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Happy New Year! Were you fortunate enough to have sung “Ring Out Wild Bells” (Hymn 215) in Sacrament Meeting yesterday? Or added it to your Home Church service?  It’s a true favorite of mine, although it is suitable for only the few days surrounding New Years.  If you haven’t sung it yet, there’s still time!  The haunting melody with lyrics by the great poet Alfred Lord Tennyson is the ultimate New Year’s resolution list for every nation …

Question

I am married to a wonderful husband. We were married for ten years before we had children and it was wonderful. He really is my favorite person and a good man. The problem is, he is not a very good parenting partner. We have five small children, and I am a stay-at-home mom. I always dreamed of this and I would not change it for anything in the world! But parenting so many small children, especially during a pandemic with no outside help, is mentally and physically exhausting. My husband is the only one I can turn to for relief and he resents it. He told me that because I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, it should be my job to take care of the kids. He has little to no patience with them and just yells at them.

I do not like asking for his help because …

There’s a fun science experiment that teaches an important gospel lesson. In fact, it’s a great activity for a Family Home Evening. All you need is half a dozen raisins and a glass of soda.

Make sure the raisins are separated, then drop them into the glass of soda. Wait a moment, and you’ll see the raisins sink to the bottom because they’re more dense than the soda pop. But, as the drink releases carbon dioxide bubbles, they attach to the rough surface of the raisins. Soon the bubbles become little flotation devices; they make the raisin more buoyant, and up it floats to the top again. But now the bubbles pop. Suddenly the raisin falls back to the bottom again. Up and down they go, until your soda is flat.

Now let’s assign some symbolism. Let’s say the raisins are church members. We want them baptized, and then to …

The following is excerpted from the Church News. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.

Paraphrasing Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles said during the closing session of April 2018 general conference, “The most memorable moments in life are those in which we feel the rush of revelation.”

“President Nelson, I don’t know how many more ‘rushes’ we can handle this weekend. Some of us have weak hearts,” Elder Holland continued with characteristic jest. “But as I think about it, you can take care of that too. What a prophet!”

Earlier that conference — President Russell M. Nelson’s first as 17th President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — two new Apostles were sustained, priesthood quorums were restructured, and ministering replaced home and visiting teaching. During his closing remarks, President Nelson would announce seven …

To read more from Rodger, visit HIS BLOG.

We live in a world of change. That’s nothing new. It’s always been so. And the only way to make sense of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

That’s not to say that change is easy or without risk. Most studies show a 60% to 70% failure rate for organizational change projects. That disheartening rate has stayed fairly constant since the early 1970s.

Fortunately, some smart practitioners have figured out how to beat the odds. One of them is Dr. Michael Canic. He’s president of Making Strategy Happen, a consulting firm that helps committed leaders transform ambition into strategy and strategy into reality.

A specialist in the psychology of human performance, Michael is author of Ruthless Consistency: How Leaders Execute Strategy, Implement Change, and Build Organizations That Win.

In this conversation, Michael explains how …

Dropping off a plate of cookies, leaving a kind note, wishing a neighbor a Merry Christmas. These simple holiday traditions lift the spirits of the recipients, but new BYU research shows that such small acts of kindness can also improve the mental health of the giver.

In a study of how people felt before and after serving their neighbors for a period of four weeks, researchers found that things like chatting with someone from the porch or watering their plants lowered participants’ reported levels of loneliness.

“I get tons of people asking me what we can do during the pandemic to try to stay connected and stave off loneliness,” said BYU psychology professor Julianne Holt-Lunstad, who co-led the project. “Conducting this experiment during pandemic conditions—which we didn’t originally plan—we found that people can experience significant reductions in loneliness even in tough times just by doing things that are easy, free …

As we bid farewell to 2020, let’s look at the 15 best-read articles of the year, purely selected mathematically by click throughs from you as Meridian readers. Our top article received 350,000 reads, and there are consistently pages that draw Meridian readers first—the Podcast page, the news page and all Come Follow Me study aids.

Of note is that the articles on social issues had a real draw this year for readers, in part because we have been in such an upheaval, and we are all searching for a little clarity. We’d like to prepare for it, understand it, talk about it, escape from it.

If you have missed any of these articles, here’s a chance to look at them, now, and as we look to 2021, we expect even more top quality reads.

1. 10 Things the Devil Does not want you to know about the Book of Mormon

There is a bit of cynicism that lingers around the act of making New Year’s resolutions. Many make their list of goals for the year knowing full well that they didn’t succeed last year, and they likely won’t this year either. Were it not the time of COVID, the gyms would be chock full in January and empty again by February.

I’ve certainly had some of the same goals make their annual appearance on my list with nearly unaltered wording from the year before. I’ve hoped to lose that extra weight since I was about 15. I’ve been trying to complete Pioneer Book’s yearly reading challenge every year for the past six without ever once succeeding. I want to work on the languages I’m learning with more regularity and improve my cooking skills. So far, no good.

“The ancient Babylonians are said to have been the first people to make …

The following is excerpted from the Church News. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.

In the year 2020 alone President Nelson has issued numerous stirring, inspiring and challenging invitations to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and to the people of the world.

We discussed a number of these invitations including:

200^th anniversary of the First Vision

President Nelson began Jan. 1, 2020, with a Facebook post which reminded members of the Church of his invitation from the previous October general conference. He invited, “I extended to you at last general conference to immerse yourself in the glorious light of the Restoration of the gospel.” He went on to say that the bicentennial celebration, commemorating the appearance of God the Father and His Beloved Son, Jesus Christ, to Joseph Smith in a vision would be, “a hinge point in the history of the Church …

My mother is almost ninety-five and hard to buy gifts for. She always says, “Don’t buy me things. I probably have everything I need, and if I don’t, I will get it when I need it.”

So, for Christmas, my wife, Donna, suggested we take Mom out for dinner, and that I spend some time doing things Mom wanted to do. So, one evening when Donna had a casting meeting for a play she is directing, we picked up my Mom and took her to a buffet restaurant.

We went before the dinner crowd came, so there weren’t many people there. There was a large variety of food, and we ate heartily. Sometimes Mom wanted to try something, but not enough to get it, so I would put some on my plate. Then she would take what she wanted and leave me the rest.

This caused some challenges. Sometimes Mom …