We had a surprise when we looked at our year-end statistics, one we honestly can’t explain. We know that over the years we have been read in more than 220 countries and regions, but what were our top ten countries this year?
Usually, we expect to see primarily the English-speaking countries—nothing out of the ordinary there. Yet we have been awed over time when we’ve dug deeper into the stats. We had a long-time reader In the Vatican. Really? We used to have a very steady reader at McMurdo Bay in Antarctica. Over the years we sometimes received requests for hard copies to be sent to Iran and Pakistan. (We don’t do hard copies).
Still nothing prepared us for this year’s stats of the top ten countries where we have active readers. Here it is:
Top Ten Countries by Active Readers
United States
China
Singapore
Canada
United Kingdom
India
Australia
Germany
Philippines
New Zealand
Wait a minute. China, as second place? How could this possibly be? Religious restriction is real and precise in China. We felt it when we tried to get a visa once to China and they made us write a letter affirming that as founders of a religious magazine that we would promise not to speak of religion while we were there. Finally, after much back-and-forth China gave us a visa for a one-time only entry whereas others on our tour received a ten-year unlimited entry.
Nearly as strange is Singapore and India on the list. Is there an explanation for this we cannot see or is it that Meridian has a quiet reach in places, preparing hearts in ways that are yet invisible to us? A reader’s location doesn’t always reflet where their hope, faith, or story began.
Top 15 Stories You Chose
As we look at your top 15 stories, we have to note one thing. Your top choice by far is to come to First Line News and the Come Follow Me podcast. We hope you like the news because we seek to be broad and impartial and you can get a quick glance for the day without news of crime or seedy entertainment. It is just what’s happening that you need to know.
We are also grateful that you seek to be gospel scholars and listen to our podcast on the Come Follow Me scriptures of the week. We have recorded this in many awkward times and places like the inside of our car in the garage on our mission to Puerto Rico or hotel rooms when we were on the go. We have always hoped you had something from us to count on and thank you for reading and listening.
So, here it goes. Our top 15 stories in ascending order:
15. The New Hymn that Feels Like an Old Friend: A Thanksgiving Reflection
https://latterdaysaintmag.com/the-new-hymn-that-feels-like-an-old-friend-a-thanksgiving-reflection/
By Mariah Proctor
This hymn from the church’s new hymnbook already feels like an old favorite because the truths it beautifully teaches are both timeless and profound.
14. Remarkable Signs in the Heavens the Night Joseph Got the Plates
https://latterdaysaintmag.com/remarkable-signs-in-the-heavens-the-night-joseph-got-the-plates/
By Daniel C. Peterson
During the night of 22 September 1827, near Mendon, Heber C. Kimball—a future apostle and counselor in the First Presidency who, at this point, had heard nothing about the Restoration—was awakened by shouting. John P. Greene, his neighbor, wanted him to come and see something in the sky. Heber ran outside with his wife and with Brigham Young’s sister, Fanny, who was living with the Kimballs at the time. There in the sky they saw a bow with an army marching from east to west. Though they had not yet heard of Joseph Smith, this was the very night he got the plates from the Hill Cumorah.
https://latterdaysaintmag.com/a-necessary-lie/
By Doohyum Kim
The worst lie I ever told was to the person I love most.
Two weeks. I’ll just be gone for two weeks. That’s what I said to my wife, standing on the train station platform in 2009.
The next time I saw her was two years later.
12. Revealing New Rays of Light on the Smith Family Daguerreotype
https://latterdaysaintmag.com/revealing-new-rays-of-light-on-the-smith-family-daguerreotype/
By Donald Patrick Bradley Sr. and Joseph Brickey
Before Joseph Smith’s great-granddaughter Lois Smith Larsen died in 1992, she passed on to her son Dan Larsen several Smith family heirlooms—including a locket, a picture locket whose broken clasp had kept it shut, hiding the picture within. Holding onto the locket for nearly three decades, he was unaware of the treasure it concealed. But the day the long forgotten daguerreotype photograph within the locket was brought to light could forever change how we see the founding Prophet of the Restoration.
11. What Did Lucy Mack Smith have to Say about Emma?
https://latterdaysaintmag.com/what-did-lucy-mack-smith-have-to-say-about-emma/
By Scot Facer Proctor
I like to go to original journals and accounts to help form my feelings and opinions about characters and players in early Church History. Many stories circulate that are either false or based on spurious sources. I am so happy that we have a small paragraph from Joseph Smith’s Mother as to what she had to say about her daughter-in-law Emma Hale Smith. From that one statement alone we can learn a great deal.
10. If I were the Devil, and my Goal were to Destroy The Rising Generation, Here’s What I’d Do.
By Maurine Proctor
I asked ChatGpt what the devil would do to corrupt the rising generation and received an answer so profound and so subtle that it made me gasp.
As Latter-day Saints, of course, we know that the devil is a literal being, whose intents are, indeed, to destroy us, and he is far smarter than ChatGPT, but if artificial intelligence can devise a plan to soften, distract, discourage, and corrupt a generation, how much more incisive and deadly is Satan’s plan?
9. President Dallin H. Oaks: What a Daughter Learned from Her Father
https://latterdaysaintmag.com/president-dallin-h-oaks-what-a-daughter-learned-from-her-father/
By Maurine Proctor
President Dallin H. Oaks list of accomplishments is stellar, but what was he like at home, in all those thousands of private moments with his family? We asked his daughter, the renowned violinist, Jenny Oaks Baker, to share what it was like growing up with Dallin H. Oaks.
8. When the American Elite Visited Joseph Smith in Nauvoo
https://latterdaysaintmag.com/when-the-american-elite-visited-joseph-smith-in-nauvoo-2/
By Maurine Proctor
In May of 1844, just 45 days before Joseph Smith would be murdered in Carthage Jail, two imposing visitors arrived in Nauvoo just before midnight. They were Josiah Quincy and Charles Francis Adams from Massachusetts, both American bluebloods, born of powerful families. Adams was the grandson of John Adams and son of former president John Quincy Adams who would one day become a member of Congress and then American ambassador to England. Quincy’s father had been the mayor of Boston and the president of Harvard, and he too would become the mayor of Boston.
Josiah Quincy, intrigued by Joseph, wrote much of the prophet including this: Born in the lowest ranks of poverty, without book-learning and with the homeliest of all human names, he had made himself at the age of thirty-nine a power upon earth.
By Peter Fagg
Thoughts of empty chairs have haunted me for over a decade as I look at the emptying pew where all my children once sat. I mourn that some of them do not feel what I feel. It is a grief that I have not spoken. Why can they not see? It is a pain that goes on and on. Why do they not know? I’ve tried to reconcile their absence. A roller coaster of feelings has followed: is it guilt, embarrassment, or imposter syndrome? What is it that I’m really feeling?
I know I’m not alone. Most of us know a child, a parent, a spouse, a sibling, a grandchild, a friend who has stepped away from the Church or even away from any faith in God.
6. What a New Analytical Tool Tells Us About President Nelson’s Talks
https://latterdaysaintmag.com/what-a-new-analytic-tool-tells-us-about-president-nelsons-talks/
By Scott Brown
As we remembered President Russell M. Nelson, a new analytical tool has helped us see what ideas and scriptures he most often taught and what concepts he stressed more than were heard in earlier conferences. For instance, did he speak more of the second coming, and the gathering of Israel more than other prophets? If so, how much more?
5. Why the U.S. Strikes in Iran Change Everything in the Middle East
https://latterdaysaintmag.com/why-the-u-s-strikes-in-iran-change-everything-in-the-middle-east/
By Maurine Proctor
I have spent much time in Israel in the last thirty-five years, and so the existential threat that the country has lived with has been a painful reality to me. I have long known that the Iranian regime, known as the Islamic Republic and Revolutionary Guard Corps, is ignited by a vision of an Israel genocide, completely wiping it off the map. I’ve had a front-row seat to shellings from Gaza by Iran’s proxies and checked the bomb shelter in my hotel for easy access. I have heard clerics call for the blood of Jews to irrigate the dry fields like water in a trough.
4. Brigham Young Race and Slavery: Reexamining Utah’s 1852 Service Act
https://latterdaysaintmag.com/brigham-young-race-and-slavery-reexamining-utahs-1852-service-act/
By Daniel C. Peterson
We can’t escape the fact that Brigham Young said some things about racial issues that make us cringe in the twenty-first century. In fact, to make matters worse, as governor of Utah Territory, he presided in 1852 over the passage of a law that actually legalized slavery in the territory.
Or did he?
3. How the Word of Wisdom Protects Against The “Evils and Designs of Conspiring Men”
By Jeff Lindsay
The Restoration provides impressive scope in the revelations we have received. They involve much more than the theological and spiritual realms, but dare to give us practical knowledge for living our mortal lives and resisting dangers in our day. When many today have abandoned faith in favor of human wisdom and the tenets of materialism which claim to be based on science, the Word of Wisdom, given in 1833 to the Prophet Joseph Smith, comes as revelation from God urging us to take the material world and our physical bodies seriously.
2. The Latter-day Saint who is the Executive Producer of “The Chosen”
https://latterdaysaintmag.com/the-latter-day-saint-who-is-the-executive-producer-of-the-chosen/
By Maurine Proctor
Brad Pelo, the Executive Producer and President of 5&2 Studios, creators of The Chosen, might just hold one of the most unique claims among filmmakers today: sharing Easter dinner with Jesus and Peter this year, and Jesus and Judas the year before. “We hoped to get them reconciled,” he quipped.
1. The Signs and Tokens Pertaining to The Holy Priesthood
https://latterdaysaintmag.com/the-signs-and-tokens-pertaining-to-the-holy-priesthood/
By Valiant K. Jones
Latter-day Saints who receive their endowments will find that they will experience “different forms of prayer, symbolic religious clothing, gestures, and rituals” than they are accustomed to experiencing during regular weekly church services. However, as they contemplate the spiritual significance of these religious symbols, they will come to find a richness and closeness to God that will settle any discomfort that comes with the newness of that experience.