When I meet someone new, I like to ask a lot of questions.
"Where are you from?"

"Do you like to travel?"

"What are your favorite Beatles' songs?"

I like to feel that I'm getting to know a piece of them simply by listening to their responses. Perhaps I'll gain an understanding for why they are the way they are, or why they act in a particular way.

Today is the first day of September, but we have another school-related Miracle Monday to share. Sister Kimberly Palmieri submitted this one. Do you have an experience you want to contribute? Click here to send it to us.

After the Columbine High School tragedy occurred, there were many concerns about sending our children to school. Due to potential copycat scenarios, we were concerned for their safety.

I was very worried if I should send our three children to school or look into home schooling them immediately. I prayed about it and had the following dream.

Sometimes what you need at the end of a long, hard week is a quiet stroll through Psalm 23.

Today's blog post was reported by Brother Deo in Burundi. We're publishing it here in his own words.

There is a sister whose name is Regina. She had a small ball inside her left rib. She could feel it with her hands when she touched on the area.

The ball was causing pain all around her rib and the belly. She had walked with the ball for five years, and she never revealed the sickness to her husband or to her children.

Over 4th of July weekend, a couple girlfriends and I went glamping (glamour camping) at my friend's family's cabin. On that Saturday morning, we decided to go four-wheeling with her parents and grandparents.

While going up a mountain, I'm not entirely sure what happened, but as I was driving, the four-wheeler veered off the path, and we fell about 20 feet down from the road. My friend, who was riding on the back, was thrown into a tree, and I was pinned underneath the four-wheeler.

Ironically, I'm not a fan of the hot summer months in Southern California. The beaches are too crowded; the hiking trails are too packed; and the traffic and sunburns get worse every day. But in a few weeks, the tourists will leave, and the school children will return to class.

So who's left at the beach?

The regulars, that's who: the beach runner who skirts around the high tides in May and June and hops over sand castles in July; the hiker who steadily treks around families enjoying their first bird-watching or bee-stinging experience on the trail; the early morning walker whose headphones drown out traffic all year-round.

We hope you enjoyed last week's Behind the Scenes series. Today, we're back to our regularly scheduled program. We're bringing you a school-related testimony shared by Cathy Genaro. We do need Miracle Monday submissions for next month, so please see the note below for the new theme.

When I was in school, I was often teased for my short stature. As a female, I learned to deal with it with a smile and a sense of humor, but I must admit that sometimes kids can be cruel. I often felt hurt by the constant reminder that I was "different."

Somehow I survived those school days, but when my son began to be teased for being so short, I began having flashbacks of my own hurt. At the age of 12, Jason had gone an entire year without a growth spurt, and after a series of tests, his pediatrician said he would probably grow to an adult size of 5 feet tall.

We hope you enjoyed this week's behind-the-scenes peek of the Gospel Blog. We're not fancy or formidable, but we love the Lord, and we want to meditate on that love and share it with you. 

Today's post is special. It's the final Summer Reading Challenge assignment! Those of you who followed along will finish up the Book of Mormon this weekend. Congratulations for making it this far!

If you've been following along with this week's Behind the Scenes of the Blog series, you now know about our processes, our writers, and our website. Now, it's time to learn about the most important aspect of the blog — you! Well, more specifically, it's time to learn how you can get involved.

If you've always received the blog articles via email, you may not even realize that there is a blog website that houses all the articles we've ever published. Today's graphic tells you all about it.

This week, we're going behind the scenes of the Gospel Blog, showing you all the prayers and effort that go into making it happen. Today, we're getting personal. We want you to meet some of our regular writers. These are folks who have agreed to contribute one article per month — many of them do much more. Check them out below!

We're taking another break from our regularly scheduled programming to bring you a special series about none other than ... the Gospel Blog!

We want to give you an inside peek into how the blog works. We didn't choose this topic because we're self-centered. Many of you may be new to the blog, and even if you're not, you probably have no idea who is on the committee or what goes into producing a week's worth of posts.

It's time to pull back the curtain and reveal all our secrets! (Just kidding. We have no secrets.)

Today's good word comes from the Psalms. If you need a reminder that God is real, just look around you.

I've been reading this book called "The Slight Edge." It's about how, if you do simple things continuously, it can lead to great success and happiness in the future. It talks about how all people, both successful and unsuccessful, have the same amount of time during the day. What defines successful people is how they use that time.

The author says that it's easy to do the same, simple things every day, but at the same time, it's easy to not do them. One of the statements the author keeps repeating throughout the book is that if you spend 10 minutes a day reading a self-help book, then you are 10 minutes better off than those who don't.

We recently had our feetwashing service, and it left me stunned.

Normally, I try not to listen to the prayer of the person washing my feet because that's between them and God. However, this past week, I couldn't stop listening.

"Thank You for this opportunity that I have to wash her feet."

Those were the words out of this sister's mouth as she cried and washed my feet.

Why?

Why would this sister, who has been in the Gospel for years and who has known me since I was a baby, be thankful to literally wash my feet?