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It’s true that the participation can really make or break the experience, especially with an inexperienced or boring teacher (as ours is now). How many of there are you in the several? Would it smack of secret combinations if you arranged together beforehand to start a discussion? Brother so-and-so, you throw out a question about this and I’ll answer with that . . . too much preparation? I served as EQ pres a few years back. I like to think I was nice, but I was also indecisive and useless. Having no idea what yours is like, I will say that if someone had come to me and said “I wonder if we could share some ideas on how to improve the instruction” I would have responded positively. In our ward we put together a teacher improvement class thru SS for the benefit of new EQ instructors. Not sure how effective it was; I would have liked to arrange a less formal get-together for the purpose but I am quite lazy when it comes to church business outside of the meeting block.
Don’t know as I can relate fully to this, but I can sure imagine. My relationship with one in-law has not been the same for the past few years ever since we got into a disagreement over politics (he’s of the Skousen school of thought), and I have had other conversations with other in-laws regarding things like divinely-commanded wipe-outs of cities in the OT that drew enough defensive wrath that I thought it best to drop the subject. In the last couple wards I’ve lived in (one in the eastern US, the other in the southwest), there have been enough liberal-minded folks that maybe I’ve gotten a bit spoiled. Moving back to the heart of orthodoxy soon should be . . . interesting; I’m gonna have to watch my mouth even more closely than I do now.
All the best wishes from me in restoring your relationship.
Yeah, Brother Brigham was overseeing all those colonization projects and sending people to live hard lives in remote desert settlements. My guess is that when you’re trying to build up a civilization in the hinterlands of Arizona or Mexico, you’re going to be spending so much time working that character incompatibilities will have less time to create problems or even be noticeable. Two randomly sampled souls who lived in the 19th century Utah Territory might have had an easier time making a marriage work than if they had been born into our time and place. And for those of us living in our comfortable modern settings where we have so much time to assert and cultivate our individual characters: imagine who you might be, in spirit or resurrected flesh, 50, 100, 200, 1,000, 1,000,000 years from now. What is exaltation going to do to our differences, traits, temperaments, quirks, etc?
It’s hard enough to put trust in staying as in love at age 80 or even 50 as you are at age 25, or at least in the same way. I don’t doubt that there are plenty of married couples who keep some kind of “romantic” feelings or whatever to their dying days, but both partners in a marriage are going to change a lot over time and the way they feel about each other will unavoidably change too, even if it leads them to say “I love you more than ever.”
The way the human mind fails to comprehend long stretches of time leaves me with no illusions that I really know anything for sure about how our relationships will evolve over eternity. Committing to stay with someone forever in our culture certainly encourages care in choosing, but I also think it leads a lot of people to look for too much and pass up opportunities in which they could not only get along, but be quite happy.
Ha, that’s funny about the polygamy. At one time it would have disappointed and outraged me to learn of his extramarital affairs but now I feel no inclination to pass any judgment about it. SamBee: Welsh – booyah! I don’t have Welsh ancestry but my DW does.
Brian Johnston, cwald:
I do often wonder what else might have been restored by now if the successive presidents of the Church had been half as fearless as Joseph was, and what might be waiting for us to claim as we shed our cultural inhibitions and desire to be liked — by the right sort of people of course.
“The attitude that life owes us something, if not everything, encourages life to thwart our endeavours.” – some grumpy English musician Oh those Gnostic texts do have some wild stuff. I remember when I checked out the Nag Hammadi Scripturesfrom the library and settled in with it, all excited. “Gospel of Thomas”: oh yeah, good stuff here! Then I started reading some of the other books. 😯 I mean, WTF? (you all know the F stands for “freak” right?) The silly stuff I’d read on my mission about “hey the Gnostics had this stuff that shows the apostasy blah blah blah” had not prepared me for aeons, archons, the evil demiurge and all the other bizarre stuff. Kind of like when I tried to read the pseudepigraphic “Book of Enoch” – big disappointment at first, calling for a major shifting of mental gears.I like Old-Timer’s comments – that’s important to remember. turinturambar: I remember at the last Temple ded I went to: I was maybe the loudest one there. I was thinking the same thing: come on, let’s SHOUT! Now’s our chance! But phoo, we’re so afraid of even feeling the rhythm of our hymns or sullying the sanctity of the sacrament with the profanities of percussion or anything louder than the organ (good thing we’re not in 19th century Sweden when they thought fiddles were of the devil, eh?) that we can’t cut loose at the one time when we’re allowed – no,
supposed to. I really do hope we get out of the pasty white fear of anything that seems too Pentecostal (or, dare I say it, too black?) in my lifetime.
New guy here saying: I hope it went well. I’ve been in the SS pres of my ward and attended ward council for the past year or two. It is as others here wrote: the council is a time to think about meeting the needs of people in the ward. Based only on my experiences, I suggest that one of the most useful contributions one can make to a ward council is to help keep it focused. So, if the conversation strays into tangents or gossip or joking, look for quiet ways to bring it back around to the matter at hand. The tendency to gossip, chuckle or make a bit of a wisecrack (however discretely understated) when
thatperson or family comes up has certainly been tenacious in the WC I attend, so if you were to not let anyone know how you felt about certain doctrinal or cultural questions and instead resolve to be an example of keeping the focus, then you’d be a better man than I am, Gunga Din . . . or was it Gandhi? 🙂 Hm, I think someone who doesn’t fit the conventional “mold” can also offer a useful voice of compassion and understanding: “let’s consider or so-and-so might feel, being in such-and-such a situation” &c. But again, the challenge is to always keep it non-confrontational.
