Kindness

This is my week for leading scriptures and family home evening.  On Sunday I chose to read a story about kindness from the January 2018 Ensign called "Letting Go of Contention."  It spoke of serving those who have done you wrong and we discussed how contention affects our access to God's spirit in our lives and the importance of doing all we can to welcome the holy ghost in our lives.  Sometimes that means doing hard things like forgiving those that don't deserve it and serving those we don't like, and letting go of contentious feelings.

For FHE, I continued with the kindness theme and focused on Mosiah 4:30, the admonition to watch our thoughts, words, deeds, and keep the commandments.  I focused on the impact that unkind thoughts, words, and actions actually has.  We watched Vernie DeMille's (Steve's cousin's wife) 10 minute Youtube video about the "Rice Experiment" and how cooked rice responded to kind words and unkind words over a 2 week period.  

The findings were astonishing and the lesson was clear that our negative words can and do more damage than we realize.  We decided to make rice and do our own rice experiment for a couple weeks.  As per Steve's idea, we'll be putting our findings together in a video.  With the leftover rice we cooked for the experiment, we made a maple rice pudding for dessert and it was super yummy!  Everyone loved it, except mom who wouldn't even try it because she hates rice pudding so much.  

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Maple Rice Pudding 

1 1/2 c cooked rice
1 1/2 c. milk
1 egg beaten
1/3 c real maple syrup
1 Tbsp butter
1 tsp vanilla

1. Combine rice and milk in saucepan and stir over med-hi heat until thick and creamy (15 minutes or so).  
2. Beat together egg and syrup well and slowly add to the thickened rice-milk mixture while stirring vigorously so it tempers the egg.  Cook another 3 minutes on med heat while stirring.  
3. Remove from heat and stir in butter and vanilla.

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For tonight's scriptures, continuing with my kindness theme, I read a story from the New Era about a girl who was able to console her sister who was sad about not being asked to dance by anyone at her 9th grade dance.

With the recent passing of our prophet, Thomas S. Monson, I felt the strongest message I learned from him was to just be kind to everyone, ourselves included.  I loved our prophet and I'm glad I could watch his funeral broadcast on the internet.

Today, President Russell M. Nelson became our new president of the church.  I look forward to his service.  There's been so much change in the church for me lately since I was released a month ago as secretary of the relief society and then put in as the first counselor over weekday relief society meetings.  Then, they changed the curriculum for relief society and the mode in which we teach implemented this month.  Also implemented this month, they changed the visiting teaching program to having sisters rely fully on the spirit to guide their watch care and ministry.  And now we have a new prophet.  I'm honestly incredibly excited for all these changes and a little overwhelmed trying to implement everything and feeling like I'm not doing it right yet.  I know that's my conscience letting me know I need to let God in more, counsel with Him more, listen for Him more if I am to really take this responsibility I've been handed where He wants it to go.  So I'm gonna try my best. I love my Savior and my Heavenly Father and I'm grateful for the many blessings they've bestowed upon me and my family.  This is a beautiful time to be alive with much amazing good going on including the preparations for the coming of Jesus, something we are privileged to take part in.