Lotsa Talks

I have had a lot of speaking assignments with my church calling the last few weeks, four in all.

The first was a Priesthood Lesson on Being a Patriarch in the Home. I gave this lesson as part of a Ward Conference.

Second Was my regular monthly speaking assignment. I was assigned to talk on The Law Of Tithing.

Next, I had the opportunity to teach a lesson at the local youth correctional Center. It happened to be Easter Sunday, so naturally, my lesson was on The Message Of Easter.

This was a unique experience, one which only comes around once a year. I ended up teaching the same lesson, to three different groups. The first group was mostly girls, ages 12-18. Normally this first group has about a dozen participants. This time however, there were others who came to participate, and the group ended up being about 40 individuals.

The second group was boys, ages 12-18. There were about a dozen participants in this group. Many of these boys had attention span problems, and other developmental problems. In fact, some of them got up and left the room during the lesson. I didn't take it personnaly though, I knew that for some of them sitting still for 30 minutes was more than they could do. One of the boys who left the classroom got into some kind of trouble out in the hallway, and had to be taken into custody, and returned to his room.

The third group was boys from 14-18 years of age. They were all sex offenders. I have to admit that I gulped a little when I found out the makeup of this group, but I decided to continue on in a non-judgemental way. I tried to approach them as the Savior would approach them, trying to love the sinner, without loving the sin. As it turned out, this was the lesson that I felt went the best of the day.

Since this was an inter-denominational meeting, (and a State run facility) I had to limit my comments to Bible passages only, without relying on latter-day scriptures and conference talks as usual.

For part of my lesson, I showed them photos taken in Death Valley of the recent wildflowers (as noted in the link above). I also used these photos for my Home Teaching message for March, and for Family Home Evening.

I decided to email the person (Judy Moseby) who took the photos and thanked her for sharing her photographs. You can see our email correspondence here. She sent back a very sweet response.

Finally, last Sunday my Regular monthly speaking assignment April came up again (already!) This talk was on Hope Through The Atonement of Jesus Christ. This was a nice occasion, because I got to speak in my own ward for a change.

All of these talks are posted on the Gospel Study Page. Now I actually have a whole month before my next talk (Yea!)