Oh children

We teach a group of 5 kids, who are 8-9 year old, every Sunday.

I not going to lie, this has been the hardest, but also the most rewarding calling (service) that I've had in the Church. As soon as we moved into our first family ward a little over a year ago (in Provo we didn't have Primary) Kevin wanted to be in Primary. I was a little hesitant - both of us are the youngest son and daughter, and we are also the youngest cousins in our family, so we never had any experience with little children. So when we got our calling I was terrified! I didn't even know what kids that age were like: what grade they were in school, what kind of math they learned, if they could even read the scriptures and discuss them. Of course we got handed the largest Primary class: a group of 10 kids.

We learned that in our class we had a lot of special needs kids. We teach kids with autism, speech impediment, ADD and Aspergers. Since then our class has been split so now we only have 5 kids, but a lot of them are the ones who need a lot of attention. We've both tried to learn more about how to have every child engaged during the lesson, and sometimes it goes very well and sometimes it's a disaster. We've had kids crying, an outburst of "SHUT UP!", and crying adults (me).

But today (Sunday) was the perfect example of why I love teaching them. Our lesson was about the Millenium and the Second Coming of Christ.

Lately we've been trying to have them open the scriptures and read them aloud, because we feel like you can really feel the Spirit when you read the words of the prophets instead of listening to your teachers summarize a passage. So we read all the beautiful things that will happen during the Millenium and these are the things the kids liked the most:

1. Animals and people living peacefully
2. Satan will have no power to tempt us
3. No sadness
4. No death

We then talked about the signs of the Second Coming. These kids were reading the scriptures and getting so into it, and screaming stuff like "maggots will feast on the flesh of your face AAAHHH!!!" We couldn't help but laugh! The boys were getting so grossed out and scared but they were loving it! We had to remind them that the bad things would only happen to the wicked people, and if they kept doing the righteous things they are doing now they wouldn't have to worry about it.

At the end of class, one the boys (the one that likes to cause trouble the most, in fact) offered a prayer and said: Please Heavenly Father forgive me of all my sins today, and help me be good, so I can be alive during the Millenium and spend time with Jesus. It was the sweetest thing I had heard, and especially coming from him! That day Kevin and I went home happy that we taught our class, and even more grateful that we learned to be more humble and look foward to Christ's return like those kids.