Stake Conference

Yesterday was our stake conference. Since Cory had to work, Jeffrey and I drove an hour and a half to get to the Stadthalle in Fuerth which is a suburb of Nuernberg (our stake center isn't big enough for our whole stake so we went to the town hall). On the way there I listened to the Ensign that I had downloaded onto my iPod. It was nice and almost all the spirituality I got for the day. I really loved this quote from a past Young Women's General President (Margaret Dyreng Nadauld) though,

“Women of God can never be like women of the world. The world has enough women who are tough; we need women who are tender. There are enough women who are coarse; we need women who are kind. There are enough women who are rude; we need women who are refined. We have enough women of fame and fortune; we need more women of faith. We have enough greed; we need more goodness. We have enough vanity; we need more virtue. We have enough popularity; we need more purity.”
(“The Joy of Womanhood,” Ensign, Nov. 2000, 15)

As for me not really hearing anything...I decided a long time ago before I had kids, that I would not chase them down the aisles in church. When I was growing up we sat on our benches and we listened, we didn't have toys or games or books. I remember drawing on dad's 3x5 cards and thinking that was the greatest thing ever. In addition to that, Steve and Sherri's kids are (for the most part I think) well behaved and don't goof off during church. I noticed that Sherri doesn't let the kids bring their toyboxes with them. In addition to that, our bishop has really tried to push reverence during sacrament meeting so I decided that reverence during church was mandatory.

However...it's a little bit hard to enforce those rules with your own kids when they see every single other kid around them running up and down the aisles and playing with their toys. Yesterday was an exercise in patience, I was up and down to the side of the row several times with Jeffrey. I even took him out once, but saw that was utter chaos (kids running up and down the stairs, kids running in and out of the elevators, etc) and decided I didn't want him thinking going into the hall was party time. My sister (of twinnies) said she gets the same thing, except people tell her to let her kids down to play. I guess I'll just have to catch the church messages in snippets and keep listening to the magazines.

Oooh fun story though. In the Friend (which I read for Primary) there was a story about President Uctdorf and the many church buildings he attended in Germany when he was younger. It made me think about the history of our own church building. A long time ago it used to be a bar/guesthouse (I'm guessing on the guesthouse part, but there's a lot of extra rooms upstairs where we meet) and Elvis came to sing there once. When we were cleaning out the closets upstairs for the primary we found the funniest shelf paper in the closets with people in 50s style clothing on it, probably not entirely appropriate for church, but what can you do? We don't own the building so we can't make too many changes I guess.