Seminary is awesome!

At the beginning of September, my wife and I were sitting around wondering “what now?” We have kids, a home, Becca is done with school, business is good… We reached most of our goals, so what should we be doing next?

As we discussed this, we decided we needed to focus on the religious side of things more: get better at daily scripture study, go to the temple more often, consistently have Family Home Evening on Monday nights… The basics that we had been letting slide a little bit.

That evening we watched Only a Stonecutter as a family. The movie was pretty bad but the story was interesting. It told the story of a man who worked as a stonecutter for the Salt Lake City temple. An accident caused him to lose his leg. Instead of quitting his calling, he literally made himself a new leg so he could continue walking to the temple so he could fulfill his calling. Pretty intense.

The next morning we were out as a family when I got a call from the bishop. He asked if Becca and I would be willing to be seminary teachers. We said yes, and then had a day to ponder the implications.

We’d have to cut back on our family travel time. We had been spending a lot of time on the road and out of town, which isn’t possible when you teach every morning. We’d also have to move to a regular schedule (go to bed on time, wake up on time) instead of going to bed when we felt like it and waking up whenever. We thought about the Only a Stonecutter video and realized these minor sacrifices were nothing compared to what others have been asked to sacrifice, so we put our doubts behind us and cheerfully moved forward with the calling.

Without realizing it, we had been turning our living room into a seminary room. We hung a chalkboard in the living room the day before the bishop called us. We had a bookshelf with plenty of room for the students’ scriptures. We had enough seating and hymnals. We were ready to go!

So now we’ve been teaching for about 4 months. It has been awesome! There is a new manual this year, which has made the whole experience much more enjoyable. We have 7 kids in our class, and they are all amazing. We try to have one of them give a short devotional before class each morning, and they always have a great insight into the gospel or a meaningful personal story to share.

Anna occasionally joins the class, and is always eager to blurt out the answers to the easy questions that our students aren’t always willing to answer. Sometimes she makes them look bad by memorizing scripture mastery scriptures that they haven’t put in the effort to learn yet.

Anyways, we are grateful for this calling, and so grateful for the group of kids we get to see nearly every morning!