Sunday on the Road

Durango, Colorado

After two busy days of exploring we are relaxing after church. I have my LDS hymns Pandora station playing. Noah is getting leftovers ready for lunch. Kris is napping. Later we will get the big kids on hangouts when they too are all home from church.  We will all email our missionary siblings and Noah will also email his missionary friend. We will take a walk in the neighborhood. We may play a game of Skip Bo or Greed. Probably we will try to see some shooting stars tonight if it isn't overcast. With our traveling lifestyle I think I have come to appreciate the restfulness of Sunday more than I may have in the past.

Wherever we are, when Sunday comes we find a church and attend a ward. Mormon.org makes this super easy, I type in where we are and they show me the closest building, the ward or wards that meet there, the Bishop's name and number, the missionaries' number, and the meeting times. Once Mormon.org failed me. We were in California, the nearby building had two wards and one was Spanish speaking. Guess who showed up for a Spanish speaking ward instead of the intended English speaking ward? Not only that, but we were too late for Sacrament meeting even, because they had started at 9 not 10 as the website had led me to believe. This margin of error could probably be eliminated if we routinely phoned the Bishop or assigned missionaries, which we did the week after that mishap, but on this trip we have had no issues and so have perhaps become lax. I learned today that when traveling outside of the US we can even filter for English speaking wards should we desire, though they are not to be found everywhere.

We have attended a different ward every week since we left my Mom's in June. It is an interesting experience to be a visitor every week. Fionnula's name gets pronounced all sorts of interesting ways and she has had different primaries sing her the famous primary welcome song (HELLO! hello!) nearly every week for almost two months. Different wards have different personalities and some are definitely better at the whole visitor thing than others. At one ward my boys were actually greeted in Sacrament meeting by another young man who then took the time after sacrament to get them all to the right classes too. That's a service that isn't always volunteered even by the adults and leadership in every ward, we frequently need to ask. A branch we attended that had no youth of their own made up a Sunday School class on the spot just for our two boys.

 There are things about belonging to a ward that I miss, like not having a class of young women to teach, and my boys not participating in the blessing and passing of the Sacrament. I was so grateful to the branch that asked my boys to pass the sacrament because they had no young men. But overall, the visitor thing works out pretty well. The wards are not all on the exact same schedule with the lesson materials, so sometimes we get the same lesson we had last week and sometimes we miss a lesson or two. But the most important things are really just the same no matter where we attend.