Church plans

Being a small church unit, we only have two meetings on Sunday - and that only because our families are fairly experienced and so it's not a hardship to add a "gospel instruction meeting" after Sacrament. If we had any investigators (but we're instructed to be a non-proselytizing group for now), we'd do the Gospel Principles manual for the second hour. Since it's us, though, we get to choose what we do.

Last year we switched between the New Testament lessons and the October General Conference sessions since we didn't exactly get to watch them broadcast at the time.

This year, we're going to switch between the Book of Mormon lessons and the new George Albert Smith manual. The plan at the moment is that on the 2nd and 3rd Sundays when the rest of the church is doing a Teaching of the Presidents of the Church lesson, so will we. On the 1st, 4th, and 5th Sundays, whoever is in charge of the lesson will pick one of the Book of Mormon lessons for that month to teach.

We had a very effective spur of the moment Sunday School lesson, Joy and I, just now. We pulled out lesson 2 of the Book of Mormon manual about 1st Nephi 1-7. I looked at the "attention activity" and smirked. I smirk a lot at the attention activities. It's one of my less-charming traits.

Then I thought about it a bit more. What if we actually were told, by AUN or mission Pres. Buah or the State Department, that we needed to evacuate Yola for some strange reason? What would we do? 

When the manual then followed up by asking if it would make any difference if we were told by the prophet to move, Joy had a remarkably practical answer: Yes, because if it were AUN telling us to get out of town, they would also provide a way. If the prophet told us, we'd have to make our own arrangements.

We had a magnificent discussion of our emergency preparedness and our ability to follow whatever counsel the Lord should give whenever He does. Here's to a wonderful year of "gospel instruction meeting"!