January 25, 2023

Feeling at Home in Your Ward | An Interview with Melody Warnick

1 hour 24 minutes

This is a rebroadcast. The episode originally ran in January 2020. Melody Warnick is the author of two books about thriving where you live: This Is Where You Belong: Finding Home Wherever You Are and If You Could Live Anywhere: The Surprising Power of Place in a Work-from-Anywhere World. Her books have been featured in the New York Times, Time magazine, Fast Company, Psychology Today, and others, and her writing has appeared in such publications as the Washington Post, the New York Times, Slate, Reader’s Digest, The Guardian, Good Housekeeping, and Woman’s Day. A regular speaker about creating connection with your community, Melody lives in Blacksburg, Virginia, where her husband serves as stake president.

Highlights

5:30 Serving in Melody’s stake in Virginia 8:20 How the book came about 10:50 Experiments in loving where you live: micro-action steps you can intentionally take to create positive experiences for yourself 18:45 Applying these principles to wards and stakes

19:20 Creating a community based on geography creates a situation where we can practice being more Christlike

21:50 Benefits of “instant community” in the ward, as compared to moving for people not in the Church tribe: familiarity and similarity

25:45 When you struggle fitting into the community

26:25 Leaders need to pay attention to these people

27:30 The more engaged you are, the more you will feel at home

28:30 Everyone can feel left out or like they don’t fit in

30:10 Being proactive can have a big impact

34:00 Serving in callings and outside of callings: have a personal ministry from a desire to be of service

37:35 Taking your talent to the community

41:30 Do we have to participate in the Church community?

43:30 It can be easier to socialize with Church members

46:10 Serving in a Church community within the larger community

50:55 Being the mayor of your street: building social cohesion in your neighborhood

54:40 Cliques and community: creating horseshoes, not circles 59:00 Detaching from your ward and going forward: moving or changing callings 1:07:00 Choosing to live near family… or not 1:13:00 Finding joy wherever you live 1:15:00 Two-hour church and missing connections: You don’t have to ask permission to create community 1:17:45 Asking, “Where are we needed?” 1:20:00 Building relationships with people and finding ways to serve them is key to living a Christlike life

Links

melodywarnick.com This is Where You Belong: Finding Home Wherever You Are If You Could Live Anywhere: The Surprising Importance of Place in a Work-from-Anywhere World TRANSCRIPT coming soon Listen on YouTube Get 14-day access to the Core Leader Library

...more