threatening to spill into words

Sunday School is usually my least favorite hour of church. It just is. Notable exceptions are when I had a crush on the teacher, and when I was the teacher. (I apparently have a hidden attention-getting streak. And there's nothing like an excuse to stare at someone for an hour.)

Mostly it's boring. Sometimes I feel like the teacher wasn't prepared (or doesn't know how to prepare well). But I'm good at dealing with it, and I try to at least volunteer to read a scripture every week.

Last month I must've been in a really antagonistic mood, because through the entire Sunday School lesson I was downright hostile. I glared at my scriptures in order to not glare at the teacher -- but that didn't make me feel any better because we weren't even using them.

I ended up writing backwards for much of the time. I do that when I have feelings. I'm embarrassed that I had to physically write reminders like, "Keep it together" but that's the kind of day it was. Or I really just didn't like the lesson.

The teacher kept asking questions that have answers in the scriptures, but we never looked them up. (We didn't even open them.) Instead he would keep asking the question over and over until someone's floundering guess was close enough to the answer he was looking for. And they were vague questions too. I hate vague questions that only have one right answer.

So between the questions and the lack of scriptures, I was annoyed. Even more annoyed when I found out that I'd known the right answers to his questions but hadn't dared volunteer them because everyone else (who were giving adequate answers to my mind) was wrong. And I dislike being wrong.

Anyway.

I knew that yesterday it'd be time for that teacher again, and I thought I should prepare just in case I could salvage the lesson for myself. So I read up on it from my favorite Gospel Doctrine blog, and skimmed the chapters.

And it made a huge difference! We still never opened the scriptures as a class (actually, a girl asked if he could hand her a spare set and I scoffed inside because we weren't going to use them) but I opened them! And since I'd read ahead, I knew the answers to his questions! And since I'd been thinking about the lesson a little bit, I could provide answers even in the "discussion" questions. And participating (even though I blushed every time and even though I couldn't quite keep from glaring while I did it) helped me feel more engaged in the lesson. Also, bonus: it moved the lesson along because he wasn't trying to eke out the right answer from other classmates.

I could also see where he was going with his monologue. It wasn't totally random like it seemed last time. He was actually using the scripture block in some way or another. And that made me feel better.

So the moral of this story is: Read the lesson ahead of time. It makes your experience better. I felt the Spirit. I wasn't hostile. And it's even possible that someone in the class was impressed with my participation and I'll get a date out of it. (haha, like that's ever happened.)

Title text: "Between"

P.S.: I had a specific picture in mind for this post, and I looked for it longer than I spent writing. I don't feel comfortable uploading the screenshot but couldn't find another version. So it's another picture-less post. Sorry. (It was perfect, too. This sweet teacher never fails to fill me with hostility, because it's her picture I see every time I get kicked off the online seminary site in the middle of doing something. So the parallels were nice.)