Any Day Will Do for FHE

We haven't had a real FHE lesson in a while. We have had lots of family togetherness. Even lots of good conversations. Last Thursday when we all got home, as Nick was getting ready for bed, he's the one who said, "Should we do scriptures and prayer?"  

But we haven't had a formal Family Home Evening lesson. It's been nagging at me. 

We didn't do it on Sunday -- I was caught up in my photo project. And we didn't do it on Monday -- Nick had a bunch of friends over swimming, playing hide and seek, video games and a sleepover. Tuesday Dan had Elders Quorum visits. But he was home by 8:30 and Nick was home too. 

As soon as I mentioned to Dan we should have FHE, he was on board. And immediately we thought of discussing Elder Nelson's talk to the youth and what we'd like to do to follow the prophet. When we called Nick to tell him we were going to have FHE, he came without complaining. (It also probably helped to clarify, "We're going to have a short FHE.")

We talked about President Nelson's ask that we take a 7-day fast of social media. Nick had already done this -- he gave up Snapchat for 7 days. He said what he learned was that before the fast, he was in a bunch of streaks with people and was thinking a lot about keeping his streaks. But after the break from Snapchat, he said he lost his streaks and he realized he didn't really care about them. They just simply weren't that important.

We are going to try to remember in Family Prayer to pray for people throughout the world that everyone will have the opportunity to hear the message of the Gospel.

And finally, we discussed what we could give up once a week for three weeks to do something with eternal consequences instead. President Nelson had suggested we pray about it. We should ask in our prayers what we can give up and what we can do instead. And then immediately Nick said, "We should give up sleep and do baptisms."

This is the first summer that Nick has really started sleeping in. Often until 10:00 or later. So giving up sleep is a big deal.

The cool thing is we were able to talk about impressions. And that all good things come from the Lord. So when we have an impression of doing something good, we should act on it. So, it was great that he had such a quick impression and we were glad he spoke up so we could act on it.

Dan has just learned how to Index with FamilySearch, so his idea was that we take an hour and the family gather together with our laptops and index.

That left me. But I didn't have something jump into my head. So I am going to take the next couple of days to pray about it. We will either do two weeks of indexing or baptisms or do an idea I think of. (Or Chris may have an idea -- he'll be home soon!)

Didn't matter that it wasn't Monday. Or Sunday. It's always a good time to have Family Home Evening and talk about truths and things of a spiritual nature with our children. I'm glad I had the impression to have FHE. I'm glad that as soon as we decided to do it, we had an impression of what to discuss. I know it matters. It might seem small. But I think it actually matters more than we can understand.

AND... he's not home but we got this sweet letter from Chris... I miss him!