Well, today turned out to be one of the most simple days yet.
I got to bed around 1am last night, despite getting up at 4am, so I decided to sleep in a little. I hadn't finished preparing my Sunday school lesson though, and knew I wanted to use a few videos in class, so I got up at 7:30, got ready and made some breakfast (pancakes with Nutella, yum!) before going over to the other house with Theresa's laptop.
After about a half hour of searching, I finally found the videos that I wanted: the clip of the saints in Missouri being thrown out of their homes/mob men bragging about the murders, rapes, and thefts they were guilty of, as well as the Mormon Message of the currant bush. I finished up just in time to pack up and run back over to my house, where everyone was meeting to walk to church. I took my backpack full of the things I needed and made the lovely trip to church with Miya.
Once we were at church, we were greeted by a few of the members, as well as the two missionaries that we had over for dinner last week. It was really good to have extra familiar faces there.
Sacrament meeting was great. The bishop gave the first talk on focusing on the purpose of Sacrament Meeting more...from what I heard, it was a great talk. I know, its super ironic that this was the rare occasion that I wasn't super paying attention to the speakers (I always try to take notes from every talk), but I had to finish organizing the order for everything in my lesson.
My favorite part of the bishop's talk, again, very ironically, was a poem that he read. It drove in the message of his talk perfectly. I loved it so much that I asked him about it after the meeting and got the title and author. It's called "A Sacrament Meeting" by O. Willard Piling. I took a minute the next day to look it up so I could put it on here, but I couldn't find any trace of it. I'll keep hunting around or ask the bishop next week for a copy.
Haha, by the end of Sacrament meeting, I had everything set for my lesson. I enjoyed what I heard of our Stake representatives talk on being a light to the world and doing more to 'rise' each day. I'm sorry I missed so much. Thats what I get for trying to multitask.
Once Sacrament meeting ended, I went upstairs and got everything set up quickly. I didn't dawdle, but got class started with a prayer once I had confirmed that everyone was there. The other two classes were on the same floor, so I got super nervous while I was trying to teach with so many people walking noisily along the back of our room. I didn't hesitate though, but I felt a ton better once things were more still.
Okay, so my lesson was on the saints in Missouri being forced from their homes and the purpose of Zions camp. Once I read through the whole lesson a few days back, I knew I was going to fail in teaching if I didn't invite an adequate weight to what we were going to discuss. I just felt that in order to appropriately show the much-deserved reverence to the people we were about to discuss and the hardships they went through, hardships I won't pretend to understand, that I needed paint a heavy picture using the facts provided. I started by telling the class that this was going to be a heavy topic, not because I'm a cynic, but because I felt it was important, so they should be aware of that from the beginning.
I actually started by writing the word 'extermination order' on the board and asking the class, as psychologists love to do, what feelings they had when they read those words. After a few answers, I thanked them, then asked them how they would feel if they were told that morning that their name was now on that order and that it was now in effect. I got a lot of responses actually. Some said they would feel afraid, others would be very sad. Some said that they would try to hide, and others said they would run away.
I thanked them again, commenting briefly on comments, and then explained that these were all probably feelings that the saints had when they were put on the real Extermination Order in Missouri. I explained some of the background that had led up to this, then hit play on my pre-set clip on the laptop...which worked for about ten seconds, and then brought up an error saying that youtube was blocked from the church's wifi.
Oops. Well, no need to panic. I had watched the clip only a few hours ago, so I quickly tried to paint the scenes for them. One girl teared up, so I guess I did okay. We read some scriptures on why The Lord allowed these things to happen, briefly discussing why it was important. Then I took the liberty of flipping the question onto the class: its easy to talk about the saints being put through their trials because of the reasons we had just read, but do we struggle with keeping the same commandments too? I didn't want this to be a confession session, so I just one comment through and had everyone else just think about it.
I then took another liberty to side track, because I felt really good about it as I was preparing the lesson earlier. I opened up some discussion on the purpose of trials. We discussed how they are teaching tools from a God who loves us enough to TRUST US with such painful experiences. I thought about showing the Mormon Message about the currant bush at this point, but then decided against it, since everyone there had said they had seen it, and I wanted to save some time. It was a really wonderful discussion though, and made for a great part of the lesson.
I went from this into having the class read and discuss how The Lord also showed great compassion to the Saints and how we can also be looking for the same things.
This led into an explanation of Zion's camp, what the men involved had to sacrifice and endure, and then how it had abruptly ended after a 1000 mile journey. Since half the class was from America, I reminded them about the rugged landscape that had to be crossed from Ohio to Missouri. For the other half of the class, I explained that this would be like walking from Cardiff to the eastern border of Austria OR from Cardiff to Madrid, Spain, (I'm cool with giving a few options) with a bit of a swim in there too that us Americans didn't have to worry about. Theresa reminded us all that while they had to swim, their walk would be much prettier than ours. I agreed with that, and announced that I probably should have tacked on a few extra miles to make up for that.
We talked a bit about how they would feel, if they were a part of Zions Camp and had been told at the last bit that they wouldn't be fighting and that they were disbanded. I was surprised at how upset they were. They showed a lot more frustration than I had considered, so for the last few minutes of class, I really opened some doors for discussion into what it means to trust in The Lord. We talked about what it takes to sacrifice for Him, why that is important, and how we can implement it more into each day. We had a lot of really amazing comments on this. It was at this time that my time was up, so I ended class by writing one of my favorite quotes up on the board and challenging the class to consider how some of their trials may be The Lord trying to teach them something specific, as he had done with the early Saints. My departing quote was "Nothing scares Satan more than when, at then end of a terrible day, you get down on your knees and say 'Lord, I'm still with you.'"
So, that was my lesson. I'll worry about how many people it made go inactive sometime when I get around to it.
Relief Society was good, with the lesson focusing on grace. We talked about how it is an enabling power, which is something I had never thought much about. As an enabling power, I learned that grace is something that helps you to do things, things that you couldn't ever do alone. Like, be saved. But it does more, i think. I'm pretty sure it does, but I want to think more about that later.
After Relief Society was over, we stayed for the ward munch and mingle. Yeah, not just for the youth or YSA, but the whole ward (that just shows how small the ward really is). It was fun, but instead of chatting with the same lady I had talked a lot with before Sacrament Meeting, I ended up chatting with the missionaries we had over for dinner last week. I think they really enjoyed being able to talk with someone about what they had done last week as well as some of the differences between Wales and Utah, like the country, the frequency of the f word, and the food.
After I walked home with my group, I crashed. I had gone without a lot of sleep for the last four or five days, so I was cool with sleeping for a while, but I was very surprised to find that I had slept through my alarm and had taken a three hour nap. Oops.
I ran downstairs to help with the last of dinner only minutes before the second missionary companionship walked through the door. We played a round of 'Stump the Stars' (basically, you ask a history question about something we had seen so far and if no one can correctly answer it, then you get a point) before we could say the dinner prayer. I'm very proud to say that I was one of three who got a point!! No one else could remember who the longest-serving Roman emperor was from the dreaded 3rd century (dreaded because we have so little facts about it, so we all hate answering questions about it. Which is also why I made sure to store this tidbit away during all our recent Rome days). No one said Constantious, so Cheers all! :)
Katie had prepared some homemade mac and cheese, peas, grapes, garlic bread, and brownies for our group of twenty. It turned out pretty dang good! Both of these missionaries were from Utah, which I thought was a little funny (is there anyone between 19 and 21 in Utah still?), but it seemed like they enjoyed talking with other Utahns.
I left dinner as soon as things started to wind down so I could sneak over to the other house for some wifi/skype time. I was able to skype with Ethan while he at his chill security job, Nick and Brook while they were at home, and then Dad, Mom, and Gretchen when they got home from church. It was so great to see everyone and get the updates! I felt bad that I had to transfer my pictures while I was talking with Mom and Gretch though, its never polite to be distracted while you're talking with someone, but I had almost made the mistake of completely forgetting to get those pictures off my camera, so another mulitask session ensued. Sorry guys. I still do love you, I promise!
I came back to the house in the middle of the movie 'Amazing Grace' that my roomates had put up on the projector against our kitchen wall. I love it when we have time to do that. I sat down and watched a bit before I left early to take a shower (my hair got super gross super fast today, so I was thrilled to go wash it!), read some scriptures, say some prayers, and just go to bed.
Which I did. :)
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