Relief Society Lady

In preparing my lesson for Relief Society, I thought about how much I wish we could do fun things for lessons, like I used to do in my Primary calling. Why must Relief Society lessons always be so boring serious? Well, since my lesson was on searching the scriptures for ourselves, I thought, “wouldn’t it be fun if we did a sort of talk show?” I could interview King Josiah (his story is told in the lesson), and maybe some of the other scriptural heroes. But how do I do the rest of the lesson? The part with all the important quotes from the teachings of Spencer W. Kimball? Well, I thought about it all week, and though up and rejected several options, then finally went with having “guests” from the class come up and “read and discuss” important quotes. I would also get a volunteer to dress up and do the whole King Josiah thing, which I wrote up like a skit. I also had a “commercial” of our family acting out a story from the scriptures that we taped in FHE a few years ago. I usually give out treats, but didn’t want to do the usual treats of candy, so we popped a whole bunch of popcorn, and handed out 45 lunch sacks, each with 3-4 cups of popped popcorn for snacks.

I was very nervous about the lesson. It could either go over really well, or people could give me that look. You know, the who is she and why isn’t she teaching a lesson look.

So, before everyone came in, I taped 6 envelopes under random chairs, moved the traditional table and set up two chairs and a small table, brought in the TV, and brought in my huge box of popcorn. When it was lesson time, I put up my poster that said “The Relief Society Lady” and started into my “monologue”. I had to welcome everyone to my first show of the Relief Society Lady, and make a joke about how the producers wanted to hire Marin, (a major scripture scholar in our ward), but rumor had it she was too busy and too expensive, so they got me. I told everyone to look under their chairs because there were prizes. Oh, and I also thanked the house band–them.
I introduced the lesson with the story from President Kimball’s life, and then asked the person with envelope #1 to come on up, they were the first guest. So, that person came up, introduced themselves and told a little bit about herself (which was a good thing, since we have a ward that is growing so much and we have new people constantly), then she read the quote and we talked about it a little bit. Then she stuck the wordstrip up on the board. To thank her for being such a great guest, I gave her a pair of tickets to an upcoming concert in the Tabernacle. Once people learned there were tickets involved, they were a little bit more willing to come up and help.

The lesson went VERY well. I forgot to pass out the popcorn until about 1/2way through the lesson, and the TV wasn’t working for our commercial break, but some nice lady fiddled with it and made it work, so everything went as well as I could have expected it. One lady said, “We should have lessons like this every week,” but I think she was referring to the snacks. My friend, DeEtte told me, “You are hilarious! You SHOULD have your own talk show. I would watch it every day.” I think she might be exaggerating that a bit, but I’ll accept the complement. Marin, the scholarly lady I joked about, came up and said, “That was delightful! You did such a fun job with what could have been a boring subject.” I hope that’s true. I know it wasn’t boring at all, but I hope that people still got the point of the lesson and maybe just maybe felt the spirit a teeny tiny bit.

At the end I quickly bore my testimony on the truthfulness of the scriptures, and encouraged everyone to watch our next show, the subject will be “Gardens, why you should stop mooching off your neighbor and plant your own.”