Kyra Moon

I was recently thinking about how much my religion is often as much about the tangible as it is the spiritual. For example, religion asks that we not only have a broken heart and a contrite spirit. It also asks us to take bread and water each week. It asks us not only to follow Jesus and keep His commandments but to put on a jumpsuit and walk into a font of water to get baptized. It asks us not only to obey God's commandments and live the gospel of Jesus Christ but to make tangible covenants that show we really mean it. It even asks not only for people who have died to accept Jesus Christ but to be baptized by proxy by living people in jumpsuits and fonts holding little slips of paper they printed out that morning. It's as if religion says, "It's not enough for your heart to be in it. Your body has to be in it too." I used to wonder about what there was about the nature of the water or the words that provided the transformative effect to cleanse us or endow us wi...

I think about change sometimes. How do cultures change? How do people change? How do I change? The first realization I had about that was that change usually doesn't happen until there's no way to avoid it. When I moved back home, I was surprised to see that, despite all the growth in the area, there still weren't sidewalks along the older roads. Where the sidewalk ends "They don't bother unless there's a new development," my mom explained. They had petitioned for sidewalks along that main road ever since they moved in, but no one had bothered because no one wanted to foot the bill. Compared to other projects, it was pretty easy to ignore. Something being a good idea didn't mean it was going to happen. Something similar stood out to me as I read Hidden Figures . It was the World War II labor shortage that first caused people to reach out to African American women to work for NASA. Once they did, the whole country was blessed because of the brilliant wo...

This week has been so horrible for so many families. Innocent people have lost their lives to domestic violence, racism, and anti-Semitism, and others have been threatened with bombs. It is all horrific, but it is equally mind-boggling. How could anyone think another human being deserved to die? I think I know one answer. As soon as you are unkind to someone, you start to hate them. You start to warp them in your mind so that they deserved what you gave them. This happens with gossip or turning someone into a punchline. It happens with an entire culture built around dehumanizing black people so that you can justify enslaving them. It happens with immigrants, with LGBT people, with people of a different political affiliation. And today it happened to Jews. Anti-Semitism is as old as it is bizarre. That a mere one percent of the world's population can be hated by more than ten percent of the world's population defies logic. These verses in 2 Nephi 29 in the Book of Mormo...

Last night, as I was going to bed, visions of peaches filled my head. Each time I closed my eyes I saw myself blanching peaches, pitting peaches, and slicing peaches. It made sense since I had spent a good chunk of the day picking and canning peaches. As I worked in the garden this week, I learned a couple things about gardening that probably apply to real life. I'll let you figure out the metaphors. 1. There is always something to do in the garden, and you should do it as early as you can. Although I've been kind of helpful in the garden since coming here, it wasn't until this week that I had an active role in maintaining it. My parents were gone for several days, so I took over harvesting the vegetables and picking the fallen peaches. I realized it was best to just plan on spending at least an hour out there every day, even if that hour was interrupted by short naps ending and bees getting in the way. When the rain and hail came one day and the smoke settled ...

Since my son's birthday a few weeks ago, I've been cutting back on nursing quite a bit. While we still have the occasional night where he wakes up repeatedly wanting to eat and eat and eat (ugh teething), during the day he is mostly weaned. Each time I've weaned a baby, I've noticed myself struggling with a feeling of uselessness. There is something satisfying for me in being needed for my baby's nourishment, and to lose that affects every area of life. You combine that with living (albeit temporarily) with parents and moving into a healthy, functioning ward and neighborhood, and the result has been has pretty intense this time around. Today, as I was grappling with these feelings of not being needed, I had the thought, "This is a very normal, human feeling." Then came the thought, "This could totally be warped into something incredibly unhealthy." I kind of laughed at that thought, but then I realized how true it was. My need to ...

I'm pretty sure "Come Thou Fount" will make it back into the hymnbook. I'm pretty sure this song from the  "Music from the Friend"  section of the Church Music Library won't.

From Providence and Her People , page 220, we learn: