Light, Truth and Homemade Doughnuts.

I've decided that now that my oldest is in middle school it is time to teach some deeper doctrine. It is an experiment on my part actually, as Aaron and I are studying some deep doctrine ourselves these days. Sidenote: D&C 84,88,93 are just mind-blowingly good. Often we think we must teach kids the "milk" before the "meat".  I have been finding that when I treat my kids like adults in spiritual things, they often surprise me by easily and enthusiastically grasping difficult concepts. In many ways they are more open to them than some adults I've taught!

Tonight for FHE we brought our scriptures and marking pens and I had my big pad of paper and my easel out. We started in D&C 84:45-47 and took these verses phrase by phrase.  I drew a chart of the concepts as they read them and they marked the verses in their scriptures. The concepts were:

v.45
1. The Word of God is Truth
2. Truth is Light
3. Light is Spirit--even the Spirit of Christ.
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v.46
4. The Spirit of Christ giveth light to every girl ;)
5. It's purpose is to ENLIGHTEN us. (what does enlighten mean? We looked this up and discussed how the spirit of Christ speaks to us as what the world would say is our "conscience")
6. OUR JOB is to HEARKEN unto it. (What is Hearken? Listen and DO.)
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Next we skipped to verse  and I drew a diagram of the verse with us at the bottom and a road leading to Jesus, and God the Father.
v.47
7. If we continue to HEARKEN unto the spirit of Christ, He will come to us (a.k.a second comforter) and even lead us to God the Father.


====Victoria then said: So....when we do these things the veil that blocks heaven from us will start to crack open. The more we follow the light of Christ, the more light we get and the more the veil opens, and then we will see Him.====

This insightful comment brought up some good discussion that isn't present when we talk about cookie cutter stories out of the scriptures. I was loving it!!!!!!

We then took a break to make HOMEMADE DOUGHNUTS which was a family tradition of mine. It has only taken 11 1/2 years to break down and buy a $19 Fry Daddy. I think it was the first time we were all in the kitchen joyfully making something together---Holly and Victoria were shaping the dough (pillsbury biscuits), Dad was cooking them, and Abby and Meredith were rolling them in cinnamon sugar. Aaron was a bit surprised at how good they were! You really can't beat fried bread rolled in cinnamon sugar. It's the one-two punch!

After doughnuts, the girls wanted to keep going with the scriptures. (!!!) Holly jumped up and wanted to teach the concept again to us, so she used my charts.

Then Daddy thought of a great game where we turned out all the lights downstairs except one (representing the light of Christ at birth) then each person would get a scenerio from Dad and if they made the right choice they got to turn on a light. The girls just LOVED this game, and it really taught a good lesson. Dad even made one or two turn out a light later on when they made a bad choice!

===After all the lights were back on I said: What would happen if we focused on following the light of Christ in us all the time? Here was Abby's response:
Abby: Then we would get more and more light inside of us, and we would begin to shine brighter and brighter. We would soon have no darkness in us and look bright and white like Jesus does. ===

Out of the mouth of babes......we then quickly turned to D&C 88:66-68 and I showed Abby that she had just spoken scripture! She was glowing of course, and proceeded to "teach" this concept again to her sisters on the big pad of paper.

We ended the night with Meredith who insisted she teach something as well. She drew an interesting cubist modern art picture and we guessed what it was. Please disregard the outfit--she took it from the clean clothes pile and it's not her size of course....!

It was truly a wonderful night. No lesson plans, no websites to search--just us and the D&C.

===Who knew?===