A Church Without Light...

Today started out as a pretty typical Sunday.  We got up, got breakfast, got all the kids ready and made it to church on time (barely!).  The new stake president and his wife were our speakers today in Sacrament meeting.  Since Jessica, Matt, and Ben were sitting with us, my kids were having a hard time staying still and reverent--no surprises there.  I kept having to correct them and remind them to be reverent, sit on their bottoms, and keep still.  All of a sudden, in the middle of the stake president's wife's talk, the chapel goes completely black.  The poor woman stopped talking and there was a stunned silence.  All I could think was "uhhh...what?"  So a couple members of the bishopric quickly descend from the stand and go to identify and fix the problem, while the third opened the side door on the side of the chapel to let in some outside light.  Thank goodness the weather was beautiful today!  It was enough light for the speaker to see the podium, and she said "Well, I can continue, but I'll have to yell."  She had to really project her voice for the remainder of her talk.  I wasn't too worried about the outage, because usually these sorts of things are fixed within a few minutes.  Twenty minutes later, at the end of Sacrament meeting, there were still no lights.  At that point, I started to wonder where we would hold Primary, because the Primary room has no windows.

At the conclusion of the talks, the bishop stood up and announced that due to our "situation", we would have to make a few adjustments.  He then announced that the Primary would be meeting in the Young Women's room since the Primary room had no windows and would therefore be pitch black.  The same went for several classrooms, and the men's bathroom (the women's has a window, thank goodness--poor guys, having to pee in the dark.  I'm sure glad I'm not on the schedule to clean the church this week!).  I am in the Primary presidency, so immediately all the wheels in my head started spinning through the ramifications of this announcement.  We had to combine a few classes, and fudge a little here and a little there. So we kicked out the poor young women, who ended up having their Sunday School classes outside.  And we tried to set up our Primary in the Young Women's room, which is laid out completely differently from our Primary room.  But we made it work.  It was exciting and chaotic, but we did it.  About halfway through the third hour of church, the lights came back on.  Of course it was too late by that time to move anything else around, so we finished out as we were.  But it definitely made me grateful for electricity! It was also kind of a nice experience to have to scramble and sacrifice to have our meetings--it made me prove to myself that I was willing to do what it took to attend all my church meetings, and to make it possible for the children to attend all of theirs.  It was a really memorable Sunday. I am grateful for the light our church brings--and also the light fixtures in our church.