Good grief, was today's fast-and-testimony meeting epic or what? Kellie was to my right (RSP, baby!) and kept saying "Oh my gosh," and "I can't take this" in between poking my leg with "ARE YOU KIDDING ME?" pokes. Seriously. I hope I can do any of this justice as I recount bits and pieces as best I can. I think only two current ward members have this blog address, so Angel and Aubrey, it's your chance to fill in any details I missed. I beg of you, PLEASE. :)
Like any singles ward (or any ward, for that matter), we have a Top 5--the same five people get up pretty much every month, right? It looks like we'll have a new entry into the Top 5, folks!
A couple people got up . . . nice, short, and sweet. Then this guy gets up--he moved into the ward five weeks ago, apparently--and starts off with how much he's been waiting to bear his testimony in this ward. He's just bursting and has to get it out; he wanted to get up the previous month but "something occurred" so he wasn't able to attend our ward that day.
He then started to talk for maybe five minutes about how he's an IT guy. A salesman. An entrepreneur. He had a company, but then didn't like the direction it was going, so he decided to get a real job as a developer (computer programmer). Now, he'd been told the learning curve was a month. But because he is "very gifted in many areas" he was able to get it down in 2 days. So after those two days, he didn't have much else to do. He'd get in to the office at 6am, have his work done by 9am, and then start asking people in the office if he could help them with their work.
He was brought in and told they were going to let him go. "But why?" "The reasons don't matter; we just need to let you go." "But what takes other people a month, I did in two days." "We need to let you go." Somehow, this lesson turned into a lesson on tithing because he usually just paid tithing once a year after reinvesting any earnings back into his company, but decided to pay his tithing on this one-week paycheck after his mother urged him to "pay your tithing."
So, again, because of his very giftedness in many different areas, he decided to use all the skills he learned in those few days with that company to start two new companies and, within days, he had more work than he could handle--it was so successful. So he's an entrepreneur again.
He then proceeded to say that he's so busy with work and has slept very, very little recently. So little, in fact, that while on a date with a lady from our ward (whose name he did reveal from the pulpit), he told her he'd slept 5 hours in the previous 48. "Then we should call it a night! You should be home sleeping!" "No, I've had enough."
Yeah, I think we've all had enough. Seriously, it was the biggest kick to look around the congregation and see the looks on folks' faces. Kellie was dying next to me. Sometimes I had to look down at my iPad and focus on SOMETHING just to keep from laughing. The Bishop was trying to hold it together. It was really, really awesome. It was maybe a 12-15 minute testimony on . . . who knows what it was actually on.
Another Top 5-er got up next and Kellie was like, "C'mon, A, bring it back!" You know it's bad when you're asking A of "The Church is run by little, old men" fame (that was in her testimony several months back) to bring the meeting back on track. But she did a great job. Short, sweet, simple, and to the point. Perfect.
Then another guy got up. Another Top 5-er. And, at this point, the guy to my left said, "Oh no. Not this guy." He then proceeded to shake his head incredulously throughout the testimony. It was another long one . . . maybe 10 minutes or so. Unfortunately, I'd completely lost any mental abilities to focus at this point, so I was just reading notes from Fluhman D&C lectures from my BYU days on my iPad. But oh, that first long testimony. I wish you all could have been there so we could compare notes and funny lines from it. It was epic.
