As the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced that church would not be convening because of COVID-19, we pulled out our family chant, "Welcome to Nigeria! Have a nice day!"
Normally we only recite it when the electricity shuts off, but nothing reminds us of our Nigeria experience quite like holding church in the comfort of our own home. For 3 years we did that. At first there was a second family, but then they left and it was just us and then just me for the last year. The kids couldn't remember those days very well, but we just had to pull our old system out of mothballs.
I assigned Superstar to prepare a 5 minute talk about something from Jacob 1-4 that we had all read last week. Joy and I each prepared 10 minute talks and we had the young ones bear a brief testimony. I picked four hymns - opening, sacrament, intermediate, and closing - and accompanied the family on our piano. I blessed the sacrament and our new deacon passed it to me and the rest of the family.
This was our setup in Nigeria.
We put an end table on top of a coffee table to create our podium
while the rest of the coffee table held the sacrament. This seven year old pic sure does bring back memories and nostalgia for those tiny kids!
In TX we had a two-drawer dresser to hold the sacrament but I haven't invented our podium yet. Maybe I'll pull out our long card table and stick my music holder on top of that to hold people's notes....
I often miss blessing the sacrament. When I was a priest, I was also the ward organist, so I rarely got the opportunity to pray over the emblems of our Lord's Atonement. And that, too, after being mostly in charge of setting it up for the two years before since we lived so close. One of my favorite things about home church is the opportunity to say those sacred prayers and participate in a deeper way in the ordinance of the sacrament. I was thankful for someone's Facebook post where they shared that they used medicine measuring cups for the sacramental water. We had used some decorative glass owl cups that I was nervous about people dropping, and that's just distracting. (One of them did fall off the counter later, so now we only have 4 of them and we'd be mismatched again anyway.)
Joy also put together Primary. I reckon that's what newly-called Primary presidency counselors do. We sang some Primary songs for half an hour and had a short Come, Follow Me lesson that involved something for the younger kids (JT) and the older kids (Princess), with Superstar helping with some of the teaching. He's understandably none too thrilled about returning to Primary just after graduating from it, but he did a fine job participating.
I'm actually looking forward to more Sundays as a family. At least, I'm choosing to look forward to them - since we're going to be doing this for a while, might as well enjoy it!
Normally we only recite it when the electricity shuts off, but nothing reminds us of our Nigeria experience quite like holding church in the comfort of our own home. For 3 years we did that. At first there was a second family, but then they left and it was just us and then just me for the last year. The kids couldn't remember those days very well, but we just had to pull our old system out of mothballs.
I assigned Superstar to prepare a 5 minute talk about something from Jacob 1-4 that we had all read last week. Joy and I each prepared 10 minute talks and we had the young ones bear a brief testimony. I picked four hymns - opening, sacrament, intermediate, and closing - and accompanied the family on our piano. I blessed the sacrament and our new deacon passed it to me and the rest of the family.
This was our setup in Nigeria.
We put an end table on top of a coffee table to create our podium
while the rest of the coffee table held the sacrament. This seven year old pic sure does bring back memories and nostalgia for those tiny kids!In TX we had a two-drawer dresser to hold the sacrament but I haven't invented our podium yet. Maybe I'll pull out our long card table and stick my music holder on top of that to hold people's notes....
I often miss blessing the sacrament. When I was a priest, I was also the ward organist, so I rarely got the opportunity to pray over the emblems of our Lord's Atonement. And that, too, after being mostly in charge of setting it up for the two years before since we lived so close. One of my favorite things about home church is the opportunity to say those sacred prayers and participate in a deeper way in the ordinance of the sacrament. I was thankful for someone's Facebook post where they shared that they used medicine measuring cups for the sacramental water. We had used some decorative glass owl cups that I was nervous about people dropping, and that's just distracting. (One of them did fall off the counter later, so now we only have 4 of them and we'd be mismatched again anyway.)
Joy also put together Primary. I reckon that's what newly-called Primary presidency counselors do. We sang some Primary songs for half an hour and had a short Come, Follow Me lesson that involved something for the younger kids (JT) and the older kids (Princess), with Superstar helping with some of the teaching. He's understandably none too thrilled about returning to Primary just after graduating from it, but he did a fine job participating.
I'm actually looking forward to more Sundays as a family. At least, I'm choosing to look forward to them - since we're going to be doing this for a while, might as well enjoy it!
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