FIRST IN A LONG TIME ENTRY, MOSTLY ABOUT MY SUNDAY SCHOOL CLASS

Well, I've been teaching Old Testament since the first of the year, and it's been wonderful! Of course I still get kinda nervous before a lesson, but it's a healthy fear, compared to the dreading kind of fear I used to feel facing another day as primary president. I know that the class members are my friends, and love and support me. I can feel it. I might say I under-prepare, which is to say I read a lot, listen to quite a few of the wonderful blogs now available that go along with our SS Come Follow Me schedule. Some are purely scripture and scholarly narrative, and some mix history and doctrine with personal experiences, some bring in illuminating references to the Hebrew translations of words and phrases which bring so much more clarity and meaning to the scriptures. When I say I under-prepare, I don't really follow an outline. I usually write main points that I absolutely want to cover, and some others I really hope I have time to cover if there's time, but ultimately, there tend to be quite a few time gaps in my lesson, which, rather than ending up being "dead air time", allow for class members to feel that they have time to share points of view, often in ways I hadn't thought of before. It helps that my lesson is always on the first Sunday, so I'm usually fasting. This last Sunday, (OK, yesterday,) I stopped about a third of the way through my time and said, "I don't know why, but I'd like to bear my testimony now, rather than waiting until the end of the lesson. I can do that because I'm the teacher and I can do what I want." I went ahead and talked about what an indescribable influence the church and the gospel have been for me, expressing how I could only guess what other paths I might have taken had I not been born into the church. I spoke of the support and love and example of my parents, my family, and what an ironclad framework that these provided me for making my life decisions. Then I went back to the lesson. At about 5 minutes before the end of class, I played the video of Il Divo's concert in the Colloseum singing Amazing Grace. I, personally, thought it was VERY moving; it's SO POWERFULand never fails to give me chills through and through. Andy Ringger came up to me after class, and he said HE knew why I'd been prompted to do that. There was a less active, apparently struggling ward member who had to leave shortly after my testimony, and Andy said that what I said was exactly what she needed to hear. He said, "So now you know why you felt prompted to do that." Kinda kit me hard.