Kyra Moon

Our house is almost done! Weather permitting, we should be moving in on Saturday. It will be really exciting to live somewhere new and beautiful. But almost as exciting will be having access to my maternity box. When we moved in we packed a lot of boxes in the shed. For some reason, that one has been hidden so well that there's been no way to access it. For a while, of course, that was fine. But as the weeks progressed, I was getting more and more desperate, resorting to keeping jeans together with hair elastics when I went out in public. So the last time we went to DI I tried on some $4 maternity jeans. Compared to the nausea inducing tightness of my usual jeans, these felt like freedom and pure bliss. I bought them without a second thought. But it was the same story as always. These maternity pants were still invented by the devil. Come to think of it, they're probably what everyone is assigned to wear in realms where the devil has power. Welcome to Spirit Prison or hell or t...

Back in December, Kevin and I spoke in church. Here's the meat of my talk (my introduction was a little long since I had to remind them all about the time I cracked an [empty] egg on the pulpit when I was 13). I have thought a lot about the topic of establishing Zion in our families and ward, and I believe that we begin by establishing Zion in our own hearts. As Sister Reyna I. Aburto said in her talk “With One Accord”: “Even though we may not have seen our Savior with our physical eyes, we can know that He lives. As we draw closer to Him ... the love of God will dwell in our hearts; we will have the determination to be one in the kaleidoscopes of our families, wards, and communities; and we will minister to each other “in newer, better ways.”” In King Benjamin’s address to the Nephites, he makes similar promises. He teaches that if we repent and always remember God’s love for us, then “ye will not have a mind to injure one another, but to live peaceably, and to render to every man...

I just remembered this essay I wrote about a year and a half ago in Connecticut and thought it deserved an easily accessible home before I forgot about it forever. Enjoy! Once, while my son was working on a puzzle, he asked me how the puzzle makers knew what to put on each puzzle piece so the picture would form. I explained that the picture came first and that the pieces were just cut from a preexisting image. At times, I have treated life as a preexisting image cut into puzzle pieces that have to go in the correct place. This idea was reinforced by a letter from a missionary in which he suggested that God "micromanaged" our lives so that we would be standing in the right spot to talk to the right person. I extrapolated that He would micromanage further so we would marry the right person, live in the right places, and meet the right people. But with this mindset comes pressure to do things exactly right. After all, when working on an intricate puzzle, the end result can be sp...