Wrapping Up

I apologize for not writing all week! Things have gone really well, and we are now having some time for debriefing. I'll try to highlight a few things from the past week.

Tuesday Lunch
We met again on Tuesday for our regular lunch meeting. Williamsons brought a fabulous meal: lasagna, bread, salad, cookies...yum! Our discussion was fragmented and frivolous for the first 20 min or so, until Sister Williamson broke caught everyone's attention with the question, "So, what did you learn in Brother Thunell's class today?" This was an interesting question. You see, Tom had tailored the class to be directed at us because he thought it was our last day. He spent the hour showing us how the Book of Mormon's primary purpose is to testify of Christ so people can come to salvation. He had overheads with lists of references from the BOM that used phrases like "Come unto Christ," "the only name by which salvation comes" "the Rock of our salvation" or had instances of people seeing Christ. Then he opened it up for students to share with us some of their favorite passages from the BOM. Most of them were pretty cool--things like how Christ stands between us and justice and satisfies the demands of justice, or how Christ knows all of our infirmities, struggles, etc.., or how God leads us on the path of righteousness. It's funny, though, because to them, the way the BOM, which was (supposedly) written during Old Testament times, primarily speaks about Christ is a prime reason for them accepting it as scripture. For us, we see it as evidence that the BOM was written after the New Testament (like during the 19th century), because of how much it steals from NT language. But, somehow that's just not as obvious to them as it is to us.

The rest of our conversation turned to 2 main, intense topics: 1) what happens to those who never hear of Christ (asked by them) 2) grace vs. works (brought up by us, of course). I don't have time to elaborate here right now, but might later. Once again, we walked away glad for our time to converse and the things God allowed us to share, even though this was quite a bit more intense than the past discussions.

Thursday Class
Yesterday I had the opportunity to lead the devotional in our class, "Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith." God totally blessed our time and was very present. I got to share a blend of a quote from Joseph Smith on happiness, my testimony of (unsuccessfully) trying to find happiness in my own perfection and performance, and then how God has taught me to delight in Christ alone and seek my happiness in Him. I read part of Psalm 63 and also shared how "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him." God helped me to speak clearly (even though I was nervous) and Brad said he could tell I really believed what I said and was genuine. Then Brad and I led "Amazing Love" (using a guitar--a first in an Institute class) and Mariah prayed the opening prayer. It was AWESOME. Afterwards, at least 4 or 5 students (plus Brother Thunell) said how much they appreciated what I shared and loved the song. To God be the glory! We got email addresses from several students in the class as well as Brother Thunell and stayed after with several to take pictures. I'll attach one now. The second picture is me with Brother and Sister Williamson, the couple who have been amazingly hospitable to us and used to be Evangelical Christians. We had a casual lunch again with them and discussed grace more.