An Old New Beginning

It occurs to me that I assume that everyone who reads this Blog belongs to the Mormon Church. So, this particular post among others, might be a bit confusing. So let me see if I can make a complicated thing simple. See, we go to church on Sunday for 3 hours. The first hour you meet all together as a congregation, called Sacrament meeting. Then you split to different classes. For this post you only need to know about the children's class called Primary. We have no paid clergy in our church, we are all asked to fill certain rolls and perform certain jobs, called Callings. You could serve in a calling for a couple of years, more or less. Then your job will change to something else. So my calling right now is to teach the children music in our singing time. I love it. Most of the time.

See, we are assigned a certain time to attend church. It's determined by where you live. We call that a Ward and it usually has a name attached. Ours is the Highland 9th Ward. When a ward becomes too big, meaning too many people to fit in the building at one time, they "split" the ward into two separate wards, again determined by where you live. So the people in your ward, live by you.

So I was asked to be the children's music leader in January of 2007. At the time we had a Primary Presidency, women who organize the children's classes, who wanted the kids to have FUN in singing time. They thought that the children had to sit through classes and Sacrament meeting and that's a lot to ask of children. So I had the greatest time, singing and playing games. The kids LOVED it. Then in April of 2007 our ward was split. So they had to reorganized the Primary Presidency. The new Presidency wanted the children to feel the spirit and wanted me to continue that all through the singing time, too. I had a really hard time totally changing my point of view. I didn't think it was right to completely end all fun for these kids, so each week I tried to combine fun with spirituality. Not an easy thing to do. Not to mention I was supposed to have 15 to 20 minutes every week and most times I got about 5 to 10. A couple of weeks I didn't get any. It was very frustrating. I had Primary teachers come up to me all the time and say how much they wished I would get more time.

So last Sunday, our Primary President was released. Her husband got a job out of state and they are moving. They called one of those teachers to be the Primary President that would always talk to me about my singing time frustration and she immediately told me how she's going to give me 20 minutes every week and she wants the fun back! YEAH!!!!! I'm so excited! I loved doing this so much more when I could have fun with the kids. I just feel like I can be more myself now. Cuz, you know, I'm such serious person and all.