Sunday Thoughts

It's been an interesting experience these last several weeks as I have prepared a lesson nearly every week for priesthood and then, for one reason or another, ended up not giving it. This has happened the last four or five times I've prepared a lesson.  Some of those lessons I have really struggled with while preparing them, struggled to find what felt like the right message out of the material.  Being third hour, these lessons are usually taken from the most recent General Conference.  As the quorum leader, it's typically me that selects the talk.  You'd think that would make it easier.  Neither do I normally feel constrained to limit myself to the selected talk to use as resource material for these lessons, although I do try to keep whatever material I use on topic and supportive of the message.  That seems like it ought to make it easier, too.  The struggle has been finding the right message in the talk, the right material to convey that message, and then putting together an outline to use in presenting the message.  Sometimes it just seemed really hard to feel like it was coming together right.  

The thing I find noteworthy in all this is that as I have struggled to prepare I have prayed for help and every time it has come, even though the Lord knew I would not be giving the lesson.  How easy it would have been to just let me struggle and worry since He knew that whatever I prepared would not be presented.  You know, the blessings of adversity and all that. But instead, each time the Lord answered my prayer and helped me, blessed me to be able to get the lesson to where I felt prepared, ready, and comfortable.  I look upon it as the response of a merciful God to a child calling for help.  I've long felt that I usually gain more than the class members when I teach because in preparing I study and see lots more material than I ever end up presenting in class.  So all these lessons I've prepared but never given were not wasted in the least.  On top of that, the help I've asked for has been given even though it was just for me.  He does that, in little things as well as big things.

"In my distress I called upon the Lord, and cried to my God: and he did hear my voice out of his temple, and my cry did enter into his ears." II Samuel 22:7