Living the Life

At this moment in time,
I am eating ramen straight out of the pot.
With chopsticks.

By so doing, I am also ignoring the load of homework projects that I have to either catch up on or...catch up on. Even though I'm a total school-loving nerd (ha, most of the time), I loved the time I spent away from classes to be on tour with some of the greatest people in probably the world, doing some very important stuff on tour in the communities on the Navajo reservation.

We performed our show (or pieces from it) 6 or 7 times during our tour of the four corners area, and we also got to be a part of a very special sacrament meeting fireside in the tiny Indian Wells branch in Arizona. Honestly, that experience is one that will stay with me for a very long time. I'd never been to such a small branch before--there were probably a max of 75 people there, and since it was their Thanksgiving dinner day, that was considerably more than they usually had. The entire building was one hallway, a chapel the size of a relief society room, and two small Sunday school classrooms next to the chapel. Having grown up in Happy Valley, I was used to gigantic stake centers (mine even has two floors and a basement), and I'd never experienced such an intimate setting for Sunday meetings. Because our group was basically the sacrament program that day and only three chairs a row for the bishopric members served as the stand, we set up our chairs in rows facing the rest of the congregation (the other half of the room). It was so interesting to be able to look every member of the congregation in the face and watch their reactions as we shared testimony through word and song.

It may sound cliche, but in truth, there was hardly a dry eye on either side of the room by the end of our program. The prayers and such in the branch were given in both Navajo and English, and the two Navajos from our group who spoke were able to share part of their messages in Navajo. We sang one of the lines of our penultimate song, "I Am A Child of God" in Navajo, too.  Some of the elder members of the congregation spoke only Navajo, and you could see them smile as they heard their native tongue. At the end of the fireside, we decided to include "Go My Son" because it seemed appropriate, and I was touched that some of those who only knew Navajo were mouthing along with the words as we sang them in English. It was such a powerful experience for me--I'd never felt the Spirit so strongly through an entire meeting, and I'd never known that such an intense love for a people I hardly knew could grow so quickly within me.

Is this how missionaries feel about the people they teach?

In general, those of the elder generation especially are very reserved when greeting and interacting with you--at most you'll get a heartfelt squeeze of the hand. But when it was time for us to leave, they literally were pulling us into full-on embraces and saying "Thank you, thank you."

I love them. And I didn't want to go. But we had to get back to the RB before late that night, and we had a lot of ground to cover before then. I will always remember my experience there, though, as well as the many other great experiences I had on regional tour this semester. Welcome to Living Legends 2011-12: great people, great times. And it's still only the beginning.


Lauren from the native section made this "behind-the-scenes" video of tour. :)

Living Legends — Four Corners Tour 2011. from Lauren Flores on Vimeo.