Growing up I never thought of my ward as any kind of family. Maybe because I was too young to look outside myself or maybe because I was surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, siblings, etc. and I didn’t ‘need’ a ward family.
When I moved away from home to go to school, the wards changed so quickly that you never really got a feeling of togetherness there. It wasn’t until I got married and moved away from everyone and everything I was used to that I discovered what a blessing a ward family can be. We had Lennard’s parents close by for a couple years, but after that (for about 4 years) we didn’t have any family at all that lived anywhere nearby. We quickly came to depend on our ward family. One year we had 26 of our ‘family’ over for Thanksgiving dinner! It was great!
Then came the day when we moved back to Alberta. What a shocker! Most families (not all… but a lot) have family around them. Church is just that… church. It’s not your complete support system like it was for us out East. I find that people go to church, say hi in the hallways and go home. There’s not a lot of extra interaction. At least until lately. Our ward has recently (within the past 3 months or so) started to have more activities. We had an amazing Relief Society activity and another one is planned for this month. The youth put on a Halloween party for the Primary kids. We have also had a few temple nights. They started out small with the bishopric going to the temple and inviting a few people. Then it was the Ward Council going and each inviting someone. Last night the entire ward was invited to attend the 7:00pm session. We had a bit of a hard time finding a babysitter and I just about gave up trying, but thankfully about an hour before we were to be at the temple we found one! The kids were excited and so were we.
We got to the temple early (about 6:30) so that we had time to change and relax before the session started. It was fun to see more and more people file into the chapel. It became quickly apparent that there would be too many to fit comfortably in a session and about five minutes before the session was to start they decided to split the session. They asked that anyone NOT in the 1st Ward to please go in the first session. Even with about 25-30 people in that session we had about 70 still in our session! It was such an amazing feeling to look around the room and only see people from our ward.
It made me stop and realize how much a part of me this ward has become. It has taken a while to get to know people, but I love this ward. I may not know all of them as well, but as I sat through the session I had an overwhelming feeling of love. I love where we are in our life right now. I love our home, our friends, my calling, this town… it’s an amazing feeling to know that we are where we are supposed to be.
We didn’t get out of the temple until almost 10:00 and then headed over to the Nay’s for refreshments. We didn’t stay very long because we had to get our babysitter home, but it just felt amazing to look around and feel at ‘home’. We have the best of both worlds… an amazing ward family and our extended family close by too.
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