Sabbath Inspiration

After an amazing General Conference this month, I really felt inspired to take some actions to help our family with our Sabbath day worship. It's something that has been on my mind since last year when President Nelson gave the talk about the Sabbath being a delight. I really felt strongly that we needed to do better. With church going from 1-4pm this year, it's been really easy to just not bother getting ready or doing much until church, and then, once we get home close to dinnertime, we would tend to vegetate in front of the tv or get on devices or other mind-numbing activity.

So, I led a family home evening a couple of weeks ago where I asked the boys to brainstorm some ideas of things that they would be willing to do to help make Sunday a more meaningful and worshipful day - the Jerdon family's way of showing God where He stands in our lives. They came up with some great ideas which included calling extended family, indexing, working on Duty to God or appropriate scouting merit badge items, watching home movies together, going on walks and doing other family or gospel focused activities and service. One activity which I thought of after our discussion was journaling.

Now, Caleb and Brendan HATE (with a capital "H") writing in any form. It's like putting bamboo shoots up their finger nails. When I have them write and do journal entries over the summer, it isn't without an extensive amount of eye rolling and huffing and puffing. But, I am passionate about record keeping. With a memory like mine, it's absolutely essential, but more than that, each time we record about our lives, our thoughts, our testimonies, those are like leaving behind brass plates for our future selves and family members to treasure and learn from! Even if it's only occasionally, some journaling in any form is better than none. Be it with a blog, a paper notebook, social media posts (if you want the world to know everything about you), audio files, video files, whatever, those are precious!

So, the trick was how to get the boys on board to even flirt with the possibility of writing their own personal histories or journal entries. As it happened, I was going through some of my old Friend magazine files and found the challenges for the children to write down experiences and was inspired to create our family's first "Journal Jar" full of questions to answer as journal entries. I took 99% of my questions from the Friend and from familysearch.org's questions for writing your personal history. I picked out ones I felt the boys would connect with the most and typed them out, then taped them to both sides of jumbo popsicle sticks. Using an old candle jar and some scrapbooking supplies, I created a cute container for the sticks and then filled a second jar with the incentive - Lifesaver Wint-o-green mints (a family favorite).

The idea is to (of your own accord) get out your notebook (just the ones they've used over the summer), pull a stick from the Journal Jar, take a mint to suck on, and then record your "story" (cuz that sounds more interesting than "journal entry"). Last week, Riley was the first to try it out, and today Brendan also got his notebook out to give it a go!!! I didn't say anything about it or prod them in anyway. I simply took out the two jars this morning and put them on the kitchen table...and then waited. Success!!! The only thing I instructed them to do after they had written their stories was to add today's date at the top so that they could remember when they had written them. Bam! Happy mama moment!

And so in celebration, here I am on the blog, writing my own "story" this sunny Sabbath day and feeling so grateful for all the many resources we have been blessed with to help us on our journey. I'm grateful for living prophets who teach and inspire us to live our lives more fully in the Light. I love to feel the Spirit in our home and am grateful for the inspiration that is helping us along. We'll see if we can keep this momentum going.