I just finished reading through the September issue of the Ensign magazine, article by article, asking myself the following questions:
- What messages are in these articles that I need to apply in my life?
- What messages are important to share with my family?
- What messages do I need to reinforce with the members of my ward as their bishop?
Here’s what I did:
- “Bringing Christ into Our Home” is a great article about a sister who decided to memorize the proclamation “The Living Christ.” I sent a message to the members of my ward, suggesting that they consider doing the same.
- “Dating and Virtue” suggests 10 things that parents can do to help their youth prepare for dating. I mentioned it in my sacrament meeting talk about the role of parents in the home.
- Elder Perry has advice for returned missionaries on pages 22-24. I made copies for 3 missionaries from our ward who will return home soon.
- I gave a copy of the article “Our Senior Missionaries” to the 4 (soon to be 5) seniors from our ward who are serving full-time and Church-service missions and thanked them for their service.
- “Ten Scripture Study Tools” is a one-page summary of ideas on ways to improve your scripture study. On Sunday, I copied it onto the back of our sacrament meeting program that is handed out at the door.
- The articles “More Than a Missionary Guide” and “Using Preach My Gospel“ talk about using the manual Preach My Gospel in the home, in personal study, in Sunday lessons, and in missionary work. We’ll discuss in our next ward council meeting how to encourage members to use Preach My Gospel more. I also gave copies of the articles to the older priests.
- I recommended the article “Finding Hope after Divorce” to members of the ward who are going through a divorce.
- I blogged about the article “Role of Members Important in Sharing the Gospel Online.”
Are there similar ways that you can share the messages in the Church magazines with your family and friends?
Very nice example of applying the writtings from our church magazines in our lives.
I’ll give it a shot. Thanks for sharing!
All of your listed uses for the Ensign articles — all of them, every last one of them — are limited to advising *other* people what to do and how to live. Was there nothing in the magazine that applies to you? Are you really saying that the highest and best use of the Ensign is to redistribute the articles to all those other active people who probably saw the original anyway?
Evelyn, there were certainly a lot of things I got out of the magazine personally. I just didn’t write about them in this article. The focus of my article was in sharing the messages in the Church magazines with family and friends. Several of the people to whom I gave copies of articles are less active and probably wouldn’t have seen the article if I hadn’t given them a copy.