Sunday, November 29, 2009

Today was our last day at church in Hervey Bay for two months - a bit of a sad day, but everyone we said 'bye' to said they looked forward to our coming back, so that made us feel good.  The sacrament meeting talks were good today - they focused on the three fold mission of the church: proclaim the gospel (Elder Hurst spoke about missionary work and the importance of speaking up about the church to others), redeem the dead (Sister Pierce spoke about the importance of doing genealogy work and going to the Temple), and perfect the saints (Rob Woodcott spoke about the importance of doing all that we should be doing to become stronger in the gospel, like reading the scriptures, saying prayers, going to Sacrament, etc.).  The speakers were really good and so the meeting went really fast. 

During Sunday School, Trudy taught about how the Lord continues to guide the Church through revelation to latter-day prophets.  She also talked about how Church correlation (everyone in the world focusing on the same thing and each auxiliary working together) was initiated and continues to operate today by revelation from the Lord to His prophets, that the purpose of Church correlation is to preserve “the right way of God” and ultimately it is intended to help accomplish the mission of the Church, which is to invite all people to “come unto Christ, and be perfected in him”. The First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve oversee correlation in the Church. Correlation includes:  a. Maintaining purity of doctrine, b. Emphasizing the importance of the family and the home, c. Placing all the work of the Church under priesthood direction, d. Establishing proper relationships among the organizations of the Church, e. Achieving unity and order in the Church, f. Ensuring simplicity of Church programs and materials.  Elder Bruce R. McConkie of the Quorum of the Twelve said that correlation is a process “in which we take all the programs of the Church, bring them to one focal point, wrap them in one package, operate them as one program, involve all members of the Church in the operation—and do it all under priesthood direction”.  It is always interesting that even though we have been members of the church for such a long time, we are continually learning.

Relief Society and Priesthood was joint today as it is the fifth Sunday of the month.  We watched a dvd of a talk given to Young Single Adults by President Dieter F. Uchtdorf that our branch president thought was relevant to all of us.  The focus was on the importance of remembering who you are - that you are a daughter or son of God and that you are important.  He also talked about dating (towards the young people in the church) and the importance of dating a variety of people so that you can find out the qualities you desire in a mate.  As well he talked about continuing to strengthen your testimony by following what the leaders in the church have told us.  Again it was so interesting to watch and listen to and before we knew it, it was over.  We said good-bye to the friends we have made here so far and told them we would be back in February. 

When we got home from church, we ate lunch and then sat down and watched the movie 'Supersize Me'.  Everyone who has seen this movie has told us we would be grossed out by it, but we really weren't.  To us, the movie seemed to be blaming McDonald's for the obesity and health problems that people in America (and other countries) have since the introduction of fast food.  It talked about how McDonald's (and other fast food and junk food companies) spend billions of dollars on advertizing to get the kids to buy their products.  They talked about how McDonald's builds Play Places to get the kids to come in there to play and then expecting food to be bought.  I feel that if the kids are getting fat because of going to McDonald's, perhaps the parents shouldn't be taking them in there, or perhaps it should be a treat for them to go (like us taking Colin twice a month for a hamburger and fries with ketchup and an orange drink).  Like everything else in life, self-control and moderation is the key - people need to take responsibility for their own actions and not blame others for their lack of self-control.

We were invited out to dinner tonight to Leanne and Bill Rostedt's home.  They had invited a whole bunch of us over for an evening of food, fun and fellowship: President Brown and his wife, Diana, Elder Cox and Elder Hurst, Leanne's sister, Amanda and daughter, Talia, Kym and her sons, John and Ashley, their own four sons, Caleb, Reece, Baden and Ethan and a friend, Sam.  We all sat around their kitchen/dining room/famly room to eat (meatballs, rice, vegetables, cake and custard) - very yummy fixings.  After dinner, we chatted for a while and then we played Pictionary.  We got into three teams of three and took turns drawing for our teams to get our team to say the word that Leanne had written on a piece of paper.  Mike, Kym and I were on the same team.  Some of the words were hard to draw/get like 'Alice Springs' and 'stupendous', but some of them we did well in getting like 'red pencil' (I got that one and drew a pencil and then to get red I drew a Canadian flag and pointed to the part of the flag that was red and Mike got it).   The three of us laughed so hard as we tried to draw and get the others to try and say what the word was.  It was a lot of fun.

Kym drove us home about 8:30pm (Leanne goes to bed very early as she gets up to start her day at 4:30am) and so we wanted to get out of there early.  When we got home, Mike uploaded another web album to the blog with photos of the church Christmas party on it.  If you want to see the captions, you have to click on the slideshow and you will see what I have written underneath each picture.

After that, we watched a great movie that we have seen before, but it was so long ago that we remembered very little of it.  It's called 'Firewall' with Harrison Ford and if you haven't seen it, I would recommend you go out and rent it.  It's our kind of movie - lots of action and no romance. :-)  It's basically about a bank computer programmer whose family was kidnapped by a team who wanted him to transfer millions of dollars from wealthy bank clients into an offshore account.  Well worth the money of a rental!