Views in the Church History LIbrary

I went up to the 3rd floor to help one of our missionaries and got to see Sister Jones' Thanksgiving message and her cute little Christmas tree!  Tis the season!!!

Matt Row is the name of the "street" of missionaries
who work with Matt Heiss

 

Pandemic Continues

Monday morning there were new signs up in the Conference Center and all of the Temple Square missionaries were wearing bright red face masks.  The numbers for Covid continue to rise in Utah and around the world.  And so we are all trying to do our best to protect those around us.

Jena and I headed to City Creek to do some dress shopping--no luck with that, but we are sporting our masks there as well.

The face of 2020-2021...and probably 2022!  But life goes on!
 

Sunday Blog Writing

This morning didn't go quite as expected.  I had to pick up Sister Audenart from the airport around 9:00 am.  The plane arrived on time and she headed on the long hike to baggage claim.  She texted me (I was in the waiting area) and said that she was almost to baggage claim about 9:30....and then I didn't hear from her for awhile.  She finally texted that they were still waiting for their luggage...and they waited and waited.  Finally about an hour later, they were informed that their luggage had all been taken to custom and that it needed to be picked up and re-routed to baggage claim.  (She had flew in from Canada, but I guess they don't have to do customs in the same way.  Anyway, it took about another hour for their luggage to arrive at baggage claim.  She had found three other senior missionaries traveling to Salt Lake so they had a good visit, she said.  I on the other hand got a lot of reading done.  Thank heavens for the gospel app!

Mornings are when I usually do the blog, but had no time for that with the delays.  After Church, I was so tired for some reason and took a long nap.  Then there was the 1st Presidency Devotional and dinner and then I reviewed my presentation for tomorrow's training.  All afternoon, I was thinking--I don't think I have much to blog about so I will skip this week and catch up next week. 

So now, at 9:30, I decided to print out a picture we took yesterday with Ben and discovered that I had about 45 pictures from last week.  I guess a few things happened that I wanted to remember.  So here we go!

Relief Society Lesson

The main distraction from all of that partying was that I had been asked to give the lesson in Relief Society today. I actually enjoy teaching, but this was a bit nerve racking--more than normal.  It was tricker to prepare even though I had like 6 weeks notice on what the talk was to be discussed.  Part of it was teaching a group of 50 women--all serving full-time missions and basically all over the age of 60 is somewhat challenging.  There is so much life experience in the room and most of them are great teachers themselves.  But also we really don't know each other very well.  I don't know them and they don't know me.

The lesson was from Elder Ballard's talk "Lovest Thou Me More Than These?"  One of the things I did was read his biography which was excellent.  I encourage anyone who would like to learn more about him to read it.  At the beginning of the lesson, I did a brief summary of his life.  I had gotten this book, because several of the mission presidents we have interviewed had served under President Ballard when he was mission president over the Canada Toronto Mission in the mid-1970s.  Their comments made me curious about him.

These are items I used for my lessons.  Different from talks, I usually write out my outline for a lesson by hand often in a legal pad like this.  

I gave each class member an index card and asked them to write down a time when they put Christ first over anything else--What choice had they made?  Why did they make it?  What was the outcome?  As full time missionaries, they all have made a choice to put Christ first for this time in our lives.  But how can we always do it?  What does that look like in our every day lives?

The class then divided up into six groups and discussed practical ways to increase our love for the Savior including favorite scriptures, quotes, spiritual practices, and stories that keep us focused on letting Christ and God prevail in our lives.

It went fine and got done on time which is good!

I am not sure exactly how it happened, but now I have a devotional message to give on Thursday of this week, the following Monday--an hour workshop on "communication", and then the following day I lead a book club discussion on the book "The Witch of Blackberry Pond."  Fortunately, they are mostly different groups of people so no one person has to hear me four times in 10 days.