A few years ago, our Church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), announced that starting in January 2019, we would be moving from a three hour block of meetings to a two hour block of meetings on Sundays. The instruction from our prophet and leaders was that we needed to focus on home-centered, Church supported gospel learning. New manuals of instruction, titled "Come Follow Me", were created by the Church and distributed to each member to help with the home-centered portion of gospel learning, and Brian and I have been figuring out how best to do this with our family. Instead of just reading a few verses of scripture each night, we started trying to have more in-depth teaching and learning every night. Some nights, we did really well. Others, not so much. Here's a look at a few things we did:
We were talking about when the Book of Mormon was first published back in 1829, and this led to a discussion about the printing press and how that worked. I had individual letter stamps in my crafting supplies, and so I thought that might help them understand a little about how much work it took to typeset each individual letter for printing. We each took a section of the title page and set to work copying our individual sections with the stamps. It took a while just to write one sentence!
I don't know about the kids, but I certainly walked away with a greater appreciation for those early printers! Imagine the time it took to print the Bible, which is much longer! But still not as long as copying each line, each verse, and each section over and over again. I'm so grateful for the printing press!
Paul talked about putting on the Whole Armor of God in the New Testament, but the Lord used the same imagery in Doctrine and Covenants as well, so we made a really quick set of cardboard armor for our discussion about the Armor of God. Gabe got to be our model.
When he was completely armed, we threw fiery darts at him (aka socks). He was able to withstand all of our blows
And he even fought off a few of us.
We built a church out of Duplos and talked about how the Lord gave instructions on how His Church was to be built.
The kids also got to start having virtual singing time, which was so nice. One of the Sundays, they had asked Rachel to say the prayer. Right when the broadcast was starting, Rachel was still not quite dressed. We tuned into Zoom and heard them announcing her name for the prayer. I was finishing up the last of her hair. We quickly put her dress over her head, did up the back, and got her in front of the video just in the knick of time to say the opening prayer. I'm sure everyone has a funny Zoom story now, thanks to this pandemic!
Rachel and Gabe loved doing singing time again, and it was so nice to have some things start to be more normal again, even if it was virtual instead of in-person.
I can't remember if I've said it before, but the pandemic has made us all appreciate the Prophet's instruction to have the bulk of our gospel learning at home. We had just over a year to practice before going to Church in person became impossible. When the pandemic hit, we were already armed with manuals and routines to keep building our faith without needing to be in the actual church building. We certainly missed the social aspects (and some fresh insights from other members), but our worship didn't stop and our gospel learning didn't even pause. We truly are thankful to God for a prophet, to guide us in these latter-days!
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