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I had a very good day today. F&T Meeting was really good, even though there were a couple of testimonies that went too long to be “ideal”. I leave the ward after one more Sunday, so I bore my testimony – mostly focusing on how wards are geographic but also can be like hospital wards. I thanked everyone for taking such good care of each other and accepting people who are very different – realizing that all of us are sick in some way and need care.
Sunday School was good. Not great, but quite good.
Priesthood Meeting was excellent. I really admire and respect the man who taught the lesson today – a former military chaplain and marriage counselor. He talked about the conversations the HPG leadership had been having about how to teach. He went through the CHI and listed the components of “good Gospel teaching” in it – and then gave an example using an old Elder McConkie quote that is viewed differently by different members and could be divisive or controversial, depending on how it was presented and taught. He talked about needing to make sure that members who can digest and need meat shouldn’t be fed milk all the time.
One thing that I really liked was the idea shared by one brother that the Church only can provide milk – that it is up to us to bring the meat (the depth of discussion that changes basic principles into things that can be chewed and broken up into savory pieces). He said that if we as High Priests only drink milk, it’s out own fault as a group – and I really like the way he said it, even if my summary doesn’t do it justice.
I also mentioned that anything (milk or meat) can be presented in such a way that it causes choking or malnutrition. The word from the CHI was “edifying” – and I pointed out that even teaching about eternal families can be the opposite of edifying IF, for example, the focus is on temple sealing and it’s wielded like a sledgehammer to the heads of single parents (and their children) or single members or spouses of non-members (and their children). It’s up to us to be in tune with the Spirit and/or (at least) those who are hearing what we teach. We can’t avoid all offense, of course, but we need to try to edify in all we teach, in one way or another – even when we are talking about ways we as adult members disagree with each other.
Now, I’m watching the Super Bowl. (It’s halftime, so I have some time to drop by here.
:shh: )Overall, it was a very good day – even though the Patriots are ahead, which is not what I want.
Well, Church was sort of hard today. First of all, my ex-Bishop has now assumed the leadership position I once held (HPGL), and he is now bringing all the bureaucracy and focus on rules to our quorum. He’s an ex-military man and thrives on standardization, the Church party-line etcetera. The focus of the lesson was on the CHI’s description of one of the missions of the Church, given in a closed-end quiz format. The whole time I sat there, cringing, as the program he was talking about was the trigger for some awful behavior from our Ward members that plunged me into my first ever bout of depression a couple years ago — requiring medication for the first time in my 4.5 decades on that planet at the time. You know that worn out story. Thank goodness it was only temporary…but the lesson had me wound up inside as the Pavlovian conditioning is still there. I felt emotionally sick through the whole lesson and just wanted to leave. And then, I did something stupid. It was fast Sunday. I’m on a weight loss program and I’m not supposed to fast (lost 30 pounds so far — woo hoo!). I forgot it was Fast Sunday and openly drank a shake in the lobby between meetings while talking to a staunch TBM woman I didn’t know very well. To make matters worse, teh straw fell into the carton, and I had to tilt the thing above my head to get the liquid out of it. How gauche to do that in front of other people who are fasting without apology!!!
The whole time I was wishing I was at home working on my assignments for school. As it was, I ended up working until the wee hours of the morning as a result, and sort of regretted I was at Church yesterday.
SilentDawning wrote:Well, Church was sort of hard today…
… How gauche to do that in front of other people who are fasting without apology!!!
ah, humanity…volunteer for nursery. you will never have to hear the HPGL, and you can have snacks on fast sunday…
😆 I loved and miss that calling. Just sayin’. I’ve probably booked 10 years or more in the nursery either officially or unofficially. It’s one of the best places to hide out in the church. I got to hang out with my kids and make sure they were happy. Lesson prep? Non-existent. I was happy if I got 5 minutes of attention span from the little rug rats to talk about how much Jesus loves them. The rest of the time was playing with toys, eating kid snacks and talking to the other nursery adults. On to current times: I’ve been slacking lately. Our ward schedule shifted from 9am to 11am start time. I used to go more often because the rest of the family was all asleep anyway. I’ve only been going once a month on average lately. I kind of miss it. There are some folks I like to see.
I attended a Unitarian Universalist congregation a couple weeks ago. Went to the early morning UU service, and then followed it with an hour with the Buddhist group and some meditation. It was ok, kind of interesting.
My day at church was interesting. It was our ward conference today.
The Bishop & Stake Pres spoke. Very good.
Our Bishop is new & seem very humble. He gave us a glimpse into the daily life of a Bishop.
The next part is the most interesting.
The Stake presidency wanted to talk with some members that they don’t normally see.
I don’t know how many they chose. My wife & I were the first.
We thought it was going to be 5-10 minutes & home free.
He spent 45 minutes with us. He wanted to know our stories from beginning to today.
He wanted to know why we became inactive & why we started to come back.
We didn’t hold back on any of it.
He told us about his life, his family & some of their challenges.
When it was over he said, when are you planning to go to the temple again?
No pressure. No judgement.
I’ve never experienced this before. I expected it to be so different?
Is this kind of treatment becoming more common in the church?
In a way, I wish someone would of done this when I first went inactive. (20+ years ago.)
Mike from Milton.
That’s wonderful, Mike. I hope it becomes more common. I attended for the second time in my new ward in Carson City, NV. We have felt impressed to locate in this particular ward (out of about six real possibilities in the general area), and today was a bit of a confirmation to me that it was the right choice. The Sacrament Meeting speakers were a man and wife speaking about love – and they were excellent talks. I really like the Gospel Doctrine Sunday School teacher. About 2/3 of the time in PH Mtg was taken up with various announcements and building cleaning assignments (which I don’t mind, given the purpose of PH/RS Mtg), so the instructor just showed a video about Pres. George Albert Smith. It was produced by the Church, but it was good – with a few video clips from his actual life. I really like that man, but I didn’t know he had such a great sense of humor – that he apparently got from his father. (There was a quote from his father saying, “We weren’t forced to move west to Utah; we went willingly – because we had to.”
:clap: )The only real “downer” for me was watching the clips from his General Conference talks and wishing our current speakers in GC were more lively. Oh, well.
I gave my testimony today. I said a couple of things:
1. That sometimes we as saints have it wrong when we think that the lord only gives us help once we’re worthy. the previous testimony, by the organist, cited 2 Nephi’s verse about praying always before performing something so that the lord consecrates performance to our souls. I said that turning to the Lord for help when we don’t feel worthy can consecrate our path toward worthiness — that we need the lord to get us there, and he will always help us if we ask.
2. I talked about what the ‘church is true’ means to me. I told how a week ago I was joking with someone asking them whether the church was still ‘true’, and he, a former bishop, said, “I don’t even know what that means anymore.” I related how Alma speaking to helaman told him to counsel with the Lord in all his doings (relating to topic 1 above), and in the next verse started talking about this thing called the ‘Liahona’. This was a compass, that pointed to the way. Alma said that it is as easy to heed the words of Christ as it is was for his forefather to give heed to the compass. So for me, the church is true when it points to eternal life and the words of Christ. Think of ‘true north’ rather than perfect and flawless, because we know it’s full of humans who aren’t. I also said, that when we don’t personally confirm the guidance of the church, then the compass really doesn’t work, just like it didn’t for the family of Nephi.
Well, no-one threw me out, and it seemed to be received well…
Nice testimony, wayfarer. I chose to stand and bear my testimony as well.
I shared my experience of visiting NYC and seeing ground zero, and out of such a tragedy is rising a beautiful memorial and new construction. They are not going back to building the twin towers the way it was before, but are moving forward rebuilding things better than it was before.
As I go through my trials, it changes me. I can’t go back to how I thought before, I’m changed. But I can take the opportunity to rebuild things differently and better for me.
I wanted my family to know I have a testimony that “I know” God lives, that through the Atonement Christ gives me hope despite my weaknesses, and “I know” Christ is my savior. I then switched language and said I truly “believe” Joseph Smith was a prophet of God and the Book of Mormon is the word of God.
That was my day.
My day was hard. HP Group — the only meeting I really enjoy felt like a PEC meeting back in my ill-fated HPGL days. The former Bishop at the time is now our HPGL. He passed out priorities from our FP such as doubling missinoaries in the field, doubling baptisms, getting more people to the temple, increasing sacrament meeting attendance, reducing the pool of prospective elders. The quorum all talked about it and I knew I had better keep my mouth shut. They were talking about each member in the room inviting so many people to Church, going out and visiting the prospective elders, and also, becoming ordinance workers at the temple.
I felt like screaming…(well, saying loudly)…you’re going about this all wrong. You are trying to use a “push” strategy to get everyone to Church again, and you need a “pull strategy”. Put processes in place to enable people to be more prepared for their lessons, put on some well-organized activities that people want to come to, and encourage warm relationships among members in the Ward. Make sure there is something here people WANT to come to.
Our former Bishop, now HPGL never really listened to us on the PEC when I was HPGL. I felt like I was on the PEC again. I discreetly left he meeting and read a book on the Power of Eye Contact instead, then showed up late for Sunday School which was rather lacklustre. Then my daughter got sick so the whole family went home before Testimony meeting and enjoyed our Sunday afteroon.
My wife is not into our Ward anymore, unfortunately.
Not a great Sunday I guess.
I had Stake Conference this weekend. The Priesthood meeting yesterday was OK, but most of the time was spent in great detail discussing the Family Search indexing program. It would have been very informational and somewhat interesting, but I knew all about it already. Overall, it wasn’t good or bad; it was OK – mostly because the Stake Presidency Counselor’s talk actually about “missionary work” wasn’t stereotypical and actually was quite good.
The main session surprised me a bit. Nearly all of the talks were at least good, and two of them (a 17-year-old young woman and the Stake Young Women 2nd Counselor) gave talks that were among the best I’ve ever heard at any Stake Conference I’ve attended. They both talked about the Young Women program, but they were personal, honest, non-traditional and very, very moving.
My new Stake President seems to be a soft-spoken, humble man with a good sense of humor. I’m looking forward to getting to know him better – even though he also came across as more orthodox than not.
One more thing:
My wife told me today when we were talking on the phone that three people came up to her today in church and told her that they miss me – and, explicitly in two cases, my comments in the classes. One of the people was our former Bishop and current Stake Patriarch. I share that only because most of those comments were “unique” in some way – and many of them were heterodox to some degree.
The opening prayer at today’s Sacrament Meeting, included a whole spiel about “our boys bring peace and democracy to the Afghan Lands”. :think: Yes, that graveyard of empires, that no one’s been able to conquer for two thousand years, including the Red Army… that we’re occupying “to bring peace and democracy” to.In Sunday School, a woman tried to drag in gay marriage into our discussion on 2 Nephi 26.
:wtf: She used the proclamation to the world, to justify her homophobia. Then, one of the other sisters, who is usually quite closed minded on other matters, said “I’ve got a gay friend”, and went on to say how much she liked him, but didn’t approve of his behavior. More positive, I suppose. (Actually when our HT couple started going on about “gay marriage”, I said that I wished “straights” would get married these days. Most of them don’t round here anymore. It turned out their grand daughter was living with a man, unmarried.)In priesthood, I took a turn, and had to go out…
Yeah, Sam, you win some and you lose some . . . Sorry yours was a loss 
Stake Conference was last week, so today was Fast & Testimony Meeting. It was very good – and I was very touched by two particular testimonies:
1) One of the very faithful brethren in my new ward (the Gospel Doctrine teacher) mentioned in his testimony today that as he has studied Church History he has had to learn to accept that all of us,
including even our prophets, have weakness, make mistakes, hold on to incorrect beliefs and will be accountable for the things we say and do that hurt others– but that the GOSPEL the prophets teach (and he emphasized and stressed the word “Gospel”) is of God and that the Atonement is powerful enough to save all who have sinned and come short of the glory of God. He mentioned how thankful he has been for the chance to study Church History and come to this profound realization. I know he was referring to the recent furor over Prof. Bott’s Washington Post interview, but I was moved by the way he phrased it – and I have to admit I thought of cwald’s statement that I would never hear such a thing said from the pulpit, so I had to make sure I posted it right away in this thread. 😆 2) The other one was very, very different. A mentally disabled woman (“retarded” is the word from my youth, with NO negative connotations in its use) “bore her testimony” – which consisted of nothing more than her stumbling a bit to read some random thoughts about her month, written in her own handwriting on a lined piece of paper. (She mentioned that she will be 33 this month, but I would put her mental age at about 10 or so, at the most.)
There was nothing whatsoever in it that was traditionally spiritual.It just was her getting up in front of her friends and sharing her life with them – and it moved me DEEPLY. I can’t explain exactly why – except to say that her total innocence and lack of guile of any kind, combined with the smiles of love I saw on the faces of everyone in the congregation, struck me as what the Gospel really is all about. It’s not the flowery words of a “deep” testimony; it’s the safety and acceptance in which such purity could be manifested. I wish everyone could understand that such an attitude and environment is supposed to be there for everyone, not just the mentally disabled, but I still am thankful for the chance to see it in person in this case.
Finally, my wife called and told me she had some wonderful news about the new Stake Presidency where I just left. She told me who they are, and I almost jumped up and down in the church shouting for joy. All three of them served on the High Council with me, and I couldn’t have crafted a better, more diverse Stake Presidency if I’d tried. One of them is fairly conservative, one is classically moderate, and one is quite liberal (a hardcore environmentalist).
The counselors probably were my two best friends on the High Council – and I guess I’m just arrogant enough to hope that my time with them there helped prepare them in some way for their new callings.They all are kind, caring, soft-spoken men – and the counselors have good senses of humor, to boot. I really am ecstatic about the composition of the Stake Presidency, since I believe they will bring different perspectives and be able to “counsel” as counseling is supposed to be done. Mine was interesting. Having lost a significant amount of weight, I was showered with a number of highly positive comments. Not that I’m vain, but it was nice to have people come up and talk to me who normally don’t have much interest in talking. The social interaction was nice. I also forged a relationship with our Stake Employment Specialist who is interested in partnering with my school in some kind of an Employment Conference to help boost employment in the Church. Our school does outreach, so this is a non-hard-core doctrinal effort I can be involved in, which is more professional and community oriented than the kind of narrowly Church-serving initiatives I’ve been involved in over the years. We want to open it up to the community as a whole, rather than just the Church. Plus I’m supposed to be doing this kind of stuff for my full-time job, so it puts a different spin on my involvement. I’ll propose this to my employer in a week or so and see what they think.
And third, I started a real debate in Gospel Doctrine, but then sat back quietly while it played out in the audience. It caused a bit of a headache for the Gospel Doctrine teacher who saw we were quickly headed for non-faith-promoting conclusions, and had to exercise containment in order to stop it from getting out of control.
The subject was priesthcraft. One person defined it as “preaching the gospel for money”. The teacher defined it as any preaching of the gospel outside the Church by people who don’t have the priesthood. This is from Satan, he said, as it prevents people from hearing the full gospel as understood by our Church.
He acknowledged that all Churches have truth and one can feel the Spirit though — qualifying what he said earlier. I asked if a non-priesthood holder who preaches the gospel’s core principles (atonement, forgiveness, kindness) on a volunteer basis is participating in priestcraft, since he’s not earning money. He said that yes, that was priesthood and even that is from Satan. I then asked how principles of truth such as the atonement, which evoke the Spirit, could be from Satan. I questioned if we had the definition correct.
Hands went up all over the place and one person he picked commented that even the people at the top of our hierarchy are paid, so are the Apostles participating in priestcraft? He responded that no one is paid in our Church, although people who do it full-time might get a living allowance (thus nullifying the idea that no one is paid). Anyway, he finally conained the conversation, called on a stabilizing, old Bishop to get him out of the mess and then moved on. I kept my mouth shut after my two questions.
I wasn’t trying to stir up trouble, but after all the introspection and things I’ve learned about the Church in recent years, as well as knowing full well that the Church does pay the people at the top, I was interested in his answer. Sadly, I felt the answer was a milk answer to a meat question. I apologized to the guy afterwards for potentially stirring up trouble, I was simply trying to nail down a decent definition that covers all the bases….
My conclusion was that its the motive which defines if it’s priestcraft or not. If the motive is to “get gain” then its priestcraft. If the motive is to help others, and happen to get paid as a secondary benefit, it’s not. At least, I will believe that until I get a whim which changes my mind
😆 I had a neat experience today, and I immediately thought of this thread. I am in CA this week (yesterday through next Saturday) attending college fairs, and there was one this afternoon – so I looked up the closest building to my hotel and attended Sac Mtg and Sunday School in the ward that met this morning. Sac Mtg was wonderful, for three distinctly different reasons:
1) The ward is very diverse. There were at least 4 obvious races and ethnicities in the congregation, and there were at least 4 obvious mixed-race families. Also, one of the counselors in the Bishopric was black.
2) The opening prayer was given by a member in an electric wheelchair. The other Bishopric counselor took a microphone into the congregation and held it so the member could pray, since he couldn’t hold it on his own. The man had to repeat each phrase a couple of times to say clearly what he wanted to say, which was, in its entirety, “Heavenly Father, let us have the Spirit with us in this meeting. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.”
It was indescribable.
3) Two women talked – the first about repentance and the second, the Bishop’s wife, about temple attendance. (As the Bishop’s wife said at the very beginning of her talk, “Don’t tune out. This isn’t going to be a guilt-trip talk. I’m going to talk about why this has been so hard for me over the years.”)
The talk on repentance was very personal, and the woman used the example of how she has had to come to try to forigve an ex-husband who is “a wicked man” – and she used a couple of examples to illustrate why it’s been so hard. However, it was upbeat, focused on love and forgiveness and humility, and wasn’t full of the negativity that can infuse that topic sometimes. It’s a topic about which I feel passionate and have some heterodox views, but there were only a couple of very small squirmy moments in the entire talk. (She took my e-mail address and said she’d send me a copy once she gets it written out, so I hope I can quote from it in a future post.)
The talk about temple attendance was very open and honest, and it was so refreshing to hear the Bishop’s wife talk about all the reasons they’ve struggled to attend the temple regularly over the years. (It also helped that she has a good sense of humor, as in the following: “Everyone knows it’s hard to avoid the Bishop when he wants to talk with you. Try to do that when you live with him!” – and, “He came home, looked at me and said, ‘Sister ________.’ I knew the next words wouldn’t be good.'”) The end was a bit uncomfortable for me, since she really does believe that temple attendance is almost a cure-all – but it was ok, since the rest of the talk was so frank and almost confessional in nature.
cwald, I couldn’t help but think of your statement a while ago about not hearing these sorts of things from the pulpit. I had to chuckle a bit when she started by saying that she wasn’t sure the Bishop knew what he was getting into when he asked her to speak on that topic, since she was going to share some things about them that the congregation didn’t know. (and it was good to see her turn toward him and grin as if to say, “This is your own fault.”)
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