Personal Touch

Welcome to the Neighborhood News

Today is our last Personal Touch scheduled on a Wednesday. Starting next week, we’re moving to Mondays. We’ll also be featuring tougher, more intriguing issues, mingled with the usual ones.


Rebecca Cressman interviewed Greg Hudnall for today’s Personal Touch. Greg Hudnall is Director of Student Services for the Provo City School District. His professional passion is saving young lives by giving adolescents considering suicide the option of hope and healing from depression and mental illness. Greg helped found the community volunteer-based Hope Task Force for Suicide Prevention and now serves on the State of Utah Suicide Prevention Task Force. He is also the executive director for the State Crisis Team for schools, and is currently working on his doctorate dissertation, which is creating a K-12 suicide prevention manual for public schools.


As you may have guessed, we’re talking about teen suicide in today’s newsletter.

Our first contributor is Kimberly Job. Kimberly blogs in “Scribbled Scraps”. She contributed this piece entitled “A Cry for Help”, and mentions her son coming home from school and talking about a friend that had killed himself. She says: “As I sat down with him, the story he told me filled me with sorrow and made me reflect on my own life, and what I could do as a mother to avoid something so tragic happening in my family.” We watch it on the news, or read it on the papers, about teens taking their own lives. And we ponder what could have gone so wrong, that they just didn’t run to somebody for help.


Are we as a society so far gone, so jaded and uncaring that we don’t see the suffering of others? Especially our teenagers, our future. I'm afraid we're building a society that teaches our children to only care about themselves. I've heard of children who've gone to school and have not been addressed in any way, by their peers or adults. They feel ostracized, alone, without friends. Would they not try to build walls then, just to not get hurt? I can see that there are few alternatives, and some of them include harm, to either oneself, or others.


The next entry is from Elder M. Russell  Ballard, in his talk “Some Things We Know, and Some We Do Not.” He’d gone to the funeral of someone who’d committed suicide, and visited with the family. He said: “A comment by the youngest son captured the despair they all felt: “There is no hope for dad now, is there,” he said. It was more a statement than a question. “All the good things he did throughout his life don’t matter anymore. Now that he’s taken his life, he will be in the telestial kingdom throughout eternity.” Then he wept.


"The feelings expressed then by those family members are commonly felt by Latter-day Saints trying to cope with the suicide of a loved one or friend. The anguish and uncertainty they experience are extremely painful and difficult”. What should be comforting to all of us is to know that we won’t be the ones judging, and their fate is left to Jesus Christ to decide.


Our last entry is from John Dehlin, from “Mormon Stories Podcast”. John talks about suicide and depression in his article "Teen Suicide in Utah," and gives a lot of numbers and backs up his findings with good research. The numbers alone are overwhelming. We need to learn more about what makes someone go so low that their own lives are not important enough to save.


We would love to hear from you. Please write your thoughts in the comments section of the newsletter.


To view a copy of the Neighborhood News for Wednesday, 12 May’s, please click here.

Personal Touch

Welcome to the Neighborhood News!

In today’s Personal Touch interview, Rebecca Cressman touches bases with Mike Bell, who is passionate about mobilizing and motivating churches and groups to step into the lives of their global neighbors to experience Christian love in its fullness. He has traveled throughout the world doing exactly that as the National Director for Hungry For Life U.S., a global relief and development organization. For ten years prior he served as an associate Pastor at South Mountain Community Church in Draper, Utah. He is now leading a small group from that church to Kupenda, Kenya where for 11 days the group will partner with a Christian Kenyan charity called “Kupenda for the Children” and build a school dormitory for several dozen disabled boys. Kupenda, fittingly, means “to love” in the Kiswahili language.

Secrets have a way of getting out. Sometimes it’s an innocent mistake, a slip of the tongue, someone gets suspicious, and the cat is out of the bag. Just watch the news and see all these celebrities getting red in their faces, because someone let it slip that they were being ‘naughty’.


We have a special guest today, someone who had a trial of her faith in her life, someone who decided to come forth and share with us this very painful personal experience. Because of the kind of information she’s giving: dealing with pornography, the effects of it in her life, its consequences, and to protect members of her family, she decided to do it anonymously. We hope that this sharing will be accepted as a valuable information and a means to grow spiritually by reading from somebody else’s experience. How do you cope with something like this? How do you pick up the pieces and keep going? If you’d like to leave a comment, please do.


Our next article comes from Sare, a contributor to “Feminist Mormon Housewives” who shares with us her own heart wrenching experience dealing with pornography, and the consequences that come from following in that self-destructing road.


The last article was written by Rory C. Reid, and posted at LDS.org. He says that “success is possible. As a psychotherapist counseling numerous clients struggling to overcome a pornography habit, I have observed several common denominators among those who have successfully abandoned pornography.”


Here at yourLDSneighborhood.com we are going to bring to the forefront all those issues that we may not be talking much about. As Denise Rust said “we think it is incredibly important to address difficult topics that we all deal with, although we often keep those parts of our lives hidden.” With that in mind, we hope that this issue of the newsletter will be able to help someone in need. Please pass it along, talk about it, bring it up. We never know who may be edified, or helped with a heavy load, or shown the road to recovery.


To view a copy of Monday, 26 April's Neighborhood News, click here.