my interesting day at church.

So I actually attended church yesterday. It was interesting. I was only on 2 hours of sleep thanks to the new little one but I wanted to make my wife happy after having a discussion about my inactivity this week.

i really enjoyed the sacrament although my wife look surprised I wanted to take it. I didn’t ask her about it at the time and I kind of forgot until now. I’m wondering where that came from. I probably read her expression wrong or something.

Then we got to the testimonies. I’m in a student ward so it really clears out over the summer. There were maybe 7-8 couples there with a bunch of kids. There was lots of silence between the testimonies and I was really enjoying it. I used to get really nervous that no one was talking and feel more and more like I should. But since I wasn’t worrying about whether or not I was getting a “prompting” I just used the time to pray and ponder. It almost made me wish there was more quiet time like that. It was very refreshing.

One of the first testimonies, however, was a new sister who went on about how her siblings had left the church and how unhappy they were. She talk about how they “never say they’re unhappy but [she] can just see it in their eyes”. She went on about how sorry she felt for them etc, etc…. Ugh. I didn’t amen that one. I was pleasantly surprised that my wife made a comment to me after sacrament meeting about how judgmental she thought that was and she didn’t agree with that.

A 7 year-old girl said “I’d like to bear my testimony about Joseph Smith. I know that Joseph Smith was a real person and was once really alive. Innanamajesuchrisamen.” A testimony of JS I 100% agreed with for once.

But then came the highlight of the meeting:

My best friend in the ward’s wife gave a beautiful testimony. She is from Italy originally but is naturalized now. She talked about how she could be described as Italian, Italian-American, American, Christian, Mormon, etc. But she bore her testimony of how great it is for her when she lets go of all of those labels and sees herself and others as just children of God. She testified about how when we view everyone around us as children of God instead of with our man-made labels we are better able to love and help each other make the world a better place. It was really a beautiful testimony. Made my day.

After SM we met with my bishop for a minute to talk about blessing our new baby. I really like my bishop. He’s really pretty relaxed. So much so that because my wife is a nurse and has to work Sundays most of the time he has our home teachers bring the sacrament. Instead of giving her a speech about not working on Sundays he accommodated it. I love it. Due to scheduling conflicts we will probably bless our baby in our home or at the church on a weeknight instead of in f/t meeting. I think it’s great to be able to bless him with just our friends and family around. I’m glad he doesn’t think it has to be in f/t meeting like many bishops still do.

But the best part was that when we walked into his office, the book “The God Who Weeps” was sitting on his desk. If it wasn’t for that book I probably wouldn’t have felt the need to search out websites like this one and I’d probably be on my way out. I didn’t say anything about it. He knows nothing of my issues and I didn’t bring any up but the fact that my bishop keeps a copy in his office says something good to me.

Overall it was a pretty good day.

Fortunately with a new baby my wife didn’t want to stay past sacrament meeting. SS and EQ are usually much more painful….