Lord, Make Me A Spoon

I stole the title of the blog post from our wonderful Relief Society teacher last week in church. We have just had such an amazing 2 weeks of sacrament and church meetings, I just thought I needed to share. Last week, we were blessed to have a surprise speaker from the Quorum of the Seventy, Pres. Zwick. He's actually friends with Mike Leavitt in our ward. For those of you not familiar with who Mike Leavitt is, he was the governor of Utah. Pres. Zwick wasn't on assignment, he just came as a visitor. But, I think all who attended felt that we were deeply blessed by his presence. The bishopric asked him to speak for a few minutes in sacrament meeting and what he said was very profound. He blessed the congregation and left them with a great promise. He reminded us that General Conference was coming up and encouraged us to prepare ourselves for it through prayer and scripture study. He also challenged us to write down three questions that we had about anything gospel related or if there was something that we were struggling with in our every day life and we needed answers for, to include those questions in our prayers and ask that the Lord help us find these answers. His promise was that if we would prepare ourselves for General Conference that we would receive answers to every one of our questions. Such a powerful spirit behind those words, I think all who were listening could feel it. It seemed as if a hush came over the congregation. The thing is, I know for myself that this works. It's absolutely amazing how the lord knows his children so well and wants to answer our prayers. But I think sometimes, we don't prepare ourselves for the answer. We ask, but do not prepare ourselves to receive. What a great promise! We will be doing this in our family this week. He also challenged us to share our testimonies of the gospel in between General Conference with our families and we would receive a greater portion of the Lord's spirit. Wow! Who couldn't always use a greater portion of the Lord's spirit? I'm excited for General Conference this coming up weekend, because I know that our family will be blessed by this promise. Now to explain the Lord, make me a spoon. Sis. Carolyn Hanson was our teacher in R.S. and she is always amazing. She always has the best visuals. This week it was a spoon. She asked us to decide what kind of person we would like to be like a fork, a knife, or a spoon. A fork can grab things, help cut things, a knife can cut and seperate things, but a spoon can gather up things, brings it together, helps serve things. The lesson was about service. And what I got out of it was that everyone needs service and as we live to serve others, gather our sisters together (like a spoon) then our sisters will definitely benefit, but we will also be spiritually fed. What a concept! The lord says when we serve others we are really serving him. But who gets the blessings? We do! Wow, serve the lord/others and get blessed. Such a simple concept, you think we would be jumping at the opportunity to serve others, so we could receive more blessings. Not saying that we should serve others for selfish reasons, it's just that when we don't serve, we are actually denying ourselves blessings. Now if I could always have that perspective. =) This week I had the opportunity to be a part of a musical arrangement of "I Stand All Amazed." First of all, I love that song. Absolutely echoes my feelings about the savior. I played the piano for Joe AhQuin and Sarah Noel played violin and Janette AhQuin played the cello. I ended up changing the key so it was better for Joe's voice range and had lots of practice with my Sibelius music program in the process. Sarah mostly came up with the cello and violin parts, I only added a little bit of my opinion on those parts, because I know nothing about any instrument other than the piano. But after many hours of practice this week, the result was absolutely beautiful. I don't say that to brag, but more in gratitude for the opportunity to be a part of it. I have to thank my Heavenly Father for the gifts that he's given me and the opportunities I have been given to share them with others. One more thing, and I think I will finally be done with this super LOOONG post. This week, I had the opportunity to finish up a piece of music that my friend Amy Marshall sent to me a few months ago. She had the lyrics and the melody and asked, if I would be willing to help write the accompaniment. She expressed to me that she had felt very strongly that the primary children of the church really needed to hear the message of this song and she hoped that we could submit this song to the church. Well, we did it! The song was finished this week and put in the mail to the church music submission office. We find out in July whether or not our song has been accepted or not for church use. It's kind of exciting! Just another example of how the Lord blesses my life.