NOM

I got a text from the Primary Secretary yesterday. "Hi Brother AZflyer, this is Sister Primary Secretary. Can AZflyer Jr. give the talk in primary tomorrow? The theme is reverence is love and respect for God."

I responded with a 'sure'. and got a "Thank you!" back.

I know 'reverence' can be a trigger topic for many of us. We have a really warped view of reverence. We think it means sitting still for three hours on Sundays. So I figured I'd try to write the most NOM-tastic talk on Reverence for my seven year old son. Here it is:

"Reverence is an important part of the way we worship God, but reverence means different things to different people. The word reverence comes from the word revere. In the dictionary it says that revere means “to have great respect for someone or something, to show devotion and honor to someone or something”. Different people show their reverence for God in different ways. In our church, we learn from the Primary Song that “reverence is more than just quietly sitting”.

A few weeks ago, my parents got to go see Gladys Knight sing a concert at the church building where my dad grew up. Gladys Knight is a famous singer who joined our church almost 20 years ago. She came from a different background where people showed reverence for God in a very different way than we are used to. Gladys loved God very much before she joined our church, and she continues to love Him now.

Having reverence for God is how we show Him that we love Him. We show God that reverence through the feelings in our heart and the way we treat the people around us. In Matthew chapter 25 Jesus taught that the two great commandments were to love God and to love our neighbor. When we do these two things, we show God that we love him and that we revere him."

We'll see how it goes. The last time I did this with my other son, he mumbled through the talk and no one paid attention to it.

I see this as the way I try to stay faithful to myself. Sometimes I feel like Sisyphys, I'm going to keep trying.

I love the idea of NOMing up Primary. I wasn't too good at it, however, because I got released (fired) from my favorite calling, Primary chorister, because of it. Apparently it finally sunk in at the top levels that I am not reverent and that I teach songs differently than other people would. Back in my day Primary used to be fun. We would go after school and run around playing tag and hide and seek before and afterwards. I learned to knit, crochet, and do needlework in Primary. We sang fun songs with hand actions about seasons and flowers and things. Now it's so dismal. I was doing my best to try to make it something the kids could look forward to. Not acceptable.

I was primary pianist for a year. It was pretty cool.

Oh that is a brilliant NOM primary talk! Well done Azflyer and Azflyer jr.