Take me to Church - NOT by Hozier

 

Sunday, July 19, 2015

I took a shower with a hand-held shower nozzle (the part where you could rest it for a "shower" was broken, but I got clean all the same.  The breakfast came at the perfectly inconvenient time of me just finishing my shower.  Since I had no actual towel (it was a hotel, cotton bath mat), I threw on a dress and answered the door just as the girl was ready to depart with my food.  Breakfast was a veggie omlet (no cheese), "toast" (more like warm bread), and hot chocolate.  The omelet was very good; the Ghanaians believe strongly in salting things well, even my mother wouldn't have needed more salt.  I stayed away from the "toast" mostly because I was late (Zak was picking me up at 8:30am to take me to church--thank you Hozier for forever altering this phrase).  The hot chocolate was a "health beverage" as it provided lots of vitamin Bs and had effervensence from sodium bicarbonate (Alka Seltzer in hot cocoa?!).  It tasted okay, though.



Zak collected me via taxi and we started on the epic journey to church.  Everyone was on their way to church!  Sunday best dress was the call of the morning as people walked, took busses or taxis, with Bibles in hand.  Due to traffic it took almost an hour to get to church.  We pulled up at 9:30am the parking lot with only two cars in it looked rather vacant.  I made an assumption that church would start at 9am and I was starting to doubt.  As I got out of the car another taxi pulled up behind us with an entire family in tow.  Zak spoke with the woman and made sure that she would take care of me.  We verified that church started at 9 (phew!) and Zak left to change money, etc., with the promise of picking me up at 12:30 ('cause he knew I would chat after church and didn't want to wait or rush me).

For the record, even in Ghana, the LDS Churches have the prettiest lawns.  You can see a beautiful green lawn and look up to find an LDS church.  Even the locals who are not LDS notice and mention it.

Ghanaian time is like Hawaiian time, only later.  When I got to the chapel, the sacrament had just started.  I assume that the meeting started 15 minutes late and considering everything went 15 minutes past the appropriate start/end times, it is probably a safe bet.

Other than Elder Carson of Burley, Idaho, I was the only white person I had seen in Ghana (more on this later).  The congregation of the Odorkor Ward was small, but welcoming.  All the men were in white shirts and ties.  The women mostly wore traditional African dresses, but there were some western fashions.  Everyone was SO friendly and assumed I was from Utah, a decent guess considering I was a white Mormon. 

The sacrament meeting talks were wonderful.  There was a youth speaker who spoke about free agency, a woman who spoke about Relief Society, a man who spoke about liberty, and the 1st counselor in the stake presidency who spoke about faithful obedience.  All of the talks were focussed on the doctrines of the gospel, firmly supported with scriptures and general authority quotes.  They all had great faith and were extremely well-spoken.  The singing was done with vim and vigor!  There was complete joy in the singing of the hymns.  The keyboardist (the man who played the literal keyboard) jazzed up the accompaniment on the last couple of verses of each hymn--awesome.

The Sunday School president was a sterotypical Sunday School president; he was wonderful.  He announced the week's lesson, invited everyone to read the lesson, testified of some of the essential truths, and cheerfully passed the time over to the teacher.  At the end of the lesson the Sunday School president took a few moments to bear testimony of the topics discussed. 

The lesson itself was about the Ressurection of Jesus Christ.  Again, completely doctrinally sound.  The people had deep testimonies of the Savior and his redemptive power.

Next was Relief Society.  It turns out that the woman charged to take care of me was the Young Women's president, so she passed me off to someone who made sure I found the right place.  The Relief Society room doubled as the kitchen.  At the beginning of the meeting everyone stood (except for "Grandma" the matriarch of the ward who sat next to me) and recited the Relief Society Declaration in the same vane as the YW motto.  It was cool. 

The lesson was taught by one of the young single adults in the ward and the topic was Marriage and Family from the teachings of President Benson.  There was a great discussion and the teacher made sure to call on every person for input (except for "Grandma" who was "meditating").  They talked about how the Lord's definition of marriage is different from the world's definition.  Specifically, they mentioned a clear abhorance for gay/lesbian marriage and talked about how marriage is a partnership with a "help meet" and not a slave or servant.  This is very different from the typical Ghanaian perspective of marriage, a very male-dominant perspective of marriage.  For example, many women will not walk next to their husbands in the street; they walk three or four paces behind.  But these sisters knew that they were equal to their husbands and talked about what that looks like in real life.  For example, one of the issues brought up was, "what if your husband comes home from work and is in a grumpy mood and doesn't want to talk to you, but you want/need to talk to him?"  They had some fairly interesting and creative solutions, many that involved making sure he wasn't hungry.  H'anger (hungry anger) is a thing.

In all, church was the same as it is in the States; they were faithful sons and daughters of God that were teaching each other the gospel and striving to become better people.