Personal Reflection

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Being able to sit back and think on something like a note, a list, a choice made or just a reflection in a mirror, it's great to be able to not only relate to it, but share our thoughts with others.

The following excerpt comes from the article A Reflection on Gratitude, by Michelle Van Tassell:

"One morning I was doing laundry when I caught a glance of myself in a mirror. The reflection surprised me. I had not showered or groomed for the day, and as I looked at myself, I thought I was lucky that anyone would want to wake up next to me every day. For the first time, I found myself feeling grateful to my husband for loving me. I examined myself with new eyes and thought about our marriage from his perspective. The revelation that followed had little to do with bad hair and no makeup but much to do with my behavior. I considered all the contention I had introduced into our home. For the first time, I felt real gratitude for my husband—he had continued to love me even though I had been critical and ungrateful. 

"That simple moment changed my perspective as well as my relationship with my husband. Now, years later, we share the intimacies I once coveted in other marriages. My husband and I still retain our different backgrounds and our own preferences and mannerisms, but I stopped dwelling on issues I couldn’t change. The peace of the Spirit has returned to our home, and I am grateful for the witness I received to marry my husband."

What kind of reflection do we see in the mirror? Do we like what we see, or hate it?  Do we agree with what we see of ourselves?

To see the Neighborhood News for Monday, 11 July, please click here.

We welcome your comments. Post by clicking the link below.

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.