The title of this post initiates the beginning of blogging my impressions as a newcomer to the LDS belief set/church/faith. I wonder if I might retitle this blog as Impressions, and will leave the blog titled as it is for now. It seems I have made a decision to walk inside the LDS faith rather than observe it from outside. In our marriage years together we have not made a visit to the LDS church in our area. We decided to pay a visit two Sunday's ago. We set the ground rules for ourselves, that we would attend the general meeting and leave before the other two meetings that follow. The purpose of visiting the church was to introduce ourselves to Mormons within our community. I found myself quite taken with the speakers at the meeting, a husband and wife team in the function of missioner presidents. Meaning to the best of my present understanding that they assist and help the young missionaries in performing their functions.
She spoke with depth and feeling to the Book of Ruth (biblical), he told an engaging story, and it did not feel to me like 'preaching' in the traditional sense of the word. As I looked around at the people in attendance, I had moments of appreciation that they were people, neighbors living in the region where we live, trying to make their way in the world to the best of their varied abilities. i said to my husband, that I would like to stay and see how the rest of the meetings develop.
It happened to be the 5th Sunday at this Ward (they call their church buildings Wards), and the agenda for the services/meetings differ on the fifth Sunday. The men and women stay together in what is called Sunday School, and then the meeting following that which is a combined Priesthood Meeting and Relief Society Meeting. The men and women remain together, the children go to their various classes.
At the end of the meetings, I said to my husband that I was ready to take the next step towards moving inside, and that step is baptism, so I was ready for baptism. He was startled and quick to recover, knowing our walk is one together, not separate and his appreciation for the male role of attendance to his wife, indicated he would be baptized, he first, and then he would be in position to baptize me. Thus began for us a new aspect to our journey together. As I continue to write in this blog, I hope to write some of my initial impressions of the experience as a newcomer to this church. It has been a week since that announcement, and it has been a week full of high wind emotions, The Storm, which in it's own right is neither good nor bad, but is in fact a storm, the culmination of climatic events in the weather that come together to create conditions that generate a weather storm.
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