Monday, July 25, 2011

Early Church

We moved to early church this week.

It happened because some boundaries were moved in wards in our stake, and now our building has two wards instead of three. Before the change, meeting blocks started at 9, 11 and 1. We were in the 11:00 time slot, which is perfect if you have teenagers (and pretty awful if you have little kids). Since we are out of the toddler stage, we loved 11 am church.

But now we’re at 9 am. (Yawn.)

My 14-year old son summed it up when a week ago last Saturday he said, “Well, tomorrow is our last day of normal church.”

And not only did we need to be at church for sacrament meeting at 9, but we had a choir practice at 8:30 since we were singing for pioneer day. (Double yawn.)

Of course, we woke up to chirps from our electric alarm clocks, climbed out of our soft beds and into warm showers. We enjoyed a breakfast of Pillsbury Pop-n-Fresh cinnamon rolls, sliced fresh fruit and boiled eggs. We dressed in our nice Sunday clothes and drove the 10 minutes to church in our air conditioned car.

A century and a half ago our pioneer forefathers (my wife has Mormon pioneers in her family; mine are just good ol’ American pioneers who embarked on the Oregon Trail) may have woken to the sound of chirping birds at sunrise, crawled out of their bedrolls on hard ground, built fires to cook whatever it is they could scrape together (or hunt, or pull out of their meager supplies, if they had any that day). They likely put on the same dusty clothes they’d worn the day before (assuming they’d taken them off to sleep the night before). And, if they weren't observing the Sabbath, they'd begin their daily 20-mile hike.

Maybe early church isn’t so bad, after all.

2 comments:

  1. I make similar comparisons every time I complain about having to drive 3 hours to the temple - in my air conditioned car, with the iPod playing, lots of food choices going and coming.

    We really shouldn't complain, should we?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I remember early in our marriage as we were reading pioneer histories of my wife's family, she commented she could never do what the pioneers did.

    Looking back, we've not been called upon to do what they did, but what we've had to do has in some ways perhaps been just as challenging.

    But you're right, Robin. Complaining doesn't really do any good. Wasn't it Elder Holland who said there's no problem that couldn't be made worse by whining about it?

    ReplyDelete