I was reading Delirious' blog about being asked to speak at a women's meeting. I thought I would tell you about the experience I had last week of speaking at a board meeting for RS teachers. I was asked to speak for 15 minutes on using the scriptures in your lessons. I had no qualms about this, because this is a subject I feel strongly about and I feel like, at least in my ward, the only time I open my scriptures is during Sunday School. I wanted these ladies to understand that they needed to USE their scriptures more and not just print the scripture on a piece of paper for someone to read. Also because I have had training on this, I felt I could pass some great tips along to these women.
I wish I could tell you how great it went. It didn't. I wanted to talk a short time about footnotes, chapter headings, the Bible dictionary and the JST translation (which no one knew where it was located by the way). I was going to get these women to use their scriptures as we discussed all this...however NO ONE brought their scriptures! The education counselor appologized for no one having their scriptures because she didn't tell them to bring them. Now ask yourself this question: If you asked someone to speak about using the scriptures, wouldn't you tell all your teachers (on the invitation you sent out) to make sure they brought their scriptures? Or wouldn't you have at least gone and retrieved scriptures from the library - one for each woman? I felt like saying, "This is the point I wanted to make - women don't take the scriptures seriously enough" and just sit down. AAUUUGGGHHH! As it was, I gave my speech and sat down, thinking I had spoken waaayy over their heads.
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3 comments:
It's sad when people choose to let others educate them and allow others to choose what ideas they should believe in rather than discovering for themselves. The Catholic church printed the Bible in Latin so they could tell their congregations what to believe or not believe. Imagine if Joseph Smith chose to believe what preachers were telling him and never decided to find out the truth for himself. Agency or Subjugation? Whose plan do you choose?
"We must encourage [each other] once we have grasped the basic points to interconnecting everything else on our own, to use memory to guide our original thinking, and to accept what someone else says as a starting point, a seed to be nourished and grown. For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling but wood that needs igniting no more and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth. Suppose someone were to go and ask his neighbors for fire and find a substantial blaze there, and just stay there continually warming himself: that is no different from someone who goes to someone else to get to some of his rationality, and fails to realize that he ought to ignite his own flame, his own intellect, but is happy to sit entranced by the lecture, and the words trigger only associative thinking and bring, as it were, only a flush to his cheeks and a glow to his limbs; but he has not dispelled or dispersed, in the warm light of philosophy, the internal dank gloom of his mind." -- Plutarch, On Listening to Lectures
I think I would have asked her to get up and go to the library and get the scriptures right then. Our new Stake Relief Society president has talked about some of these same things. She has asked that teachers don't print out the scripture, but make the sisters look it up. I have to admit that when I teach, I inser in my lesson the scriptures I want the class to read because it helps me organize my lesson better, and keep my place. But my scriptures are near by in case I need to look something up.
sitting down would have driven the point home pretty well... :) I would love to see that at a meeting some day...
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