Weird Family Conversation...Check

Don't you just love family scripture study and prayer? I do. If you don't do it...I recommend you start. If our house is anything typical...you are in for a treat!

We are reading the Book of Mormon this year. Who am I kidding...we've been reading it for two years and we're only just over half way through. That's because we don't even read a chapter a night. We have this awesome edition which is broken down into sections with points to ponder, definitions and discussion questions in the bottom margin. It's awesome...but looong.



(Troy admonishing me for distracting him with my photog)


Besides taking turns with the reading and prayer, we also have another nightly family tradition. It takes place right in between the discussion questions and the prayer...usually as we're trying to get everyone to kneel around the table, but not necessarily. It's called, "Weird Family Conversation." It's not something scheduled per se...but it just happens. Anything is fair game...animal body parts...strange diseases. You name it. Even if we purposely try not to, it comes up. And each and every time, we are astonished at how we arrived on such an obscure, random topic. It's never abruptly out of the blue...there is always an evolution. The problem is...the harder we try NOT to have it...usually the harder we are laughing by the time we should be praying...so it's really pointless to avoid. Embrace the weirdness.

I've thought about blogging several of these stories... but some of them wouldn't really be what we'd like to share with the world here. I usually forget about them by morning anyway. But I'm going to attempt to share tonight's gem.

Cliff gets through the reading...a long section about King Lamoni's conversion...and one of the discussion questions involves sharing an experience we've had with being prompted by the Holy Ghost. I share (briefly) the answer to prayer I received which led me to marry Cliff...then someone mockingly says something along the lines of, "Like that was accurate revelation." to which Cliff replies (while gesturing toward the four children with a sweep of the hand), "That's right...it led to you Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" followed by an argument over who was "famine" who was "pestilence", "war" etc. and why. (ie...Coree to Patrick, "You're plague...you're the one who came down with swine flu first and got the rest of us sick"....and Jake giving a convincing argument why he should be war instead of pestilence.)

OK...Check! We can have the prayer now...