Five Areas of Preparation
ft. Cheri Stirling | Honey + Lilies Blog
Meghan: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode four of The Latter-day Disciples Podcast. I am so excited for today’s episode because this is our very first guest speaker on the podcast today, and I am so grateful to welcome, my sister, my sister-in-law, Cheri Stirling, to the podcast today. Cheri is a Canadian-American. She grew up primarily in Rupert, Idaho. She went to BYU-Idaho, and studied Integrated Studio Arts, which is a very fancy way for saying that she has a degree in photography. She married my brother, Liam, in January of 2019, and they both have two adorable little babies. Now Cheri’s hobbies include reading, painting, photography and theater. Basically, she has all of the artistic talents that I have never had, and wish that I had, and I have yet to see Cheri do something that she fails at. So you could add pretty much anything to that list right now. Cheri is especially busy right now as a full-time mother in addition to owning her own homeschool group and of course, managing the Honey and Lilies Preparedness blog, which is our sister company. So I’m very excited to welcome Cheri today. Cheri, thank you so much for joining. We’re so excited to hear about Honey and Lilies, and what inspired you to start this blog, and your philosophy around Preparedness.
Cheri: Thanks so much. I’m excited to be here. So, Honey and Lilies has been kind of a culmination of a lot of things. I grew up in Rupert after my parents got divorced when I was eight. My mom moved back to the States to live with her parents, and so we lived with them for several years until she graduated from college. And then we were just across the street for, like, three more years until she ended up getting remarried. My grandparents had a little house, but it had a giant fruit room, and my grandpa was, I’m pretty sure, the Boy Scout or preparedness leader for, like, 50 years of his life. He lives that Scout oath ‘Be Prepared’ thing to its fullest. He was a ham radio operator, so I woke up before six in the morning and fell asleep to radio check ins almost every day, including weekends, which as a preteen, I did not appreciate completely. Those radio calls are not quiet. I remember growing up when he was in charge of family home evenings we were a lot of times working on some sort of preparedness something. A few times we were updating our 72-hours kits or we ran fire drills in the summer, so we had to open our windows and figure out how to get out of the house.
Meghan: Not just for school then, apparently, no.
Cheri: How do you get out of every room? And let’s make sure that the fire alarms are working. They actually turn the fire alarms on and they tested the fire alarms once.
Meghan: (laughs) That’s so Dwight Schrute.
Cheri: He’s so good. But he took it very seriously, especially when he was the Stake Emergency Preparedness Representative. There was always that piece of just always talking about different kinds of emergencies, and running drills, and doing things like that. And then my grandma had this fruit room in her house that was filled with homemade canned goods and then store boxed things, and all of the cereal varieties on every big cereal sale. We, like, stocked up. And there were just rows and rows of cereal.
Meghan: And, hey, we could all live off of that. That’s a legitimate food storage tactic.
Cheri: Exactly. Let’s just stock up on cereal. And you know what? We never ran out of ketchup ever, like, ketchup, Mayo, mustard. We had all of it. And when there was, “Oh, no, we ran out!” You just went to the fruit-room and got more.
Meghan: It’s a last day’s barbecue. And you guys are bringing the condiments. I love it.
Cheri: My husband appreciates that practice now because he cannot live with condiments.
Meghan: So you have a very I would say, grandparents-style emergency preparedness upbringing.
Cheri: Yes. And I remember as a kid because my mom was the second of five. Some of my aunts were fairly newlywed or had very young families, and college life still when we lived there. And so I remember my aunts and uncles coming home and visiting and grandma just grabbing grocery stacks and being like, “Go shopping.” And they would just take a few boxes or a few grocery stacks full of food to go back to their house. And there were sometimes that neighbors were running out of food, or were struggling and they would take a box of their garden produce and a few things from the storage room. And they just went with it. So I remember seeing that example of being able to just give it away and be able to just be like, “Oh, I have some it’s okay. Here you go.” And she had food. And then she had laundry detergent and a few extra bottles of cleaner and a few extra bottles of hands soap or the big tubs of hand soap that you could go refill. So she had all of those kinds of things on hand. And then when my mom ended up getting remarried, the man who’s now my father is also very preparedness-aware. He listens and reads up a lot on the Second Coming. And they had a very similar storage room set up where they had a lot of things from Costco or the big bins of wheat and the big bins of sugar and flour that you could just go refill the little containers. My mom would go on Costco runs or when it was case lot sales, we would do big hauls. But there were seven teenagers living in our house at the time. My family has eight children, and seven of us were living in the house at once for a few periods there, and the youngest was twelve and the oldest was 20. We had a lot of mouths to feed.
Meghan: And if you can feed seven teenagers at once, and you have the food storage for that, then you’re good. That’s at least that’s, like seven years of food storage for a couple.
Cheri: Exactly when you have six of those being boys.
Meghan: Oh, my gosh.
Cheri: They were really good examples of how to have a little extra or have things, and how to buy it on sale or be economic about it. Not just go to the store and buy what you feel like; we bought things on sale. We utilized those big sales or those Costco runs really well.
Meghan: I love the progression of going from your grandparents with the ham radio, and the canned fruit room to your parents who are like, okay, we’re going to buy this stuff and we’re going to be wise about it. I feel like we’re finally like you’re moving in the direction of adapting food storage to the generation that we’re in. Right? Because I think that that’s one of the biggest challenges right now. It’s like, “We’re millennials, and I don’t have time to can fruit, and I don’t have a place to store it if I wanted to. And I certainly don’t have a room where I can put a ham radio right now.” So I love that you kind of grew up in this way, that it was a step by step progression and an evolution that got you to a point where it’s like, now you have figured out emergency preparedness for a millennial right then.
Cheri: As I graduated and went to college and then moved out on my own, I started to follow that example. So I didn’t have a fruit room, but I rented a three bedroom house with my brother, and so we had that extra bedroom be the storage room. And we had not nearly what my parents and grandparents had on hand, but we had a few cases of, like, Cream of Mushroom soup and a few extra packages of Ramen…
Meghan: The essentials.
Cheri: The essentials, things that we could get by on. Lots of rice. And we would buy meat in bulk. And so our whole freezer was like stock-full of especially chicken, because he was really into bodybuilding and fitness. So we did a lot of chicken, a lot of rice. Then after I had moved out on my own, there was a big snowstorm.
Meghan: When was the snowstorm?
Cheri: Five years ago. So this would have been 2017. I was a teacher at the local elementary school. I taught second grade. Our house was out in the middle of nowhere. It was a mile from my parents house, and it was a field away from my landlord’s house. We were on the top of the hill, and I had a little Pontiac Grand Prix so pretty low to the ground and it snowed and covered my car. The snow was seven inches on top of my car, and it drifted, so there was like 2 to 4ft drifts in places, and I have pictures, but there’s no way we were getting out anyway. So it snowed and it froze for several days. And the permafrost was like a foot deep because it was so cold and it snowed so hard. Day after tomorrow style vibes for any of you are trying to envision this in your head. Watch The Day After Tomorrow.
Meghan: That’s pretty much Idaho.
Cheri: Yeah. And then two weeks later, we went back to school. We got the roads plowed, and then it went from that frozen to 50 degrees and all the snow melted. But because of the permafrost, the water had nowhere to go because the ground was too frozen to suck it in. And so it flooded everything. I’m on the top of the Hill, but my little Pontiac Grand Prix cannot drive through the snow, and it also could not drive through the water. We actually ended up using a lot of my food storage because unless somebody in a pickup came to get me. So my dad and my mom would come and pick us up a few days and take us to the store so we could refill on produce and milk and things. But we lived off the stuff in our storage room because we could not get it so unexpected.
Meghan: I feel like when it comes to emergency preparedness, we always think of it as like some future thing that I’m preparing for. You’re not thinking for now, right? Or like the snow storm that makes it so that I can’t drive my car. And especially because how old were you when this happened?
Cheri: I would have been 24-25.
Meghan: So again, I think that that’s a big aspect, too, is like we’re not expecting to use our food storage when we’re 24 years old. Right. And renting this house with your brother. I love how it really puts into contrast. I think the fact that not only is it wise for, like, an end time scenario to have emergency preparation, it’s just wise in general, because you never know, you never know, you can be young, you can be old, you can have kids, you can be single, and things just happen.
Cheri: You can lose a job, bad weather, the power goes out. There was a power outage last summer, and Rexburg Walmart couldn’t check anybody out. They didn’t have any power to run the machine.
Meghan: Right. I think we underestimate how dependent we are upon the systems. We always think like, oh, well, if there’s a bad snowstorm coming, I’ll just go to the store beforehand, but, yeah, you don’t think like, well, shoot, what if the electricity goes out and they don’t accept my credit card at the store? I just love that your background is such that it’s given you the experience to know that emergency preparation is something that is prudent, not just for the things that we tend to associate with it, right?
Cheri: Exactly. For an example of using emergency preparedness as an adult, that most of us have had experience with in the last couple of years. Just before COVID happened, Liam and I went to Sam’s Club, and we were running low on toilet paper. So we just bought an extra case because that’s what you do when you go to Costco or Sam’s Club, you’re down to the last package. You buy one more package. We bought our package. But then the virus hit and everything shut down and the toilet paper disappeared off the face of planet Earth.
Meghan: We remember, we are old enough to remember.
Cheri: We’re old enough to remember the toilet paper shortage of 2020. We all have the ornament on our Christmas tree that helps us.
Meghan: Oh, gosh, the toilet paper ornament. Oh, my gosh.
Cheri: I have, like, three of them that my students gave me. I have quite a few toilet paper rolls on my Christmas tree. Anyway, we had bought some. And so we had family members in the area that ran out of toilet paper. Our next door neighbor texted me and was like, “Do you have any?” And I was like, “Actually, I do.” And it wasn’t to the point where we were running low that I was panicked about it at all. To contrast that, we had a newborn baby that year. So we had a baby in January, and I really struggle with nursing. So I end up formula feeding my babies. And the formula is also gone. And that contrast between being able to just give toilet paper away and be like, yeah, no big deal. I can find more toilet paper someday, but not being able to have the formula on hand or going to the store. And the formula is all gone. And worrying about, how am I going to feed this six week old newborn was a lot harder. And so I had several family members like my mom and dad were going to grocery stores an hour away and checking to see if they had formula. And when we’d come visit, they would have two or three canisters sitting on the bed for us to be like, okay, add this to your supply so that you’re working ahead instead of desperately trying to find something somewhere to feed the next week.
Meghan: That really hits at home. When you stop to think about that, it’s not just me, and it’s not just my husband. Am I prepared to take care of my kids in the situation that they’re in? That’s definitely something that we’ve thought about as we’ve been stocking up on food and building our food storage and our emergency preparedness plans in general is how do we provide not just for the basics, but for the overall welfare of our children in the situations that we might be put into. And yeah, that thought, like when you said that, my heart just leaps up my throat because the thought of having a newborn baby and not having the resources to feed them, that’s terrifying.
Cheri: Yeah, you can’t feed them regular milk. You can’t feed them. You’re either nursing ,or it’s formula. And there was neither of those options.
Meghan: That’s terrifying. But again, it puts into perspective, like, okay, so look at the wisdom. Right? Look at the wisdom and the counsel that we’ve been given to prepare in a variety of ways.
Cheri: Right. And when we had our second baby, we thought about that and that experience. So the last four weeks that I was pregnant with him, we actually bought a can of formula each week prior to that one to get our budget to where we were like, okay, we remember what it’s like to have to buy formula each week and two, because then there was a little bit extra, so that should he be a heavy eater or something? What happened with the groceries at the grocery store. We had some on hand for him.
Meghan: So smart. So very smart. So tell me more about your preparedness philosophy in general. I feel like we’ve talked a lot about temporal preparation and having food, having toilet paper, having formula, having, you know, the resources, the normal things that we’re using in our everyday lives on hand, just a little bit of extra. But what else can you say about preparedness beyond that point?
Cheri: Spiritual – The prophets and apostles have been hitting this one really hard, especially the last few years, especially President Nelson. I’m pretty sure like every talk he’s given since he became a Prophet, he’s had some sort of reference to strengthening our spiritual foundation somewhere in the talk. How I view spiritual preparation is how are we strengthening our relationship with our Heavenly Parents and with Jesus Christ? And it looks different for every individual person. There are some people who are further along in the path than others. Perhaps it’s having more regular scripture study for you that’s helping you build that relationship. Maybe it’s just being more intentional in your prayers or actually saying a prayer or ridding your life of some influences so that you can, like maybe changing the music you listen to, or changing the media that’s in your life, or putting a limit on social media in your life so that there’s more time for building that relationship. Each of us can have different goals, but it’s to help strengthen your relationship to the point where you can have that eternal perspective and have that relationship with Him. So that when life gets hard, and it always does, that you can get through it and, you know, and you have that place of trust with Him and with Them so that you can get through those hard times because Satan wants to make you feel guilty. He wants to make you feel ashamed, he wants to make you feel, and he’s going to do whatever he needs to to shake your relationship with Them.
Meghan: I was thinking about this recently in the context of obviously we live in the space of the last days, not just that we live in the last days, but that is our area of chosen interest, and that’s where we are building and where we felt impressed to spend our time and our energy. And I was talking to some friends about some last days theories of which there are many regarding certain prophecies and how these prophecies will come to pass. And it’s something that I’ll probably never talk about on this podcast because…not that it’s not relevant, but I don’t think that that’s what our focus needs to be. I think that our focus needs to be this area of preparation, our spiritual preparation, right.
Cheri: We can conjecture all we want, but we know what we’re getting ready for.
Meghan: Yeah. And I think it’s less important to explore all of the ways that these prophecies might come to pass, and it’s more important to be able to say, regardless of how the Lord does His work, I know Him well enough that I can recognize Him and accept, however it is, He chooses to bring these things to pass, right. That is so much more powerful, and that is so much more important. That is indicative of our spiritual relationship and our spiritual preparation, not knowing all of the theories and watching for them, but rather watching for our Savior and being able to recognize Him when He comes and when He does His strange work, as He calls it.
Cheri: Exactly. And I think to really hone in our spiritual preparation. It’s how focused are we on the Savior? Like how focused is our life on Him? Because we can get caught up in getting ready for the end of the world or the big earthquake or the big fire that’s going to come or the pestilences. And we can get really caught up in all of that almost addictive part of preparing for the Second Coming. But if that’s where our focus is, then we missed the mark.
Meghan: Absolutely. We have to be careful.
Cheri: I think if our preparation is focused on Jesus Christ and getting ready to meet our Savior and being ready to help our neighbors and our friends and our families get through the hard things that are coming to be able to see Him, then we’re in the right spot. But if we’re focused on the other parts of the second coming and we’re focused, then that has become the distraction.
Meghan: Perfect. Thank you. All right, let’s move on. Tell me a little bit more about physical and tell me, how does physical differentiate from temporal? Because I think that sometimes we use those words interchangeably. So what do you mean by each of those?
Cheri: Definitely. When I was trying to define what I was trying to say when I was getting ready to start writing these blogs, I had to kind of split them up. Food and water, and things can very easily fit into physical. But I put those with temporal because those are things we gather. Those are things. Those are resources and things that we need, and they perish. As we found when my great grandma had passed away, she had the giant food storage and all the canned goods. But some of them had been in there a long time, longer than they should have been in there. And so as we were dumping it out on the lawn, it like killed the grass for a year. The grass was dead.
Meghan: Oh, no. What would it have done to you?!
Cheri: I know! Don’t eat the stuff. The reason I split them is because temporal things can fade. They need to be gathered, but they also need to get used or disposed of. Your physical preparation is your physical body and the thing that houses your spirit. So your fitness, what you’re actually eating and putting into your body and your physical health. Do you struggle with certain illnesses, like, how do you take care of those? How are you treating those? I have three siblings with Cystic Fibrosis. So as we think about things that could lie ahead, my dad tried to make sure he had extra inhalers and things on hand because there were times when the shipments of medicines didn’t line up just right. And so having ways to take care of us like ourselves physically is how I correlate physical health and physical preparation.
Meghan: Gosh. And it’s such an important conversation. And I think that this is an area perhaps that we miss the most when we talk about preparation, because we’re always focused on the food and the water. And maybe to a degree, we think far enough to think about what prescription medication do I have? And do I have a stock of that on hand, or perhaps a better approach of saying, how can I not be dependent on this prescription medication? How can I improve my body’s immunity and how do I build strength? How do I make sure that my gut health is where it needs to be? I think that that’s a conversation that we certainly should have more often, especially because I think that this is an area where we all could focus and where we all can see need for improvement. It’s interesting to me to think about the signs of the times and some of the prophecies that we know are going to come to pass. And a lot of them are very physical – thinking about disease and pestilence and famine.
Cheri: Being possibly being called to travel, right? Or to move.
Meghan: Right. And are we conditioning our bodies to the degree where we could more easily handle some of those challenges? It’s a conversation that will definitely have in subsequent episodes about what would it look like if we actually took the Word of Wisdom more seriously and really strived to live it? What if we were actively seeking the blessings of physical health now by obeying eternal laws that govern it, including laws that we find in the science of nutrition and exercise and wellness? I think that this is in general a challenge of the test of mortality.
Cheri: Right.
Meghan: And probably even more so in our time than it has been in other times.
Cheri: For sure. And other times they worked so hard physically and they didn’t have such access to all of the food varieties that we have that I think being physically well was almost easier. You didn’t have all the holidays to eat all of the chocolate, and that would last till the next holiday and then you restock.
Meghan: Oh, my gosh. Yes, it reminds me of…I can’t remember who it was. I’ll have to look it up. But there was a Prophet who said that his greatest fear for the future of the Church was not going to be lack or persecution necessarily. But his greatest fear for the Church was going to be our prosperity. And I think that we see that in this area where, especially in the United States, we are so prosperous and we have never had to do less physical labor to build an amazing life for ourselves and our families in the history of mankind. And that has almost been a deficit to us, like you said, because it does make us more lazy, more sedentary, less engaging in physical activity than previous generations have been. So in some ways, this area of preparation, I think maybe takes the most conscious and intentional effort is to actually push ourselves out of our comfort zone to improve upon our physical bodies. Man, we all need to work on that.
Cheri: It’s New Year, guys. We can do it.
Meghan: Okay. Tell me about mental.
Cheri: Okay. So for mental, this is where I categorize all of the different kinds of learning. As a teacher, we really encourage people to get their education, and seek an education. There’s your regular high school diploma or GED, and then you have college or tech school or whatever post high school job, career-education wise certificates. But then after that, we are told to become lifelong learners, and lots of prophets have talked about becoming lifelong learners. Go to education weeks at BYU or BYUI or BYU-Hawaii, or go to a conference or take an online course that will help you with your hobbies, or with your business, or with your career. Take those PD opportunities that your career offers, find some new hobbies, pursue interests, or follow some spiritual promptings of things that you should be learning about. Learning is one of the things we get to take with us, and the Scriptures say that we will be so much better off in the world to come if we took advantage of learning here. Really investing in learning always is our mental preparation, whether that’s being really involved in watching for signs of the times, or being involved in politics, or being involved in your sphere. Maybe you’re interested in health, or maybe you’re interested in the arts, but being involved in your community, and learning how to use those gifts and talents effectively, and to better your life and the people around you.
Meghan: Absolutely. I love what you said about how this is an area where we have the opportunity and the obligation to seek and follow promptings from the Holy Ghost. I personally know several people who have been guided to study certain things that they themselves say they never otherwise would have studied. I’m thinking of a friend’s husband who felt impressed to learn Russian, or a friend of mine who gave birth to one of her beautiful children and felt impressed that she needed to study to be a midwife and help other women have similar experiences. Or someone else who has felt impressed to learn about, oh, it’s not Herbology…that’s Harry Potter language. What am I trying to say? Herbs and natural health and natural remedies, that that is something that they have felt impressed to learn about. And I think it’s so interesting because the Lord is going to give us each something different and it’s going to be related to our skills. It’s going to be related to our spiritual gifts. I am not going to be told to learn how to heal. That’s just not my gift. And I probably won’t be told to do something super artsy like you might be told to do, because that’s not my gift. As much as I’ve tried, I can tell you that I’ve tried! Anyway, but I think that that is such an important and interesting exercise to do is to go to the Lord and say, Lord, what would you have me learn?
Cheri: Yes, from personal experience. I got a degree in art. And like many people will tell you, there’s not a lot of jobs in art.
Meghan: What?! You are blowing the mind of a bunch of art students right now.
Cheri: All of my art friends, I love you. And I put that art degree to use a lot. But that is not where I have found my profession. Shortly after I graduated from college, trying to figure out what I do with this piece of paper that I’ve just spent all this money on, and I ended up getting a Para job. (So a paraprofessional is an uncertified position in the education sphere) teaching art and music at an elementary school, which is actually what I wanted to do when I went to college. And then they started firing all of the art and music teachers in elementary schools because that’s where the budget cuts happened. I got a job and I loved it. But unfortunately, as many paraprofessionals will tell you, the pay is not equal to the amount of hours put into those positions. So I actually was prompted to get certified. And I ended up being an elementary school teacher for seven years in the public schools. And so sometimes you kind of get this little twisty turning path because that’s how the Lord is going to get you where you need to be. And now I teach. I currently teach homeschool so I can be home with my babies and home with my nieces and nephews. So I teach homeschool, but I am a certified teacher. But that was a really big jump. People would be like, “Oh, you’re a teacher. Where did you go to school? When did you do your student teaching?” And I’m like, so funny story.
Meghan: Right. Well, and I would add, just kind of fleshing out the importance of the spiritual prompting. And the fact that God knew something that you didn’t know was that your husband is seven years younger than you. And so there was this seven years worth of time where you were waiting for your husband to learn how to drive and be legal and serve a mission and all of these things. And you didn’t know that you were going to be needing to support yourself for that amount of time.
Cheri: Right. When I went to college, I was like, “I’m going to get an art degree and have the part-time job at home. And I’ll go do a photo shoot or do some artsy things as a side job, being a Mama.”
Meghan: Right. So I just love, though, how that illustrates that if we take this step with a spiritual perspective, this idea of mental preparation, you’re going to receive promptings, they’re probably not going to be what you expect them to be, but they will be given to you from the perspective of greater knowledge that God has, because God knows what you need to be prepared to do when you don’t know.
Cheri: And to give another side note to that story, my grandma’s parents were both teachers, and they both told me, “You need to go to school to be a teacher. I really think you need to be a teacher,” and I was dead set, I will not be a teacher. So He’s going to ask you to do that. Sometimes the Lord has a sense of humor, too, that you kind of felt like you should probably do. But you said you never would.
Meghan: Yeah, that’s the thing. If you all are wondering what your prompting is, you’ve already received your prompting. Just go do it. You’re only hurting yourself at this point. All right, last one. Let’s wrap it up. Emotional Preparation – what does that entail?
Cheri: So this is another one that I think is really big with our generation and world right now. Emotional health and emotional preparation are a big topic in the Church and in the world and in social media. People are talking about this a lot. The Church actually recently came out with an emotional resilience program. I didn’t know about this until my family was actually one of the stakes that got to pilot it. So I had a brother and sister and my parents were involved in piloting this program. It’s very similar to the Church’s addiction recovery program and their other self-reliance classes. It’s set up like the addiction recovery program it’s held, and it’s set up like the budgeting class and the business classes that the Church offers to help build those kinds of self-reliance classes. So it’s set up in ten steps and they each build on each other kind of like the addiction program or like AA meetings, because the pornography and addiction recovery classes set up after are modeled after the AA program. There are ten different chapters that they do in the class, and then you have the meeting and you have an accountability buddy who you have set a goal with and they check in with you each week to see how you’re doing with each of these areas. And you can take the class whether you struggle with mental health or you just want to beef up your mental health, or if you don’t want to go to the class, you can actually access all of the materials online.
Meghan: This program sounds awesome. What are just a couple of the steps in the program that you feel like would be most beneficial for people to be aware of, and perhaps that would be most important to someone who is looking at increasing their emotional health.
Cheri: There are a few different ones that you can look up. They have ones like thinking patterns, developing healthy thinking patterns. If you struggle with body image or emotions related to either your weight or your physical body that is tying to your emotions, they have a chapter on your body and emotions and how that works together and how those two things play together. They also have some chapters on anxiety and depression and overcoming anger. You can even just go to the chapter that you’re struggling with or things that you would like to some extra resources for in those areas. If you’re struggling with some sort of anxiety or depression, even if it’s not to the point you need to go to a therapist. But if you do, please go to a therapist. Those are things we want to have you get help with. They help make your life better.
Meghan: And it’s a symbol of strength, willingness to reach out and to take advantage of these resources. I think that there’s a tendency for the adversary to make us feel weak, and it’s exactly the opposite. When you take advantage of these things, you are showing that you are strong and that you are aware and you are providing evidence acting as a child of God who is deserving of strong emotional health.
Cheri: The woman and the hem of Christ garment kind of comes to mind as like, reach out for the healing.
Meghan: And it was her faith to reach that made her whole. Absolutely. I love this. I’m so glad that the Church is encouraging this conversation and is providing resources to help members become more resilient in this way, and I can understand the importance of it, especially as you said, for the times that we live in emotional struggles, mental health has never been more of a challenge, I think, for any generation.
Cheri: It’s so easy to get overwhelmed or just burdened by the things because we’re constantly bombarded by it. We watch the news, we have social media, it’s always in our face where it’s like you can’t go out in the field and just like, turn it off. It’s always there. It’s on your watch, it’s on your phone, it’s on your computer. And so now we’re getting the resources not just to have a conversation about it, but to actually improve our situation. And I think that that’s wonderful.
Meghan: So we’ll definitely include links to this program in the show notes. I think that will be beneficial for everyone. Well, Cheri, thank you. Thanks for joining us. I think that this was so important and so beneficial and we all I’m sure can attest and say thank you for sharing your story and your inspiration for Honey and Lilies and what you do on a daily basis. For those of you who want more information and more resources, you can find the Honey and Lilies blog. It’s at www.latterdaydisciples.com/honey-lilies/ And you can also find Cheri’s temporal preparation tips on our Instagram, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Cheri, thank you so much for joining us.
Want to listen to this episode? Listen here.
Resources:
Resources:
Church Emotional Resilience Program
“Joy and Spiritual Survival”, President Russell M. Nelson
Love What You're Reading?
Tune into this episode wherever you listen to podcasts. Want to get started?
Come Follow Me BFF
Are you wanting to deepen your Come Follow Me study this year? Join McKay on the Daily Discipleship Podcast Monday through Friday for daily inspiration in a bite-size format.
Up Your Preparedness Game
Our Honey + Lilies Blog is dedicated to helping you prepare for the days ahead. Want to get started? Click here.