Home Church

We’re home from our trip to Utah! It took us 14 hours to make the trip home, and we brought our cousin Ciel back with us too. She’ll stay with us for the next 10 days and we hope to show her a little bit of the Southern California sights. I know she’s glad she gets to fly home and doesn’t have to make that long drive again! We were all so exhausted from the drive and just couldn’t get up and ready for 9:00 church. We did have a nice “Home Church” though. We have had Home Church a few times in the past when we’ve had a large group of visitors or a lot of sickies in the family and it’s usually a good compromise.

Today we read and discussed Ether Chapter 2 and the beginning of Chapter 3. It is all about how the Lord helps us solve our problems. The story is of the brother of Jared who was directed to build barges to cross the ocean to the promised land. He built the boats and found that there were two problems because of their design (Ether 2: 16-17). The first was that there was no way to get fresh air from the outside. The brother of Jared told the Lord he was worried that they would die without any air. The Lord then told him just what he needed to do: Go put one hole in the top and another in the bottom that you can plug closed. Open the hole that is above water to get fresh air and if the boat turns and water starts coming in, close it up again.

The second problem was that there was no light in the boats, to which the Lord answered- You’re right, you can’t have windows that would break and you can’t build fire inside the barges either. What do you want me to do to help you solve this problem? The brother of Jared then went and made glass-like stones out of melted rock and brought them to the Lord telling Him that he knew the Lord could give them light by touching them. The Lord did touch them and they did give the light needed in the barges.

We discussed some reasons why Heavenly Father would want us to come to a solution on our own and then come to Him with our ideas. We shared stories of problems that we have faced where the solution came right away, or only came after we did some work for it. As a parent I can appreciate this gospel lesson even more. There are times when I as mother do the same thing. Some problems get an immediate answer and other problems get the answer: What do you want me to do?