Wow! Yesterday I got back from the Zion Women’s Weekend Retreat. The above picture is the view from the backyard of the home of Liz, who hosted the retreat. Thank you Liz for a glorious weekend!

From the left we have Rhonda, Lindsey, Jonell, Becky, and Karen enjoying the abundant spiritual feast!

Connor Boyack, from over here gave us a presentation about what Zion is and how to build it. He said Zion has three main features: 1. unity, 2. holiness, and 3. no poverty. He based that on a General Conference talk from Elder D. Todd Christofferson. You can read his speech here. It’s comforting to note that to build Zion, we don’t need to do the same things, we are just to follow the same spirit, the spirit of Christ.

Connor said that his mom, Merrilee Boyack, the author of the above book (one of my favorites, it totally changed my life so that I don’t do all the dishes and all the cleaning around here) is now a libertarian, after reading Connor’s books, pictured below. If you haven’t read her book, do so immediately! It is very practical and funny too and will help you get your kids doing chores regularly.

This is Connor’s first book, pictured above. The one that made his mom Merrilee become a libertarian. His new book is pictured below.

Connor recommended the book below. He said that it helped him realize his thinking was not correct about how God wants agency to work.

After Connor left, some of us stayed up and gabbed. One of us, my friend Rhonda, from this web site settled in to study her scriptures at 3 AM, fully dressed in her day clothes with her shoes still on! Not just a casual read, but a serious study with her 1828 dictionary handy. My friend Shauna and I were still up, and I got to hear Rhonda’s amazing insights. I can’t remember what she said because it was so late/early.  Rhonda, I hope you got to catch up on your sleep today! I was staying up to drink my water, not to party anymore, I promise. (I always feel thirsty and can’t fall asleep unless I have had my quota of water.)

Here’s Rhonda’s gluten-free chocolate cake! It was so yummy! Some of us almost cried while eating it, it was so blissfully delicious.

The next morning, Liz, our dear, glorious, beautiful, generous hostess, shared with us that Zion is not about “where,” but about “how” we live. She based it on Elder Jeffrey Holland’s recent CES fireside, here. So if people aren’t living in a Zion-way, we are still called to treat them as if we are living in Zion: kindly, patiently, generously, as if they are part of our family, because they are.

My friends Liz and Shauna made these beautiful notebooks for us.

The next day, Tamra Laing, pictured below, gave a presentation on Energy Medicine and the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ. She was amazing! Her presentation was on her book found here. My blog review is coming soon! She gave quotes from the prophets in the LDS Church and scientists about the light of Christ. This light of Christ has healing properties. Scientists call it “zero point energy.”

I found it fascinating that she mentioned the Map of Consciousness by David Hawkins MD and the idea of “power vs. force.” His map has a range of emotions, with pride at the starting point of the range of negative emotions. He said that all negative emotions are stored in the body and come out later as disease. Then I came home and found the very book by him Power vs. Force, on my daughter’s bookshelf! She said that our friend Aneladee had loaned it to her. Another book to put on my list!

The biggest thing I learned from Tamara is how important it is to use praise and gratitude in every day life. She quoted somebody who said that healing is attracted by turning all negative experiences, including disease and pain, into praise and gratitude. As she was presenting, her laptop almost died on her. She suddenly realized she had forgotten to plug it in. She exemplified what she had just taught to us by saying, “Praise God I forgot to plug my laptop in!” as she scrambled to plug it in before it died. What a cute example!

Tamara shared her story of how her daughter was healed from her bipolar condition completely through energy healing. Conventional medicine was of no help to them. Her question of “what else is there?” in healing led her on a spectacular healing journey for her daughter. Click on the button next to this blog post that says, “what else is there?” to learn more.

Then we had John Pontius come. He’s this delightfully spiritual guy pictured above who has written extremely inspiring books for LDS readers. They are not to be missed! He shared too many amazing spiritual sacred things to share here. I was very thrilled to hear from him. I have been a fan for years. I got to reunite with his wife Terry, who used to live in my ward but moved away to Alaska when she got married to him. That was a joyful reunion! He is coming out with a new book in November with the story of a man who died three times and came back to life. He shares his after-death experiences and his visions of the last-days in John’s book. It’s pictured below. John’s books are total page-turners, ones that make you want to not do any thing else until you are done reading.

You can download some of his firesides and read some of his novels here. If you want to hear stories of people following the Spirit, and where that takes them, to court, to bearing testimony of Jesus Christ, to finding people who are hungry to be taught the gospel, to healing marriages, to raising people from the dead, and even going to prison, you will want to read his books.

We had such a fantabulous time! Thank you SOOOO much Shauna, Rhonda, and Liz, Connor, John, and Tamara! I feel like I have jumped a quantum leap in my spiritual hungering and as I delve into their books my spiritual abilities will jump as well!