Religious Education Commons^™

The Bass Coupler, Marilyn Nielson

BYU Studies Quarterly

Being called to play the organ for the first time, as a pianist, felt like being asked to ice skate for the U.S. Olympic team because you did such a good job walking into the arena. “You already know how to walk, after all,” the coaches reason. “This is basically the same thing—a stride lengthened here, a leg elevated there. You’ll pick it up in no time.”

To Live, Wendy M. Payne

BYU Studies Quarterly

“To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.”

Emily Dickinson

Quds, Bentley Snow

BYU Studies Quarterly

The part that got me was that I had to take off my Chacos to enter the sanctuary. I was irked at first, drifting at the back of our group—apathetic, iPod on—deliberately detached and not in the mood for ceremonial inconveniences. I looked into the sanctuary’s square, open-air center. The floor, I had to admit, was beautiful—thin blue rivulets streamed deep within white marble—but imagine how many feet had mixed their oils with the dirt that faintly coated it. Red wooden poles lined the edges of the square, rising out of white pedestals to support the red tiles that sloped …

On Fear, Food, And Flight, Elizabeth Brady

BYU Studies Quarterly

I’m having trouble eating.

The Time It Takes To Age, Rebecca Smylie

BYU Studies Quarterly

We moved to Africa for my husband’s job, and those first months in Dakar, Senegal, were hard. We had a newborn and were sleep deprived. The antimalarials gave me bad dreams. We were living out of suitcases, we found dead birds in the back bedroom, and our three-year-old couldn’t seem to stop crying. Increasingly, we heard her fighting with a row of new imaginary friends, who were more often than not consigned to time out in the “bird room.” How would I survive two years?