Weekends

I was a teenager when I realized for the first time my weekends are only one day long. As a religious person, Sundays are spent at church and various church-related activities or spending time with family. Ideally Sundays are meant to be a day of worship, a day of rest and spiritual thinking. Realistically, Sundays are one of the busiest days of the week.

A typical LDS Sunday consists of at least three hours of church. If you like to sing, there is an additional hour before or after the three hour block to practice with the ward choir. If you really like to sing, there is often also stake choir practice for yet another hour in the evenings. If you are in any sort of presidency (Primary, Young Men's, Young Women's, Elder's Quorum, Relief Society, Sunday School), there are meetings at least every other week, for about an hour each. If you need a new temple recommend or other type of interview with the bishop, that's another hour gone, wait time included. Often there are firesides, open houses, or baptisms, for about another hour or so in the evening, with dessert and mingling afterward. One summer I went to two wards every Sunday, because I had friends in both--this meant five hours of church minimum every week, plus choir. (The times overlapped by one hour, hence the five hours instead of six.)

I stopped doing homework on Sundays. Ha, not just because Sundays can be busy--they aren't always as busy as indicated above--but because of the prophets and apostles admonitions that Sundays are meant to be a day of worship. Even on my busiest Sundays, I felt refreshed for the week ahead when I did not do homework on those days. It was great to take a break from everything academic, and we all know we receive blessings when we follow any of the Lord's commandments. I know it's really hard for some teens to commit to, but I have seen results from planning my studies around my days of worship.

Planning around my Sundays has been an interesting test of faith through the years. People ask, "Oh, what's missing a couple weeks of church here and there going to hurt?" It makes it all the more easy to skip church again, and again. You miss out on building relationships with other faithful members, since you're not there participating in those church activities with them, bonding over the gospel. It also gets easier to justify skipping out on other religious practices, like prayer and scripture study, weakening your testimony over time.

When I was a child, you only missed church when you were vomiting with the flu. Minor illnesses like headaches or staying up too late the night before were never reasons to miss church in my home. You know you have church the next day--it's your own fault if you didn't sleep enough. And religion should be a sacrifice--if anything, going to church can help you forget the pain of a simple headache.

Growing up, my family always went to church on vacation, and I even attended early morning seminary in Florida one time. My dad had a couple work conferences in Orlando, but I had a goal to get perfect attendance for all four years in seminary. Not even Mickey could tempt me from that goal. So we looked up the local wards, made a few calls and figured out which church building would be closest to our hotel. When the kids found out why I was there, they all thought I was crazy--they had never seen or heard of a tourist going to 6 a.m. seminary class. It was good for them to see my commitment, to a goal in general, but more importantly to the gospel. As an added bonus, my dad saw people that Sunday he had met while on his mission over twenty years ago.

Attending church in other states (and later, countries) was also a great confirmation of how the Church operates. All the lessons are the same, we sing the same songs, we read the same scriptures, we dress the same modest way. For an organization that is so far reaching, it makes sense to have this kind of standardization. It prevents well-meaning members from getting too off-course, a deviation that occurs in any civilized society which does not also have the written word. 

I was about ten when I realized the gospel is true wherever you go--something I couldn't have learned if I never went to church on vacation. It was even more amazing to hear the Saints in York and London talking about their daily experiences with the Gospel, English accents and all. I remember one of our group leaders got mad at us for making so many comments in Sunday School; Americans are definitely more outspoken than their English cousins. But I figured they would want to hear our stories just as much as we wanted to hear theirs--we were the foreign ones to them.

As busy as they are, as inconvenient as it may seem to plan around them, maybe having Sunday not count as part of my weekends isn't so bad after all.