History Lesson

I encountered my first hostile person tracting the other day. Actually he was trying really hard to be polite (for him), so I had to give him that. He’s a long-time inactive member of the church who wants nothing to do with it now. I found him really entertaining. He seemed to want to scare us off by telling us how mean he used to be, but he’s getting old now. :) People are funny.

We were telling the sister who we had dinner with about him and she thinks he was part of one of the original families that joined the church in this area and then she proceeded to give us a history of the church here. It was actually pretty fascinating to me – you know me and history.

Missionaries first came to this area in around the 1890’s but the people in the Shenandoah Valley wanted nothing to do with outsiders, especially after the whole reconstruction thing of the South and the carpetbaggers. So the missionaries stayed up in the mountains and taught the people they found there- mountain people of Scotch-Irish (pronounced ‘Arsh’ here) who were also not welcomed by the people of the valley. But after the blight of the chestnut trees came over from Holland and killed off the trees which were their main source of income (because apparently, the chestnut, you can do everything with from furniture to fuel to eating and to this day no chestnut tree will grow very big without dying) the mountain people were forced to come down into the valley to look for work.

Anyway, prejudice and persecution were extremely bad, i.e. missionaries being shot and thrown in the river, etc. – ultimately resulting in the missionaries being pulled out around 1920 and along with them official ties to the church. Then missionaries came back in the 30’s expecting to find nothing left of the church here and were surprised to find a small congregation still meeting and preaching out of the Book of Mormon – even though it was more like a Baptist church than an LDS one, because they were just doing the best they could without any official leaders. :) But what really amazed them is not only that they still taught out of the Book of Mormon, but they had collected their tithing and saved it ever since the missionaries left and were just waiting for a way to get it to the right people. What a testimony of tithing they had! Especially because it was during the time of the Depression. They must have known they needed the blessings that come from paying tithing then more than ever. They also found that they had started their own women’s organization, all on their own, to help each other and the needy and called it the Sunshine Club. When they were told about Relief Society, they embraced it with open arms and abandoned their ‘Sunshine Club’. Interesting, huh?

Basically all the local members of the church here descend from those 5 old families that joined the church way back. You remember the Colemans who I always talk about (the ones with the nicknames like Tonky, Butterball, and Pinto)? They are a part of that old crowd. But what’s sad is that a lot of those old families are now really struggling in the church and aren’t very active. Crazy. Well, there’s your history lesson for the day.

The baptism we had last week went really well (so we heard) so we are really excited about that. We are teaching a new family and are still on the lookout for some more! Besides that, nothing too interesting.

But speaking of Shakespeare, since you were telling me about Kristi’s class, I have a new favorite verse in the Book of Mormon that reminds me a lot of Shakespeare. It’s the second to last verse in the entire Book of Jacob, but not the whole verse because it gets kind of depressing, but I like the middle where he says, “And the time passed away with us, and our lives also passed away like as it were unto us, a dream.” Or something like that, I don’t have it right here to quote it exactly. But not only is it very poetic, but it made me stop and gain a little more perspective about how this life really is going to seem like a dream to us when all’s said and done, so how important is it that we spend our time with the things that are really the most important? I also thought of you, mom, this week when I was reading in 1 Corinthians about Paul when he compares the church and the people in it to the parts of the body. I even started singing your song, :) but all I could remember was the chorus. Well, I gots to skeedattle. Love you all!