I really meant to stay current with this feature, but hey, if I actually DID everything I've ever really MEANT to do . . . well, I would weigh a lot less, for one thing.

Anyhow, I want to catch you up, because if you haven't encountered this little book yet, you're missing a treat. The book is Mary, Martha, and Me, and the author is one of my favorite people, Camille Fronk Olson. I got to know Camille when we went to a couple of Time Out events together last year, and I'm telling you, you would have to look hard to find a more articulate, well-grounded, scripture-genius, likable person. She has taught ancient scripture at BYU for many years, and her incredible discussion of a scripture story I thought I knew well is a great read.

When we think of Mary and Martha, it seems like most of the time it boils down to, "Yeah, Mary chose right and Martha got it wrong." And I know lots of women who characterize themselves as "Martha types" who believe in their hearts that they're "getting it wrong."

Camille takes a different approach. She points out that the Lord never said Mary had chosen "the better part," but that she had chosen "that good part, which shall not be taken away from her." He wasn't actually comparing the sisters at all, but pointing out their right to make different choices. If He was rebuking Martha at all, it was not because she had chosen differently but because she had brought her grievance to the wrong place--to Him, instead of to the person who had grieved her.

The point of the story, Camille says, is to find the "one thing . . . needful," which is Jesus Christ. And we can find him in a lot of ways. There's Mary's way, sitting at His feet and listening closely to His teaching. There's Martha's way, serving others and making them comfortable. And both ways (and lots of others, too) are valid if they lead to the proper end, but they never will if we insist on comparing and forcing others to do it "our way." I love this perspective, and I love how Camille points out that just before Christ's passion He went once again to the house in Bethany, and "There they made him a supper; and Martha served" (John 12:2). She didn't complain. She didn't compare. She did what she did best, and she had evidently learned to find joy in her serving and, through it, to find Him. She, too, chose a "good part" that would not be taken away from her.

I'm sometimes amazed at authors who have access to the same scriptures I'm using, but seem to get so much more out of them. I'm so grateful to have the benefit of Camille's great insights!

I plan to make you all exceedlingly jealous by teasing you with the fact that I received this week the manuscript to edit for volume 6 of Chris Stewart's "last days" series, The Great and Terrible. If you have not encountered this series yet, you are really missing out. Picture Tom Clancy meets Work and the Glory. Because Chris Stewart spent years as a pilot in the Air Force, he really knows military details that just make his books SO plausible (kind of like Clancy, but not quite so technical). And because he is such a committed Latter-day Saint, he brings a knowledge of the gospel to the story that reminds us the battles we wage are a continuation of a conflict that is older than time itself.

I liked the books from the start (the writing is incredibly gripping), but the one that really got me was volume 3, in which a scenario is painted that is so believable that I felt for the first time how quickly the last days could really be upon us. And then, what happens in volume 4 gave me a testimony of the principle of food storage that no number of stake conference meetings on the subject had ever managed to touch. I'm not kidding. It sounds goofy, I know, but you just have to read it to see.

Anyway, if you're already a fan, you'll be delighted to know that volume 6, which is the final volume in the series, will be hitting the shelves in October, fairly close on the heels of volume 5, which came out earlier this month. If you haven't read the books yet, now's the time, because you won't have to wait forever for the whole series to be available. What a fun thing to catch up on this summer!

Meanwhile, if you're just drooling to know what happens in volume 6, I may drop a hint from time to time. THIS is one of the reasons I LOVE MY JOB!

I love the new Enrichment program because it lets me enjoy what I LOVE and have it count as participation in the Relief Society program! And, as I'll bet you can guess, one of the things I LOVE is reading. So I am the unofficial hostess of our Relief Society's monthly (mostly) book group, and I thought it would be fun to share with you from time to time the books we're reading.

Our most recent book is one that I begged Deseret Book to publish for many years. It is titled The Uses of Adversity, and the author is Carlfred Broderick. If you've heard me speak in the past year, you've probably heard me quote from it, because I think it is the finest treatment I have ever encountered on the subject of the pains and trials of mortality. Dr. Broderick, a nationally respected psychotherapist, teacher, author, and stake president in California, tackles the most unanswerable kinds of pain imaginable--abuse, a child's death, debilitating illness. And he doesn't take the stance so often adopted in LDS culture: "Oh, it's all for the best." He makes it clear that he hates pain, and that it doesn't always make us better, but that we get to have some choice over the effect it has in our lives.

The line from the book that really reshaped my worldview when I first read it was: "The gospel of Jesus Christ is not insurance against pain. It is resource in event of pain." We don't get spared from the consequences of mortality just because we were born in the covenant or got baptized at some point. We all get trials. Where do they come from, and what do we do with them when we encounter them? This book has real answers to those questions.

What I love about Dr. Broderick's writing is that he is a storyteller. He doesn't preach maxims about pain, he shows us several examples of up-close, true suffering and teaches us through those stories what people have learned, what he has learned. It is brilliant writing. The stories hit bone-deep. The magnificence of the Atonement is clearly displayed. I came to realize that one of the things that was restored in the Restoration was our eternal perspective, the knowledge that offers peace in the face of the most perplexing of human problems.

In a time of cyclones and earthquakes and tornadoes and wildfires all hitting the news in one day, The Uses of Adversity is a book the world needs.