Hope your Christmas was beautiful.  I am still lingering in ours and soaking up this family of mine.  Hopefully I can get the pics downloaded today but until then, let’s talk for a sec. about some end-of-December things.  
Our church congregation has grown so much that it’s become kinda like sardines trying to pass each other in the halls.  This is a great thing, so many people to love and learn from, but the wards (congregations) in our immediate area have been overflowing to the point that the local leaders deemed it time to change things up a little bit.
So, a couple weeks ago we were all called together for a special meeting and boundaries were re-aligned to make a new ward.  
Our house is included in the “new ward.”  
Changing of wards is sad because when boundaries change you don’t see many people you love on a regular basis any more, but so many more are added to get to know and fall in love with.  I already adore so many new faces we get to meet with each week.  Change is hard but also so good and growing in so many ways.
With all the changes going on, the leadership was switched up in all kinds of ways.  Almost everyone got new “callings” (responsibilities to help make the ward run smoothly).  I have been working in Primary (the children’s organization) for a few years now as the singing leader.  I have talked before about how I practically fell off my chair when they called me to do that little task because, well, quite simply I’m not much of a singer, and certainly not a song-and-dance kind of girl, which it pretty much what you do to keep those kids entertained each week.

But boy oh boy I fell in love with those kids and loved the learning that comes from being pushed out of your comfort zone.

With the changing of so many things, however, I was released from that and asked to work with the 14-15 year-old girls in the Young Women program.

Which includes my own darling one:

Although I will miss those sweet Primary kids I am pretty excited about hanging more with that girl of mine.  
She is over the moon as well.  At least I’m pretty sure that’s what she meant when she found out and told me not to embarrass her 🙂
Claire is pretty excited because she turns twelve in January and will be joining the ranks of the Young Women as well.  Elle is in the oldest group so although I’ll mostly work with Grace, I get to interact with all of them and how fun will that be to have all three of my big girls in there?  Pretty fun I tell you!  
We got right down to business with all the responsibilities involved (we have a pretty awesome YW president…I’m already learning so much from she and the other leaders).  One of the first things on the agenda was to help the girls get to know each other better.  Christmas is a perfect time to do that so we held a Christmas dinner and White Elephant gift exchange.  
Our kitchen went from this:

To this filled with all these wonderful women/girls:

I adore all these girls already even though I barely know so many of them, there is just a great spirit among them and I feel so lucky I will get to learn from them each week.

Here are the leaders I get to work with so far:

Love them already too.  A couple more got called right before Christmas who I’m excited to get to know.
Looking forward to the new adventures that lie ahead.

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11 Comments

  1. Oh my goodness – your group is huge!!!! 🙂 Our stake was realigned about a year ago, to make the wards more balanced. I've been in Primary ever since we got put in our 'new ward' but my good friend was just called as the new YW pres..she shared a pic of their Sunday group and there were five leaders and three girls. And I'm in Utah County!

    1. Sometimes there is a new building, but a lot of the time when a new ward is created, they will just shuffle other wards around to different times. When my old ward was created several years ago, they kept us in the same building, we just met at a different time. Where I live, our wards meet at either 9AM, 11AM or 1PM and we rotate each year. I'm not the best at explaining things, so I hope that makes sense! 🙂

    2. When the parish gets larger we add a mass then when it explodes we build a bigger building, or build another parish in the same community. Multiple mass times gives flexibility. But most people go to the same time most weeks and recognize most people at that mass. Sounds like wards are just assigned worship times. What do you call the building then? Are all the people who attend there are some point on Sunday associated to one another as a larger group? Our parish has about 8,000 over 6 mass times in two languages btw Saturday and Sunday. Course not everyone comes. Do buildings ever support that many?

    3. We just call the building a church. The chapel is the main part of the building where everyone meets together for the first hour, then they split up for the last two hours into individual classes.
      Our ward boundaries are assigned geographically, so where you live will determine what ward you go to. In my community there are 5 different LDS church buildings and I believe that 2 or 3 wards meet in each building. We had one church burn down several years ago, so the wards that met in that building were moved to other church buildings while the new one was being built. During that time, we had 4 wards in our building, which was a bit cramped, but doable. 🙂
      The wards are part of what is called a Stake, which is basically a group of wards. In some larger communities, there can be more than one Stake. In my community, we just have one Stake. Twice a year we all meet together for Stake Conference. We can't all fit into one building, so each ward is given an assignment for which building to attend that day and then the conference session is broadcast so that everyone gets to watch it no matter if they're in the chapel or one of the classrooms. During Stake Conference, we don't split off into individual classes, it's just the one meeting for everyone.
      Hopefully this all made sense. 🙂

    4. Yes that makes sense. Stakes are collections of wards that can go beyond a single building. Wards are specific worship times. I suppose if there are too many wards a new chapel gets built.

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