Right now I am the one and only gospel doctrine teacher in my ward. Which means weekly lessons. Which translates into, I feel strange writing things that don't end with my testimony. To ease me back into blogging, I'll try to split this blog entry evenly between the New Testament and my kids.
Tonight [actually written a few weeks ago] I almost put the kids to bed without scripture time because it was close to 9. Mark had gone back to work, and he usually coordinates scripture times since I am nearly always out of mommy energy by that time. But I remembered (with guilt) the girls' primary goal of reading every day, and I decided to tell them a story relating to something I’ve been studying.
I taught the Sermon on the Mount on Sunday, and while that isn’t necessarily chock full of interesting stories, the idea of Christ changing the laws from really specific to “vague” is important and interesting and, I decided, comprehensible by a six-year-old. So I told the girls about how the children of Israel (previously slaves) having a hard time obeying and even “getting” spirituality. Then I told about their arrival at Mt. Sinai, and the golden calf incident while Moses was up receiving the law.
(Eliza got a little fixated on the idea of worshipping idols [which are HARD to define…dolls, sometimes golden, that were supposed to remind people of religious figures, but sometimes became more important than the religious figure itself?]. Following my attempted definitions of idols, Eliza proposed several examples of idol use, all involving Lily playing with idols in her bedroom at playtime.)
I gave them some examples of the detailed rules of the Mosaic law and Sage and Eliza were totally amused. (Sage was momentarily distracted over and concerned about whether or not we took more than 55 steps (the random number I threw out hypothetically) on Sunday. And Eliza, after hearing about “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” had great fun extrapolating to “what if you cut off someone’s head…then they get to cut off yours?!?” (She usually asks weird questions like this anyway, but it was extra exciting to her that this was a legitimate issue in someone’s law.)
But then we talked about Jesus’ “upgrade” to a more celestial law during his sermon on [another] mount, and they totally got it. And they were excited about it, because it made logical sense to them—much more than the 55 steps business. When I posited the “new law” of “love thy neighbor,” Eliza proceeded to rattle off four examples of how to “love your neighbor” at the exact same time as Sage excitedly recounted a long story she had read in the Friend about (as far as I could tell) a child who included a wheelchair-bound child in their game of basketball. At least that’s what I could make out of their excited tones, since I couldn’t quite bring myself to curb the enthusiasm even the tiniest bit by making them take turns to express their new ideas.
And that is how the scripture time that was going to be a minute or less (in my mind) turned into an awesome story-telling session and discussion about truth that lasted ten or fifteen minutes. And I didn’t regret a second of it.
