gear. If my daughter signed up for track it was only free if she wore her own shoes while everyone else wore cleats. And thus the list went on and on.

Every fall we would start out with hundreds of dollars in …

This article is adapted from Rescuing Wayward Children. Click here to learn more.

Because of their fallen nature, some children do not arrive at the testimony of Jesus Christ and His redeeming gospel easily. They may struggle with spiritual concepts and more readily adopt portions of the prevailing anti-Christ philosophy:

• To discount prophetic teachings and warnings as foolish, and to embrace vain traditions and false hopes that are enslaving
• To view religion as the effect of a frenzied, deranged, or unenlightened mind
• To embrace the idea that men, independently of God, succeed or fail according to individual management, prosper according to individual initiative and genius, and conquer according to individual strength

Our children might imagine that pursuing this philosophy is natural, and thus no crime against man or God.[i]

The Effects of the Fall

Whereas they were born pure and innocent, “whole . . . even from the …

This article is about making cupcakes that taste good.

I’m a decorating dummy.  We have plenty of people that are naturally talented cake decorators, but somehow I missed that line.  I can make reasonably attractive cupcakes by sticking with a few basic techniques. I can make cupcakes that taste good.  And that’s my priority-making them taste good.

And you’ll find some of my favorite “taste good” cupcakes in this post.

How to Make Your Cupcakes Taste Good

You have three strategies at hand:

• Make great cakes.
• Add a filling
• Top it with a fantastic frosting.

The really good cakes, the ones you’ll serve as desserts to out-of-town guests that you want to impress, use all three strategies.

How to Make Great Cakes

Forget the box cake mixes.  They have too much air. The filling and the frosting is going to overwhelm the
cake.  You need balance.

You can make cakes from …

We learn from the Book of Mormon that our whole purpose in life is to experience joy. “Men are that they might have joy.” 1 People look for joy in many places. A certain measure of joy can be found in many things, such as winning a game or doing a job well. A counterfeit joy can be found in the pursuit of pleasure-what the scriptures call “riotous living.”

But in only one place in this world can we experience anything like a full measure of joy, and that is the holy temple.

In the temple we unite our precious families for eternity. In the temple we receive the promise of exaltation. In the temple we feel the presence of our Father in Heaven. And in the temple we encounter our Savior. “We come unto Christ through the ordinances of the temple.” 2

The scriptures always couple the temple with …

Motherhood offers relatively few paydays for services rendered. There is no beginning and no end of any one pay period. There are no bi-weekly checks, no bonuses, no commissions, no opportunities for stock options with this job. You just keep working and working, day in and day out, back-to-back shifts, hoping that one day, maybe just one day there will be some kind of payday for all your efforts.

Take heart, the paydays do exist. But they are often unpredictable, sporadic, and will last you until your next payday to be sure, but you have no idea when that will be.

For example, my newborn recently learned how to smile. Genuinely smile. And not just smile, but he smiled with a coo that made his blue eyes sparkle like the Mediterranean at high noon. That, dear readers, was a payday. When he smiled at me, it was a more than …

How we can feel the spirit.…

Most of us, if asked, “Are you smarter than a 5th grader?” would not deliberate very long before responding, “I sure hope so,” or “I’d better be.” On the other hand, if we were asked, “Are you smarter than a prophet?” our response would likely be, “No chance. The prophet has God giving him the answers.”

Therefore, it is confusing when good, active Latter-day Saints deliberately implement a plan that is in defiance of a prophet. If a prophet said, “Take the Eastern path up the mountain or you’ll encounter an avalanche,” and for some reason I got stuck on the Western Route, I’d have a panic attack. There is so much safety in following a prophet, it’s a true dare-devil that tackles the Western Route.

Recently such dare-devils have asserted they know more than the prophets do about teenagers and dating. They claim, “Sure the prophets have told us …

A new Christian film looks at standing by your religion in under the toughest pressures. It is scheduled to open Oct. 4. Click here for locations.

I attended high school in the “mission field” as it were. There were perhaps 4 or 5 other members of the Church in my school of 4000. In 9^th grade, I was handed a 30-point list by a total stranger, while I was at my locker, of reasons why the Church is not only wrong but evil. In 10^th grade, a boy handing out pretzels stopped before handing me a bag and said, “Wait, are Mormons allowed to have salt?” The grades that followed were full of “How many moms do you have?” and “Are you allowed to dance?” All told, I found my community and my high school and especially my beloved best friends to be very respectful of my religion, …

I’ll never forget my excitement. I was three months into my mission in London and waiting to receive the news of who my second companion would be when I learned I was going to become a trainer. I was stoked. This was my wish. With my new companion, I was confident that nothing could stand in the way of us living up to the legacies of Heber C. Kimball, Wilford Woodruff and the legendary English missionaries of old.

I remember the surprised looks on my zone leaders’ faces when we told them our companionship goal for the month of September was four baptisms. “Are you sure you want to go for four?” “Why don’t you just go for one or two, and then if you achieve it, you can go for four in the next month”? They didn’t believe we could achieve this goal. But we were determined. I thought …