Can We Just Get On With It

… By the time we finally get to it, it won’t be any fun.

It’s suppose to be fun? Serious & boring I can see, but fun?

By the time we get to it, no one will be whooping it up on the short end.

Leaders in my ward are already being a buzzkill about it. The ward council decided that the hour and a half after church would be designated as “sacred time”. No one is supposed to contact anyone else in the ward during that time so that everyone can focus on studying :shh:

The ward council decided that the hour and a half after church would be designated as “sacred time”. No one is supposed to contact anyone else in the ward during that time so that everyone can focus on studying

That should be a fun one to police.

Double bonus, it goes against Elder Bednar’s Conference Talk on the changes and encouraging us to quit using checklists. That is totally check listing. Feel free to use Elder Bednar as your support for declining to acquiesce to their invitation.

And it goes against the similar advice we received about not programmizing it. Guess your ward council didn’t get, didn’t read, or didn’t understand the memo. But on the positive side, I’m fine if nobody contacts me all day. An hour and a half is a start, but if you really think about, the whole Sabbath is supposed to be sacred time. Related side note: there used to be a guy in our ward who would yell at you if you called him on Monday evening. He wouldn’t answer the phone, mind you, but he’d yell at you later if you left a message (pre-caller ID days).

Only two more Sundays this year and one of them will be SM only. Though the last time we had a “SM only” Sunday, SM went 2 hours. 2 hours! What’s wrong with people?

I can already tell home church is going to be a “thing.” I’ll do my studies, but I’m not looking forward to all the lessons where all we talk about is how people should be doing home church.

Double bonus, it goes against Elder Bednar’s Conference Talk on the changes and encouraging us to quit using checklists.

I think I saw someone checking that talk off a list when we read it during EQ. We have a really, really hard time not measuring each other (and ourselves). Checklists make it so easy.

I do like the spirit of a no contact time though. One other thing we don’t get right is “sometimes less is more.” I’m sure there are some Nephis waiting in the wings to fill your reclaimed hour with something or other. If we gotta do checklists, and I think we do, we might as well use them to keep people off our backs.

I think our Sacrament Meeting on the 23rd is just the standard meeting time with a Hot Chocolate Bar/Mingle Time afterwards.

In any case, I am pretty sure that my husband and I will take our toddler home and work on Christmas Festivity Prep (and avoid the Hot Chocolate Bar). The oldest WILL mutiny if she is not allowed to participate in the Hot Chocolate Bar (this was confirmed during the announcements on Sunday)- so I am hopeful that I can ask one of the adopted branch grandmas to drop my daughter off on the way home. I think that it is all of 3 houses (one way) off her path back home anyways.

Our branch has dedicated the 3rd Sunday of every month as “Potluck/Mingle Sunday”. The branch is already practicing this for the last 2 months. NOTE: Our branch has a lot of single/widowed sisters, and quite a few empty-nester (or almost empty-nester) couples. They meet together Mondays for FHE, some go to the BoM class on Wednesdays. 4 families make up approx 70% of the branch primary (3+ kids).

I was conducting in RS last month, and I kept making the joke that we had “Only X more three hour block Sundays, so LIVE IT UP!” or “This time in a month we’ll all be chillin’ at home!”