Double-Duty Lessons

Returning from an inspirational day at church, I felt motivated to enhance my family home evening lessons, which we often took from the Family Home Evening Resource Book. I expressed this desire to my husband, but when I mentioned buying a book of ideas at the bookstore, he said he didn’t think that was the answer. I spent the rest of the day thinking about ways I could enhance my lesson plans.

That night I read in the Ensign about the new curriculum changes in priesthood and Relief Society. I felt I had found my answer when I read, “Instruction by the Spirit will happen … as husbands and wives share new insights from their class discussions and as they teach their families” (“With ‘the Tongues of Seven Thunders,’” Ensign, Jan. 1998, 53; emphasis added).

I decided I would use my new Relief Society manual, Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Brigham Young, as an additional resource for family home evening lessons. I had already committed to reading the lessons for Relief Society; now I realized I could also adapt them to supplement the resource book.

As I study and ponder the manual before the Sunday lesson, I am better able to participate in Relief Society and am also preparing for family night. I look forward to the opportunity to listen to others’ perspectives before teaching my own family.

Most important, my family and I can, according to Elder Dallin H. Oaks of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, “be profoundly taught and exhilarated by the truth and beauty and value of the principles of the gospel” taught by President Brigham Young (quoted in Don L. Searle, “Major Curriculum Changes in Priesthood and Relief Society,” Ensign, Dec. 1997, 12).—Mary Hawkins Allen, Hillsboro, Oregon