Personal Touch

Welcome to the Neighborhood News

In our Personal Touch with Rebecca Cressman segment, she interviews Mark Justice, President of the Castle Valley Pageant. Mark alongside theater directors, producers, technical crew and a cast of hundreds of volunteer actors gather together every other year to portray the trials, triumphs and tragedies of some of the first settlers of Castle Valley Utah, who set out to homestead a vast frontier. The Castle Valley Pageant celebrates the settlers faith in a strange and often unwelcoming land. Volunteers and members of the Daughters of Utah Pioneers host a "pioneer village" exhibit that instructs visitors on the skills required to survive as a pioneer. The first performance of the Castle Valley Pageant occurred on 11 and 12 August 1978. Since then it has grown from a small, simple production into a spectacular event, performed in an outdoor amphitheater with seating for 4,000. This year's Castle Valley Pageant runs through August 7th, 2010.

Our dear Cindy Beck brings to us a personal experience that she relates in her blog ‘Meandering Thougts.’ She calls her article “An Opportunity to Present the Truth”, and narrates a time when she overheard a couple talking about the Mormons. Her options were to keep quiet and let them keep talking, or interrupt and have her opinion heard. Is this something you’ve had to do, let someone know about the Church, or just let it pass, because is not any of your business? Read her story, and you’ll see that she made the right choice.

Since we’re talking about being brave and presenting the Gospel, let me share this blog I found called ‘Flooding the Earth with the Book of Mormon.' The author is Bookslinger, and I like his reasons for posting. In his own words: “My goals in keeping this blog/journal are: to encourage others to offer people copies of the Book of Mormon and the Bible, to illustrate the incredible number of recent immigrants who are eager for bilingual material, to illustrate the ease of encountering them and offering them material, and to make known the wonderful deeds of the Lord (Ps 105:1, Isa 12:4) in arranging many of these encounters.” I think it’s amazing that things like this can be done in this cyberspace age, and some people are in fact trying to spread the Gospel any way they can.

Convert stories are really good for sharing. I’m a convert and someday I will share my own conversion with you, but for now read this one posted by the folks from “Why We Believe”, a new blog from The More Good Foundation. There are many testimonies, so it was hard to choose, but read Keith’s personal conversion and you’ll probably remember your own. It’s my opinion that whether you are a convert or have been born in the Church, there’s a point in time when you go through a process of conversion, and find your own voice, your own testimony.



To view a copy of the Neighborhood News for Monday, 2 August, please click here.


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