HOW DO YOU EAT AN ELEPHANT?

September 23, 2010 Thursday

I know, I know—one bite at a time. But then the question is where do you start? The tail, a foot, an ear, the trunk? And those are only the parts you can reach standing next to him. We had YW tonight. The five girls came. We read through Sister Beck’s talk, “Mothers Who Know.” Each paragraph could have been a separate lesson for the girls. Their families are so broken that there are no positive examples coming from them. When I picked up the Rollason girls, there was a huge fight going on between the mom and the girls. When I came to the door, the mom let the “F” work fly and then apologized like crazy when she saw me. She’d been drinking a lot. She and her husband were mad because one of the girls had called her mother a slut. Gavin said he thought the church would be teaching them better than that. So I have the girls one hour a week and they live with their parents the rest of the time. Who has a stronger influence? As we read about mothers preparing their kids for missions, temple marriages, etc., I had to wonder what the girls were thinking. Family Home Evening, family prayer and scripture study? Never even thought about. The girls really have no clue about most church doctrine. Their Sunday attendance is sporadic, so they don’t learn a lot there. Some of them grinned at each other when we read the part about mothers needing to be vigilant about what their kids are involved in. I mentioned alcohol and drugs—their parents do both. Chastity? Getting married is pretty much ignored here in Broome. Shacking up and having kids outside of marriage is the norm. I initially thought I’d work on teaching them what the YW theme meant. Then I thought they needed to learn about the temple. Most of them really don’t remember the basic missionary lessons. Should we do those? Goal setting? The more I think about it, the bigger the elephant becomes. The branch president says that just bringing the girls into a home where love of the Gospel reigns once a week is probably the biggest influence we can have. I hope so—they need so much. And I thought I’d gotten too old for YW!
Tony came over this morning. Orson had asked him to read D&C 76 last time. He’d read to section 85. He’s up to the part in the BoM where they are building the boat. We talked about some of the commandments with him. You can see the Sabbath day is a big one for him, but he says he’s working on figuring it out. He’s going to Fitzroy Crossing (about 4 hours away) this weekend and offered to see if he can locate a couple of members of the branch who live up there. How about that—he’s going home teaching!
We taught Jenna this afternoon. Bless her heart. She’s been through a lot and we aren’t sure that she is really able to learn and remember what she’s learned. We want her to have the Gospel in her life, but we don’t want to give her more than what she’s capable of. She is one we are going to have to pray a lot about in order to know what to give her. She says she’ll come to church this Sunday.
We called back on Katrina this afternoon. She was very cool. She said her husband is just not “into” religion. He’ll be home from his military training next week. We told her to give us a call if he would like to talk to us.