Sis. Bonnie L. Oscarson (Oct. 17): "The Needs before Us"

 The Activity:

1.     Have class members make a list of people that surround them every day.  These could include family, friends, co-workers, neighbors, people they see in the store, etc.

2.     After a few moments of making the list, ask class members to think about how they might serve each person on their list.  Stress that these ideas need not be “ambitious ways to change the world.”  They should, instead, be simple ideas that can be done from the heart. 

3.     Ask them to jot down an idea or two for each person on their list.

4.     Ask them to take a second and look over their list for the best idea or two on their lists.

5.     Have them share their best ideas in small groups (3-4 people each).

6.     If they want to at this point, they can “steal” one of the ideas someone else shared and add it to their list.

7.     Ask them now to identify three things from their list that they can do this week.

8.     Challenge them to do these three things and to write in their journals about it (even if they have to wipe the dust off their journals first).

Using the Activity:

The more time I spend thinking about teaching the gospel, the more that I am firmly convinced that truly teaching with power and authority, to borrow the scriptural terms, means challenging our class members to put into practice the doctrine that has been discussed in our classes.  Yes, we can teach lessons filled with the Spirit and not challenge those in our classes, but our responsibility as teachers is to help our class members have a greater portion of the Spirit in their lives each and every day of the week—not simply on Sundays.  So, we need to help our class members plan for ways to act on the doctrine that we teach. 

This activity is designed to do that.  Serving can seem overwhelming at times because either we only want to do things that move the earth or we see the size of the lists of what we could do and are overwhelmed.  This activity, then, tries to help us see the large number of things we can realistically do and then asks us to commit to simply doing three of them (you could always alter that number and simply ask class members to do a single thing on their list).  Also, this activity mentions journaling about their experiences.  The idea behind this is to help us have a record of how we have been instruments in the Lord’s hands and how He blesses us as a result.  These records are vital, even if we don’t speak as much about journals in the church as we did when I was a youth.

I pray that this lesson is useful to you and that it leads to many of your class members having Spirit-filled experiences.  Please leave me a note telling me how this activity worked for you.