A World of Experience

Sisters around the world reflect on lessons they have learned as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Kathleen Flake: The sisterhood of the gospel to me is a spiritual gift. It’s through the testimony of Jesus Christ that I have understood true sisterhood.

Hattie Soil: I don’t see a sister as a white sister or a black sister. I see her as my sister, and I don’t think it makes any difference what color you are or what background you have, how much money you make; it doesn’t make any difference. You are my sister, and that’s all that matters.

Amy Miner: I think of the heroes in my life—the heroines—and they’re the kind of women who when you meet, they’ll look right into your eyes, and they seem to just touch your heart. And they do it in such a way that when you leave you haven’t really noticed the interaction, but you feel better about yourself.

Mary Ellen Edmunds: I grew up thinking that rich and poor were temporal, and I didn’t realize there were other ways to be rich and other ways to be poor. I’ve met people in tiny little homes that they built with their own hands out of whatever they could find who were so rich. And that’s where that feeling started to come that you can never get enough of what you don’t need, because what you don’t need never satisfies. It seems to me, I (and maybe others) spend a lot of time spending money I don’t have, to buy things I don’t need, to impress people I don’t like, who don’t come over and get impressed.

Olga Campora: The most important idea for me that I found in the gospel is joy. It was really very meaningful for me. I think that when I found joy in the gospel when I was twenty-one years old, I really found that my life was something completely different. We can have a lot of joy, but the gospel joy is an eternal journey of joy.

Lois Clark: You can do it! I am proof that you can do it. I have friends who have also lost their husbands, and some of them are just kind of wallowing in self-pity, but you don’t have to. You can get out there. You can be a person—be happy.

Martha Beck: Heavenly Father does not want us to minimize our reactions to life. He asks that we accept what he gives us and then take to him our feelings and the truth about our lives, whatever it is. If we can go to him with absolute openness and say, “This is what is happening to me right now, and this is what I feel,” then he can use that openness as a conduit to teach us how to heal and how to forgive and repent and how to love.