Sunday on the Isle of Wight

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Church in Freeport on the Isle of Wight was wonderful—it was great to be in an actual ward instead of a branch. I didn’t feel like quite as much of an invader here since they have enough members to outnumber us a few times. Sacrament meeting is interesting: the first talk is a report on one of the ward member’s visit to Salt Lake to meet President Hinckley because her husband was in the Hyde Park ward during President Hinckley’s mission. It was interesting to hear an outsider’s perspective on my home town—kind of a reverse of what I’ve been feeling traveling among the British. The meeting continues with an emphasis on the importance of prophets, appropriate since in two weeks there’s going to be a regional conference for all England where he and Elder Eyring will be speaking. I found out later from John that we won’t be able to go because the money to travel to the nearest broadcast center isn’t in the budget—very disappointing.

After church, we had a picnic lunch in the chapel with the missionaries, which was fun. We found out yesterday that we would be doing a devotional today, even though we hadn’t heard back from the bishop when we’d tried to call him while planning the trip. I got asked to speak, so I ended up spending a good deal of Sunday preparing my talk. Our theme was Christ and the atonement, which is a pretty broad subject. I had no idea what to write, so I just decided to read through my scriptures, and then suddenly I was hit with a flash of inspiration and the outline for my talk was suddenly there. It’s all about how the atonement fills our lives with a light that goes beyond explanation, with the central metaphor drawn from a short story by CS Lewis called “The Man Born Blind.” The talk turned out very well, and I really like it a lot. I’m probably going to polish it up some more because it deserves to be shared somewhere.

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