*Today at church the topic was the sacrament. I feel, however, that on this particular day, I didn't focus on the sacrament as much as I would like, as we were helping inform our friends and families of Zoom links, which had to be changed at the last minute (meaning during the sacrament portion of the service), for Gracie's upcoming "farewell" talk. Ah, well. I'm grateful for being able to try again next Sunday. One brother's topic was to share how taking the sacrament can bless him in his daily life (or something to that effect), and I appreciated his reminder that when we make our sacramental covenants, we're promised that the Holy Ghost will be with us. That is a gift I surely can (and do) use in my daily life.
*After his talk, Gracie and I played a piano duet. I was pretty calm despite the difficulty in the timing of the piece, which was "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing," arranged by Anne Britt. There was a tricky part, but we'd played it well in our warm up. When you play instrumental music, your mind can be in a variety of places. Mine was thinking about the tricky bit, and after I got through it, I was pretty happy--but then we started to sound really off for some reason. We kept going for a few measures, but couldn't make our sounds come together, which was so confusing to me, so we stopped--which is against rule #1 when playing a duet, but we just couldn't keep doing what we were doing. Gracie pointed to just after the tricky bit, and we tried again, but our first few chords were still so dissonant. Gracie looked at my hands and pointed to a key that I should be playing that I was instead playing as a flat, and all of a sudden I realized that right after the tricky bit, there is a key change, from three flats to one. I'd never missed that key change in any of our practices, but I did right then, and it took Gracie pointing it out in the middle of our performance for me to see it. We started there again, and were able to finish without a problem. I felt bad that I had messed up so badly for Gracie on her big day, but she quickly forgave me, and people were very gracious in their comments to us about it afterwards.
I was thinking about this experience, and it made me think about trials. Sometimes we get through hard things (the tricky bits), and then we try to keep going the same way we were going, even though things within us have changed. We can tell something is not right, but don't know how to fix it. We can receive help from heaven, through the Holy Ghost or an angel sitting next to us, who will point out where we need to go back to, and change, so that we can keep moving forward harmoniously. I also thought about Gracie, who had to correct her mom. Maybe being the angel is not always an easy or comfortable thing to be. But they are also following promptings, and are blessed for doing so.
*Gracie was the final speaker, and was poised and confident and competent, as she so very often is. (Good news--the Zoom link worked.) She shared her testimony of the sacrament, as well as other aspects of the gospel that she is excited to share with the people in Germany. We get to have her for two more Sundays (Fast Sunday and the one while she's doing Home MTC), and we are so excited for her and are so going to miss her while she's gone!
It was a delight!
