We had 40 minutes to give two talks...piece of cake for us. Except someone decided to ask the Sister Missionaries to give a song in between our talks and that took about 8 minutes of the time.
Sister Davis struggled with writing this talk because the wording is different when you have to pause and let someone say what you just said. The breaks in sentences need to be in just the right place OR the meaning of the message sometimes changes. After rewriting her talk three times...Sister Davis felt it was pretty good.
The talk focused on what the Law of Moses was designed to do for the Israelites...
get them to turn to God. She wanted to have enough empathy and love in her words, that the audience would actually take the things she said to heart. And her talk was on obedience to God's laws.
Elder Davis was speaking on the law of sacrifice. We both want the members here to realize the gospel of Jesus Christ requires a lot of work but that if you love the Savior you want to be like him and do what is necessary to build up His church and that takes obedience and sacrifice.
Our church runs on volunteer help and sometimes members won't accept callings or assignments. They just don't have the faith to think they can be a teacher, or leader or librarian. They have never had any experience and think they can't do the job. And of course, there are always those who accept many assignments and do the majority of the work.
Sister Davis told the story of when she was a new member in the church. She knew next to nothing about the gospel. And her Bishop came to her and called her to be a primary teacher for the 7 year olds (Paso Robles, CA). They were mostly boys.
Sister Davis never really liked children when she was younger. She loved dogs, cats, rabbits and horses. She was newly married and now she was called to be a primary teacher. Well, she wanted to be obedient so she said she would try and she was given the manual to study. She studied and gave the lesson at church. Putting it mildly, it didn't go well. She will never forget that lesson because she came home crying. She felt like a failure. She learned that seven year old boys don't like to sit still listening to a teacher talk.
She didn't get much sympathy from Elder Davis who had been on a mission and knew how to teach. He said, "It will go better next week. Just try again, I know you can do it!"
So Sister Davis went back to church more prepared than the week before and came home again in tears. She didn't have a clue how to control a classroom of 7 year old boys.
But she was given a wonderful blessing...she was asked to attend the teacher development class where an absolutely wonderful teacher taught her how to teach and how to control her class of wild and crazy kids. Sister Davis learned to be a better teacher. And the more she taught, the more she learned. And now she LOVES to teach! It's her favorite calling in the church.... being a teacher.
And after that story, she looked at the clock and realized she had used up 20 minutes of time!
Whoa! Sister Davis...
ElderDavis still had 15 minutes to speak..but remember that's only 7.5 minutes REAL time. And he went over time, too! That is the first time we have ever seen the Latvian branch go overtime in sacrament. We usually start 5 minutes late and get out 10 minutes early! We were both relieved when our talks were over. And then people came up and in English were saying, "Thank you!" "Thank you for your talks." They were touched by what we said. They were so sweet to us. One person wanted a copy of Sister Davis's talk...and it's in English! She was probably just trying to be nice....but it made us feel good.
No comments:
Post a Comment