I love our bishop! He is one of the kindest, most gentle men I have ever known. I want to remember what he did today because it was such a beautiful image.
There are very few prayers in our church that need to be exact - baptismal prayers and sacrament prayers are the two we hear most frequently. As a result sometimes the person who is offering one of those prayers will have to start over in order to say it correctly. (I won't discuss a former ward where a group of irreverent boys thought it was funny to see how many times they could "mess up.")
Our ward has a number of new members and recent immigrants and we have been blessed by their addition to our ward. One of the men was at the Sacrament table today. When he began the prayer I realized there was going to be a problem because his reading ability in English was rather limited. He said the prayer once, then when the bishop indicated he should do it over, he tried again. There were several mistakes where he added a word (and) or replaced a word with a different one. When he finished the second time, the bishop didn't hesitate. He got up, walked over to the table where Brother C was kneeling, moved the young man out of the way and knelt down next to Brother C. Brother C began again and each time he stumbled, the bishop whispered the correct phrase to him and Brother C repeated it and went on. It was such a tender loving way to help him get through the prayer. Each phrase was correct before they went on but it wasn't a painful do the whole thing over and over as sometimes happens. This was just a sweet image of a loving bishop teaching a new convert the words he needed in order to bless the bread as we have been taught. Seeing both of them kneeling there together brought tears to my eyes and gratitude for a bishop who leads by example.
I don't think I've ever seen a more Christlike example of a sacred ordinance.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment