I am still struggling with ponderizing. I am trying, and it is on my mind, but I
struggled this week. I didn’t designate
a scripture.
That’s not to say that I didn’t have spiritual things on my
mind. I had a couple of really bad
traffic days that I got through by listening to General Conference. I have to say that I was extremely impressed
with the Priesthood session. (I’m a bit ashamed
to admit that this was the first time that I listened to or read it in its
entirety.) In fact, the scripture that I’m
going to choose for this coming week is inspired by Elder Andersen’s talk from
that session.
One thing that I’ve been thinking about in the last few days
is family home evening. Here’s why:
During tithing settlement, my bishop mentioned to me that a
focus for the ward next year will be getting back to the basics of living the
gospel: FHE, daily prayer, daily scripture study, and keeping the Sabbath
day. I do well with the middle two—maybe
not always super effective, but I don’t know the last time I missed doing
either of those at least once during the day.
Sabbath observance can be improved.
I don’t go out an overtly break it, but I could make better choices
about my use of time after I get home from church. That leaves FHE. For obvious reasons (though not necessarily
good ones), FHE hasn’t been all that high of a priority for me.
So what I’ve been (sort of) ponderizing this week is how I
can do FHE on my own. And what I’ve come
up with is to look at conference talks—at least one, but maybe more if the
topics overlap. For years I’ve thought
about studying them as if I was preparing a lesson about them, but I haven’t
acted on that. But I think that’s what I’m
going to do for my FHE. And it could
also be a way to improve my Sabbath day activities. I do better preparing lessons when I give
myself time to chew on the material before sitting down and laying it out. So I’ll read my chosen talk(s) on Sunday in
anticipation of Monday night.
How ‘bout that? It
all works together!
That sounds like a great idea. A few weeks ago a member of our ward gave a talk where he invited us all to read a conference talk a day. I haven't quite succeeded in reading one per day, but I've read quite a few and even though I listened to quite a few talks live and I've listened to all of them through podcasts, I have found that I get more out of them when I read them. I'll be curious to hear how well things are going with this endeavor!
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