First, a little about Shannon. Then I’ll tell you one of the things I find really impressive about her.

Shannon Hale is a Mormon who lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. She was the middle child in a family of five children and she always loved making up stories. At first, she’d act them out with her sisters, but in fourth grade, she learned how to write her stories on paper for others to read and that’s when she decided to become a writer. She was pretty sensitive, so she found the social part of grade school hard and ended up crying at home a lot. Things got better, though. In junior high school she was on the staff for the school literary magazine and met her first professional author, Dean Hughes. She was also in drama class, even though she never got chosen for the school plays.

She enjoyed high school a lot more. She felt her school was pretty diverse, which was interesting to her, and unlike most schools, it was not filled with cliques. Here’s something interesting she said about high school: “In movies and books, a teen’s life often involves drinking, sex, or drugs. It sure didn’t in mine. While I think it’s important to have stories about all kinds of people, I think it’s also important to acknowledge the other side. I did not drink alcohol or take drugs or have sex with boyfriends because I chose not to. I did have a lot of fun, though.” (See The Official Site of Shannon Hale.)

In high school, still writing and acting (but getting small parts now) she met her husband. She had a big crush on him, but he didn’t have a big crush on her. She went to school right near home, because she’d been sick for a long time during her senior year, and Dean went off to Washington State.

Shannon started out majoring in both drama and English. Even though she loved acting, she eventually decided she would rather be a writer, because you can’t act unless someone hires you, but you can always write. She loved books, and decided to become a writer. However, she hadn’t finished anything she started and she wasn’t sure what kinds of books she wanted to write. But she at least had a goal now.

She took a year and a half off to be a Mormon missionary. This is something she chose to do, not something she had to do. You pay your own way and you don’t choose where you will go, so opening the envelope is pretty exciting. She was sent to Paraguay and had to learn Spanish. She was assigned native companions (partners you share your apartment with and work with) and was determined to live like a native while she was there, so she could really learn the culture. She learned to focus on other people, not herself.

While she was on her mission, Dean wrote to her regularly. When she returned home, he was living in Utah again and they started dating seriously, but they broke up after about a year. She decided to go to graduate school out of state.

Here’s another interesting thing: The best writers got chosen to be teaching assistants and they got free tuition. She wasn’t  chosen and in fact, she was the only person who never did get chosen, meaning they thought she was the worst writer in the whole program. Despite that, she is the only writer in that group with a lot of best sellers and big awards. So, if you don’t seem like the best in your field yet, don’t give up. School isn’t the final decision maker in whether or not you can make it in what you want to do.

Even though the school didn’t think she was very good at writing, she loved her time there. She got back together with Dean and ended up marrying him. She started the book that would become The Goose Girl. It took her two years to get it written, starting over a few times and doing a lot of editing. Eventually, she got an agent and the book got sent to publishers, who didn’t like it. It was rejected nine times, but in the end, the same company that first published Harry Potter bought her book. And I’ll bet the other publishers are sorry they turned it down! It’s her most popular book.

I find Shannon Hale’s writing to be very elegant. I’d love to be able to write that way. But even beyond her amazing writing, what I really admire about her is that she has high standards and sticks to them, even in her writing. At the back of The Goose Girl there is an interview with Shannon. She said she sees a lot more racy books for teens and that her book was turned down because that stuff wasn’t in her books. She says she does not like writing about sex, so her books are sometimes seen as better for younger audiences, but she does have a few adult books as well. Sometimes people think they need to compromise to make it in the “real world.” Teens think they can’t be popular unless they lower their standards. One of my daughters came home from church one week telling me her eighteen-year-old teacher, who had been homecoming queen and head cheerleader, told them she never compromised. She didn’t feel she needed to compromise her standards to be popular, so she never did. I admire that in a person. It seems like Shannon Hale is that kind of person, so she is someone I admire, not just as a writer, but as a person.

Do you have a favorite celebrity who doesn’t compromise his or her standards?

Finding a church to join is like a quest. You can just guess which church is true, but that’s pretty dangerous. If you’re going to commit to a religion, you want to be sure it’s the right one. The only way to know for sure which church is the true church is to ask God.

Today, we’re going to learn about a  teenager who did just that. We’ve talked about him before, but we’re talking about him today as an ordinary teenager who wanted some answers. He was fourteen when he started to worry about which church to join. He wasn’t alone in this, though. All around him, people were worrying about which church they ought to join. His area was suddenly filled with ministers and pastors holding revivals and competing for new converts. Everyone was talking about religion, arguing about it, worrying about it. People went from one revival to another, trying to figure out which church they liked best.

Joseph Smith, the teenager in our story, was just like the others. His mother and siblings were all attending these revivals and he went with them. His father didn’t attend, not believing that was the best way to choose a church. He preferred to study quietly at home for now.

Joseph went and his family seemed to be deciding on one particular religion, but Joseph just couldn’t be sure. He thought that religion sounded pretty good, but he felt like it was such an important decision and he didn’t want to make the wrong choice.

The problem was that every minister said he was teaching God’s truth and yet, each minister taught something different. Sometimes it was just little differences, but sometimes they were big differences. Joseph Smith felt that God would have one set of truths, not lots of conflicting ones. After all, the Bible says, “For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints” (1 Corinthians 14:33, King James translation of the Holy Bible.) Conflicting information was confusing.

But how was a person, especially a teenager, supposed to figure out who was right? While he was trying to decide, he started reading the Bible. One day he found a verse that caused him to stop what he was doing and to think about the problem in a whole new way. This verse was in the New Testament and was written by James, whom some people think is Jesus’ half-brother. The verse says:

5 If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.

6 But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed (James 1:5-6.)

This made complete sense to Joseph Smith. People might lie to him or they might be mistaken, but God knew what was true and he wouldn’t lie. Joseph Smith had been raised to trust God, so he felt this was the solution to his problem.

He decided to go into the woods near his home and put this promise to the test. He wanted to be alone and he lived in a typical small home filled with parents and siblings. He also wanted to pray aloud, something he’d never done before. He went into the woods and knelt down and prayed.

Now, if you decide to put this to the test yourself, you probably aren’t going to get the results he did, but this was a special situation because God had plans for Joseph, so His answer had to be bigger than usual. First I’ll tell you what happened to Joseph. Then I’ll tell you what you will probably experience when you give your own prayer.

When Joseph prayed, Satan tried to stop him from continuing. Satan, like God, knew the plan and didn’t want it to happen. Once that ended, a light appeared in the air above Joseph. He saw two personages in the light. One was God and one was Jesus. He knew this only because God pointed to the other personage and said it was His Son, Jesus Christ, and that Joseph must listen to Him.

Jesus explained that Joseph Smith must not join any of the churches then in existence because none of them completely taught the truth. They had pieces of the truth, but none of them had the entire truth or the authority to carry out the complete program.

Why not? After Jesus died, His apostles ran the Church, but they eventually died or were killed. Because most of the people were more anxious to kill Jesus’ leaders than to listen to them, God withdrew His authority from the earth for a time. The small number of Christians remaining were very brave and did their best to keep things going but it’s hard to keep things going in a straight line without a prophet.

Even before the apostles died, various church groups were falling into apostasy. The apostles wrote many letters trying to straighten out false doctrine that developed. When they were gone, there was no one with that authority. And to make it worse, sometimes new issues came up and there was no way to find out what God wanted them to do about those things, so they had to guess. Over time, people didn’t agree on those guesses and they’d break away and start a new Christian church. Eventually there were a lot of churches all teaching different things and none of them held the whole truth because they’d all pieced together doctrine from other religions or what they thought the Bible meant.

God told Joseph to wait, so he did. Eventually, an angel named Moroni was sent to help prepare Joseph to restore the Church to what Jesus had established.

In the meantime, though, Joseph was a teenager trying to decide what church to join. The solution he chose is the same one you can choose, because that promise from James wasn’t just for Joseph. It was also for you.

Next post, I’ll tell you how to pray, in case you don’t yet know how, and what to expect from your prayer, since God and Jesus probably won’t come visit you in person.

Lisa Mangum, Mormon author

Lisa, a Mormon who lives in Taylorsville, Utah, is the author of The Hourglass Door, published by Shadow Mountain. The Hourglass Door is a supernatural story for teenagers, but with an emphasis on romance. It concerns a teenager named Abby who has a perfect life—until a tall, dark, handsome, and mysterious Italian stranger arrives in town as an exchange student. Dante Alexander is about to change everything. He might be an exchange student from Italy, but he has traveled further than she realized at first—he got here in a time machine built by Leonardo da Vinci, and now he and he friends need to get back home. This book was named 2009 Book of the Year for independently published young adult fiction. Her second book, The Golden Spiral, was released in May. In this book, Lisa has to rebuild the time machine and save Dante, but his time traveling friend Zo is complicating matters by trying to change history—Lisa’s history, to be exact. What will happen to Abby and Dante’s relationship?

Lisa is a young wife and an acquisitions editor—someone who decides what books get published. That is probably a big help for a writer, since it means she is used to evaluating what is publishable and what isn’t. She is certain to have read lots of good and bad manuscripts, so when it came time to write her own, she was ready to go. That doesn’t mean it was easy—writing is hard work, no matter how prepared you are.

She makes good use of all her time, even writing on the train to work each day. However, her favorite setting for work is on the sofa with music playing and a cat on her legs while she types on her laptop. With a job, a husband , and a home to care for, she has to write when she has time. And of course, now that she is a popular author, she also has promotional work like book signings to add to her schedule. Since she grew up shy, it’s been a change for her to learn to speak to large groups, but it comes with the job. You can visit her website, which has a blog, to see just how busy she really is.

Leo’s Dungeon