I decided to try out my ward's institute options to counter-balance the rather secular school that I attend. Unfortunately, thus far I have been highly unimpressed by the experience. My options are either Provident Living or Book of Mormon. Since the words "provident living" only bring to mind images of my parents' food storage room, I decided to stick with BoM. The class is taught by senior couple missionaries & the first week was the lady's turn. The topic was the tree of life dream - pretty hard to misunderstand considering that the explanations of the symbols are explained in the next chapter. However, she is a remarkable lady & was able to spew so much false doctrine that my roommate (who joined the church 3 months ago) was totally lost. My favorite was a ten minute discussion on the semantics of the words "clinging to the rod of iron" - which this lady had convinced herself were negative. I spent most of the hour muttering "that is just her opinion, NOT doctrine" to my confused roommate.
The next week my roommate had something to do so I went alone. I was going to try the provident living class, but it still intimidated me so I went back to BoM. This time the husband was teaching and I thought "Well, maybe she is crazy, but he is voice of reason in this companionship". Ahhh, the hope of wishful thinking. This guy starts out with a 20 minute speculation on things Nephi's boat could symbolize. I was very tempted to raise my hand and say, "What the hell is wrong with you people? It is just a boat. It took them across the sea. It is an f-ing boat!" But, swearing at institute is usually frowned on so I just listened in disbelief to the many things that were enthusiastically fabricated. Since we wasted so much time talking about the boat (maybe its the power of God!) we only had time to mention that Jesus said the words of Isaiah are great & we should study them. Of course, we didn't actually have time to even read them because we'd been too busy making up crap about a boat (maybe its life!) We finished off with the wife telling all about dancing in the temple.
The only lesson I learned from the past 2 weeks at insitute is that false doctine hour seriously pisses me off. Not exactly the desired repsonse to institute. So even if it is how to can peaches and store water for the rest of the year, I'll be going to Provident Living.
3 comments:
I would've paid money to have been there, Brooke.
I would've too, but only if you hadn't censored your profane thoughts!
Instead of chewing them out, you could rat them out. Maybe you could send a letter to someone in the CES about your experience.
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