We’re delighted to announce that Segullah’s summer issue will arrive in mailboxes across the country this week. The topic, “Gifts of the Spirit,” was inspired by our ongoing quest to find and develop the spiritual gifts which we’ve been given. In her editorial, Allyson Smith says, “I have met many people who come by patience (or faith, or discernment, or trust) with remarkable ease. To some is given one gift, to some another. going back through the list of spiritual gifts laid out in Moroni 10, I am well aware that I did not come installed with most when I was born. But the lack of them hasn’t let me off any hooks. I may be low on original patience, but that doesn’t mean I’m not under injunction to develop some. And so it goes for us all. We start where we are, with what we have.”

The issue includes personal essays by Heather Oman, Michelle Lehnardt and Tarasine Buck, where the authors find themselves in possession of spiritual gifts they didn’t know they had until they were put to the test. I’m particularly excited about our features: an article by Barbara Bishop, who views dreams as gifts of the spirit, and an interview with Marilyn Brown, who sees her role in developing Mormon writers as her own spiritual calling. The issue features amazing art by Leslie Graff. If you haven’t subscribed yet, do it now, so you can read more great stuff like this poem by Darlene Young, which reminds us how spiritual gifts are sometimes given to the people we’d least expect to receive them, and spiritual experiences often catch us unawares:

“Shepherds”

by Darlene Young

Don’t tell me about rose-cheeked Arcadian youth
gathering daisies on a hillside
piping tunes to their cloud-fluffy sheep
under the stars.

No, these were foul-smelling, lusty
men with dirty necks, greasy hands,
snorting, arguing, joke-telling, nose-picking
men—one wearing stolen
sandals (although I admit he felt
guilty about it)—gambling on who
had the best aim as they chucked rocks
at a nearby lizard.

You talk about salt of the earth—
these men were salty, alright
downright ornery, some of them,
fighting sometimes and yelling
at their wives when they were home,
which wasn’t often.

Yeah, I’ll grant you Dan
was an innocent
and Dave had some noble moments
and none of them was really evil
but they all had dirty fingernails
of one kind or another
when the light came—

yes, it came.
But don’t take away that moment just before—
flies whining over the sheep dung
and Jake and Zeke having a
spitting contest—
that’s the key moment, you see,
in all their grimy glory;
it has to be

because the light came to me too,
Alleluia.