Sunday was great, though packed.  I sat down in the back pew, just a few minutes before sacrament meeting was to be starting, and was asked to bless the sacrament.  I thought that was interesting not only because it’s not exactly a small ward, so there are plenty of other priesthood around to do it, but also because they still don’t even know for sure that I’m a member.  I haven’t met with the Bishop, and I’m sure that my records weren’t transferred yet, so I could just be a guy off the street (who knows a fair bit about the church and doesn’t mind sitting in church for several hours).  I finally decided that the reason he asked was because he wanted to hear my Canadian accent bless the bread.

    This week there was a couple of babies being blessed (not that the babies were a couple, this isn’t a pre-arranged marriage sort of country, just that there were two of them) so there were significantly more people at church than the week before.  So many so that we had to add some cups and fill them after all the water trays had been depleted, something that hasn’t happened to me more than a handful of times (this was the third, I think).  After a really good testimony meeting at which I bore mine, the teacher of the singles class approached me and recruited me into her class.

    After helping set up the chairs, I was asked by the missionaries to help out with the Gospel Principles class because there were so many non-members there for the blessings.  The aforementioned teacher, whose class I had been in for just 2 or 3 minutes, was really hoping that this wouldn’t be a permanent thing (which it wasn’t).  The missionaries spent the next 45-50 minutes trying to give a really well-prepared first discussion.  I say trying because there was a visitor who was a member, but had a bad case of brain-mouth.  She just kept talking about some of the most random stuff that though it was always related to the church and spirituality often had little if anything to do with the overview of the plan of salvation that the Elders were trying to teach.  Sadly consequently, we only made it through pre-mortal existence and almost all of the way through mortality.  For any of you who have served missions, you will know that one hour is plenty of time to make it through the plan of salvation.  I felt sorry for the missionaries.  That’s really a hard position for them to be in.  They really want to be thought of as nice and kind, but they really need to get through a lesson, so they’re torn between being nice, and not getting through a lesson.  It takes a lot of skill (and often a lot of courage as well) to help someone feel like they’re not getting cut off when, usually, that’s precisely what’s happening.

    During priesthood I was informed that we were going to be doing lesson 3, a fact that bothered me quite a bit.  There may be some wondering why this would bother me at all, but then there are also those who made the connection between Fast and Testimony meeting, babies blessings, and lesson 3.  Lesson 3 wasn’t supposed to be till the next week.  I decided to comment on it, and in response the EQP said that because there were so many lessons in the manual that we’d never be able to get through them all if we only did two per month.  It kind of boggled my mind that neither he nor any of the other members knew that the manual was to be used over a two-year period until one brother informed me that they got the Teaching of Brigham Young manual a year after it came out for us, so they only had it for a year.  So, in their defence, they had precedent for thinking that we would have it only for a year, but really, that information should have been made available to them.