This isn’t an easy decision and many Mormons choose college instead. However, Simms has a track record of putting God first. Despite the demands of high school and football, the Southe Point, South Carolina teenager got up early every morning to attend a before-school off-campus class about religion. The class, called Seminary, trains high school students in the scriptures canonized by Mormons. Two years are spent on the Bible, one on the Doctrine and Covenants, and one on the Book of Mormon. He has been preparing for this mission all his life by choosing to live a morally clean life despite the usual challenges of peer pressure and by studying his faith.

Initially, he intended to leave on his mission when he was nineteen, the minimum age for male missionary service. However, recently, Mormons lowered the ages of missionary service for both men and women. Men can now leave on their missions as soon as they are eighteen if they have graduated from high school. While they can also choose to leave later, Alex Simms decided to take advantage of the earlier date. His parents left the decision to him. Missionary service is encouraged, but not required. When he returns from his mission, he will choose a college and return to football.

Read about Alex Simms’ Mormon mission

Mormon missions are an important coming-of-age experience for young Mormons. At a time when most young people are focused on parties and dates, at an age when some are making choices that ruin or end their lives, young Mormons agree to spend a few years focused on nothing but serving Jesus Christ.  They live by very strict rules—no dating, no secular music or television, no internet except for church-approved online missionary work and weekly emails to their parents, and no video games. They rise early and work hard all day. They live on a tight budget and when not teaching the gospel or studying it, they are expected to serve others. They have one day a week off in which to do laundry, chores, and perhaps a game of basketball to stay in shape.

This time develops self-discipline, independence, and a sense of accomplishment that pays off in their adult lives. It helps to explain why Mormons do so well in business. (See Mormons in Business.) It also explains why young adult Mormons are more likely to remain active in their faith than are other young adults. They had the opportunity to spend a few years focused entirely on Jesus Christ and the teachings of their faith. Because they are never alone—they share an apartment with another missionary of the same gender and the two stay together at all times—and partnerships are rotated regularly, they learn to live with others who have different personalities and preferences. This enhances their relationship skills and prepares them for marriage, which requires the ability to share your life with someone who is not just like you. Mormons who marry in the Mormon temple have a lower rate of divorce than other segments of the American population. Living in a new country or state helps them to be more flexible and accepting of others.

However, the primary purpose of the mission is to share the gospel of Jesus Christ. Young Mormons are expected to learn about their faith and to pray to God for a testimony of it. Then they take that God-given testimony to the world and help others to discover what they know. It is a unique opportunity for young people to escape the self-centered life of young adulthood and focus on the greater good of the world.

Learn more about Mormon missionaries.

And he’s a Mormon. There is a Book of Mormon in his backpack and Jabari considers his religion more important than his basketball. He says that playing basketball is only what he does, not who he is. He finds a lot of people are surprised to find out he’s Mormon because he lives in Chicago and is black, so he says he spends a lot of time clearing up the stereotypes. His father is not Mormon, but his mother is and the children were raised Mormon. Jabari’s older brother served a volunteer two-year mission for the Mormons when he was nineteen and strongly encourages his brother to do the same, saying it was the greatest experience of his life. His mother also served a mission.

The Sports Illustrated story notes that Jabari is different from most other young stars. He’s just not that interested in the fame part of his life. When the reporter tried to catch him after a game, he couldn’t find him with the other players, who were flirting with girls and soaking in attention. Instead, he found him handing out water to the JV team, far from the media and the girls.

Jabari feels he has a moral responsibility to set a good example to other teens and to children who are fans. He knows they are watching and that some will make choices based on how he behaves. He knows he has the power to make a difference.

Jabari learned how to play basketball at the church. Most Mormon buildings contain a cultural hall which also doubles as a gym. The gyms usually have a basketball net and most congregation have teams for their teens, both boys and girls, and sometimes for adults as well. His father took him to the church early in the morning to practice and the boys had their own church keys so they could practice safely early in the morning or late at night. Because Jabari grew up in a very dangerous neighborhood, he found in the church building a safe harbor. Because the building was filled with pictures of Jesus Christ, he and his brother felt a strong spiritual spirit and found themselves unwilling to do the kinds of things they might do somewhere else. Their practices at the church kept them morally safe, as well as physically safe.

His parents helped set priorities. They made it clear to the high school coach that Jabari was a student and a Mormon first, which meant he was expected to get good grades and to attend church. Basketball had a lower priority than either of those things, an attitude which surprised their coach, who was more accustomed to parents who wanted to make sure their child became a sports star. Sunday practices are scheduled after Jabari’s three hours of church meetings and when he travels, the coach makes sure he gets to church. He has even skipped celebrations to get home for special church events, such as the day he received a priesthood advancement at church. (All worthy Mormon men can receive the priesthood at age twelve and advance through several levels.)

Mormon teens who achieve fame and success at a young age face a great many challenges, but the gospel helps teens like Jabari to focus on what really matters in the long run. A basketball career might last a few years, but his identity as a Christian will last forever.

Read the article on Jabari Parker in Sports Illustrated

The audience cheered for him as he made his announcement. He explained that no one had asked him to serve a mission. He had felt strongly that this is something he needed to do and he had learned to listen to these types of promptings when they happened. He did not announce where he was going but did say he’d be leaving after the first of the year.

Mormon missions are voluntary. They aren’t required, but many young adult men and women serve them. Men can serve for two years at age 19, and women serve for eighteen months when they are twenty-one. They pay their own way and serve wherever they are needed. Some serve in their own countries, but others go to foreign lands. During their time, they learn the language of their mission and live as the natives do, which means they sometimes live very primitively. They follow very strict rules, going to bed early, getting up early, and living on a tight budget. There is no dating and music and books are limited to a strict list of religious media. They spend nearly all their time teaching about religion, finding people to teach, studying their religion, or serving others in need. The men wear suits and the women wear dresses.

Why would any young adult want to live like this—and pay for the privilege—at a time most young people are dating, going to school, starting careers, or just having fun? They do it because they love Jesus Christ and want to share what they know about Him. They understand how God has blessed them and how being a Mormon has affected their lives and they want others to have those same blessings.

Although they aren’t paid for their work in money, there are other rewards for serving as a missionary. Missionaries develop a great deal of self-discipline because of the very strict rules they follow. Because they are assigned to a companion they room with and spend all their time with, and because those companions are regularly rotated, they learn to get along with all sorts of people and to adjust to being with another person all the time, a skill that is great preparation for marriage and parenthood. They learn to budget and to live inexpensively, as well as to take care of themselves and their homes. They develop leadership skills and learn to be comfortable meeting and talking to strangers. All these things make them valuable students, employees, and spouses when they return.

Spiritually, having a few years to focus exclusively on God and Jesus Christ is an amazing opportunity. Very few of them will ever again be able to give so much attention to their spiritual development. They learn the gospel extremely well, memorize scriptures, learn how to explain their beliefs, and strengthen their testimonies. They become comfortable talking about Jesus Christ.

How would it affect your life if you were to—at your own expense—spend two years teaching others about Jesus Christ or doing volunteer work under very strict rules. How would it make you different from your peers? David Archuleta is about to find out.

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?

His parents credit his education for his accomplishments, but it’s his education at home that has made the real difference. Although Robert goes to a good traditional school where he learns a lot, his parents supplement what he learns at home. This is called afterschooling.

What did Robert do after school that made him able to win out over the professionals? He went to school and worked hard, but at home, he devoted a lot of his time to learning even more. Schools don’t have time to teach everything and a lot of times, they don’t teach what you are most interested in. You can do that at home on your own or with the help of your parents.

Robert spends a lot of his free time at the library looking for great books to read. He reads and writes when he doesn’t actually have to. When he was little, his parents took him on a lot of “field trips.” They went on family outings that were fun, but were also educational.

As he’s gotten older, he’s taken on more of the afterschooling himself. He started teaching himself HTML and CSS, both necessary for building websites. In fact, he built his very first website in third grade for his class. He’s been learning web development for five years.

Robert’s parents encouraged their children to learn more than the school requires them to learn and to do the best they know how to do. They watched to see what excited their children and then showed them how to learn about it themselves.

What do you want to learn that your school isn’t teaching you at all, or that they aren’t teaching you enough about? Just because your school doesn’t teach it doesn’t mean you can’t learn it. The library is filled with books on practically everything. There is a lot to learn on the Internet if you’re careful to choose reliable sources. There are people at church and in your neighborhood who would love to help you learn the things they love to do.

You might not end up inventing a popular app, but whatever your talent, there is a lot you can do. Some teens have written best-selling novels by learning how to write on their own. Other teens start charitable programs. Or maybe your goals are a little smaller. Maybe you love the Revolutionary War but your teacher only spent two weeks hitting the highlights. The really good parts of any subject aren’t usually found in the highlights. They come when you dig way down deep into the subjects.

Start then by figuring out what you would love to know more about. It might be a subject you’re learning in school or it might be something your school doesn’t teach. Then figure out how to get your hands on more information. Think about the museums near your home, libraries, bookstores, teen clubs, programs at colleges…there is more learning going on in most towns than you probably know.

Now think about how you want to learn the material. If you love to read, you’ll probably want to find the best books. If you intend to become a best-selling author someday, write a book. You don’t have to try to get it published unless you want to. You can start a website on the subject and put all your articles up there. Make a list of the places, people, and books you used to learn the subject, so other afterschoolers can use them, too. If you’re an artist, maybe you’ll want to draw or sculpt or build what you learn. Songwriter? Write a song about it. There are hundreds of ways to show what you’re learning. Choosing a project helps you figure out what you really understand and where your learning gaps are. Another good way to test your knowledge is to teach the material to someone else. You have to learn something really well to teach it. All these methods let you test yourself without taking a boring test.

How much do you need to study? Well, you’re in charge of your afterschool education, so it’s up to you. Sometimes I’ll read a few articles on a subject and decide I know as much as I’m interested in knowing for now. Other times I’ll get really excited about something and keep right on reading book after book.

But here’s how it usually works. I will read a book about George Washington. Then I’ll get curious about his wife Martha, so I’ll switch and read about her. That book talks about her friendship with a former slave and I’ll realize I’m kind of interested in the history of slavery, so I’ll study that for a little while. Along the way, I’ll find a novel by an interesting author and read more of her books and maybe a biography of her life. One of her books is about time travel and I start wondering if it is even scientifically possible to travel in time. I find some books on the science of time travel, which get me interested in…you get the idea. One subject gets me interested in another and after a year or two, I’ve explored all kinds of different things. I’ve studied some of it a lot and some of it a little, but my world just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

That’s what learning is really meant to do—to make your world more interesting, more exciting, and a whole lot bigger.

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

Peter Vidmar, a Mormon, likes to quote a former leader of his church, Spencer W. Kimball. President Kimball’s motto was “Do it.” Peter Vidmar says if you want your dreams to come true, you can’t just dream about them—you have to get to work and make them come true.

He explains that the margin of victory is often very, very small:

“Let’s realize what the margin of victory was in a few of the events in last summer’s Olympics. In women’s cycling, after the 79.2-kilometer race, the difference between the gold medalist and the silver medalist at the finish line was just the length of a tire. In a pressure-packed swimming relay, the difference between the first-place team and second-place team was only .04 of a second. In many of the gymnastics competitions, the difference between first place and second place was as minute as .025 of a point.

The champions didn’t win by running twice as fast, by jumping twice as far, or by scoring twice as many points as their opponents. In many cases they won by just a fraction of a second, a fraction of an inch, or a fraction of a point. Likewise, and more important, the champions didn’t win by training twice as hard as their opponents. If another gymnast trains six hours a day, I can’t train twelve hours a day. Twelve hours a day in a gym just isn’t healthy! But I can train six hours and fifteen minutes a day. This is where giving it that little extra and going the extra mile makes the difference.” (Peter Vidmar, “Pursuing Excellence,” Ensign, May 1985, 38.)

He advises people to work at everything they do just a little longer—even just fifteen minutes a day more will add up to more than 91 hours a year of extra training and can make the difference between success and failure.

Next, he reminds listeners to not give up. Success isn’t always smooth or consistent. There will be days when nothing seems to be going well, or when we get discouraged, but if we give up, we can’t possibly succeed. Instead, just keep working away at it, little by little.

He teaches that intermediate goals are important, but equally important is to set a really high top goal. He aimed for the Olympics even when he hadn’t started winning local competitions, because it made him work that much harder—not hard enough to win the next local competition, but hard enough to win the Olympics. This meant he worked harder than the others, who were only focused on the next contest.

Finally, he encourages his listeners to hold on to their moral standards. He tells a story of being handed a large cup filled with wine. Each winner was supposed to drink from the cup and pass it on. He explained he wouldn’t do it—not even just a sip—because he was Mormon. They insisted he take the cup when it was passed to him, so he did, but he only held it high and then passed it on. The audience laughed at him for refusing to drink, but, even though he was a little embarrassed, he was also proud to realize how easy it had been for him to not give in to pressure to lower his standards.

Read Peter Vidmar’s complete article on Pursuing Excellence.

The Browns are Mormon and the press has noted the siblings are very close and very clean-cut. Being clean-cut and moral has not hurt their reputations at all, with their concerts regularly sold out and their albums topping the chart. They have a popular Facebook fan page.

They are even more unusual in that they all play the piano. The parents admit they would have taught them all different instruments had they been planning ahead, but at the time, they just wanted their children to appreciate music. Before they were even out of grade school, they were accompanying the church choirs. Their practices became so intense the parents worried because their children were too busy with school, music, and church. They had no time just to have fun and be kids, so the parents switched to homeschooling, which is more efficient because you don’t have to wait for the other students to catch up to you or do the small things that take up a lot of school time. With this new plan, the children had all afternoon to play, while still getting their school work done and their music practice in.

After the two oldest girls started attending Julliard, a prestigious music school in New York, they wanted their siblings to join them. Since their siblings were still in high school, the parents moved to New York also, rather than assigning their children to a guardian, as did most families. Eventually, the parents were forced to return to Utah, due to New York’s high cost of living and the cost of having five children at an expensive school. By then, most of the children were adults, and the youngest son commuted back and forth by plane each weekend, living under the care of his siblings while in New York.

It was having five siblings at Julliard that that started their path to fame. The media heard about this unusual piano playing family and started doing stories about them. It started with the BBC and went on to Oprah and other popular television programs, until almost everyone had heard of them. The youngest son was offered a chance to be in a boy-band, but his father turned down the offer. Most offers they received were for pop music, but they are classical musicians and weren’t interested in turning into a rock band.

Eventually, they performed for a large group of record label executives, playing the classical music they loved in the youthful fun way they had perfected and everyone wanted to sign them. They chose a label and the tours and albums began.

You’d think, spending so much time together, the siblings would be constantly fighting, but they aren’t. They love being together and being a brothers and sisters. Mormons are taught that families aren’t just something you have while you’re on earth. They can also be part of your lives forever, so Mormons tend to work pretty hard at getting along with their families and becoming close friends. The Browns are a real example of how you can be siblings and friends at the same time!

Chelsea Hightower, a popular Mormon dancer who was a finalist on a television program called “So You Think You Can Dance” was about to go onstage for a solo when she realized she didn’t have a dress for the number. She approached the wardrobe department, and they offered her an immodest dress that didn’t even cover her stomach, which is a violation of Mormon dress standards. She was unwilling to wear it, so she began approaching other wardrobe people, checking the dresses she had brought with her, and looking frantically for an appropriate outfit. The time approached when she should have been warming up and steeling her nerves for the solo. Solos always made her nervous, and the panic over finding an appropriate outfit only made her nervousness worse. Only moments before going onstage, she found something to wear.

She was concerned about the impact of not warming up and of going onstage already frazzled, but she felt a calm come over her as she went onstage. She knew God was rewarding her for her determination to honor her standards. While she was not always allowed to control her wardrobe choices on the program, she tried to wear appropriate outfits whenever she was allowed to choose what to wear.

Source: Chelsie Hightower’s Experience on SYTYCD
August 17, 2008 — Bryce Haymond on Millennial Star

Torah isn’t afraid to tell reporters she doesn’t drink or smoke, or even drink coffee, and that she is not going to become sexually active until she’s married. She even explained she wanted a Mormon boyfriend who shares her beliefs, and she found this in Jake Welch, an American snowboarder who is also a Mormon. When asked how she would celebrate a win, she cheerfully said water was her celebration drink of choice.

Torah said, “”I have strong beliefs and they never waver. (The gospel) keeps me grounded and gives me purpose to what I am doing. I think the way we believe as Latter-day Saints is amazing, especially in the world today” (Torah Bright Wins Gold Medal, LDS Newsroom Blog.)

Torah is a great example to teenagers who are being made fun of for their standards or who are being told they need to be immoral to be popular. She is beautiful, talented, and popular and she’s done it all without sacrificing her beliefs. She’s proof that the world is lying when it says you have to lower your standards to make it in the world.

Sure, it’s easier to be different when you’re famous, but Torah hasn’t been famous all her life. She made the commitment to her standards long before sponsors were desperate to sign her. Her past choices, made before she knew how things would turn out, are important now, because once you’re famous, everyone starts searching for the scandals in your past. Torah’s lifelong choice to be moral is paying off now, as it does for everyone who chooses Jesus over the world.