BYU Ed Week

I don't know how many of you ladies have attended BYU Education Week before. I've always heard wonderful things about it and I figured this was my year. So my wonderful husband stayed home until 9 or so each morning and took the kids to a babysitter so I could leave around 7:30 Tuesday and Thursday and attend for the day. It was only $25 for the week and well worth the money. I attended classes from some prior institute instructors from college so that was fun too. Some of the classes I took were: Visions of the Pearl of Great Price, Handmaids of the Lord in the New Testament, Raising Stripling Warriors in Latter Day War Years, 5 ways to Improve your Marriage, but my favorite was 5 was to have a Gospel Centered home. It was by Randall Wright, I remember he was an EFY speaker when I was a kid and went to EFY a few times. He began by reading the BD definition of temple, towards the end it says something about how the only place on earth that can compare in sacredness to the temple is the home. I know we've all heard this before but do we really get the magnitude of the power that can and should be in our families lives? Here are a few points he brought up that I loved:

1. The first thing we see, regardless of day or time when we enter the temple is someone sitting at the recommend desk. Always, there are no exceptions to that, ever. He talked about the importance of being at the crossroads when our children are coming and going from our home. He had plenty of scary statistics of children who get involved with pornography, drugs, etc and the relation it has to whether or not someone was home after school when they got home. He talked about regardless of the day or time we need to be there doing 'countenance' checks for our kids as they come and go. The best time to solve a problem is the first encounter, not once it's gotten out of control so as we are there each day, or each time our children come home from an activity and we look in their eyes and ask them how they are, we will be able to know if there is a problem. He committed everyone in the audience to never go to sleep when our teenagers are gone.

2. The second similarity he brought out was the exact obedience of the Temple Presidency to the Prophet. We never hear of a Temple President saying 'well, the Prophet doesn't quite know our demographic here so we're going to open a little later than what he asked us to, and we'll let people wear whatever they'd like, because that would increase attendance etc.' Why do we then try to adapt what the prophet tells us about our family? We are told to do FHE on Monday nights, have daily scripture and prayer. How often do we say 'well, it's a great idea but our family is a little different and it works better if we just read on the weekends, or have FHE only when there's nothing better to do.' He said how important it is to be exactly obedient to our Prophet.

3. He challenged each of us to go home and sit on our most used couch or chair and look straight ahead. What are our children seeing in their environment? Do they look up and most often see the TV, or a poster of a sports hero or movie start? Or do they look up and see pictures of the temple or of the Savior, or of our family? We need to make our home consistent with the teachings of the Gospel.

Anyway, it was a wonderful, wonderful experience and I'm so glad I went! Thanks hubby for helping with the kiddos so I could go!