Visiting Teaching

A few months back as Cade and I were getting ready for church, I started a conversation about the purpose of visiting teachers and home teachers with him. We know a certain "someone", we'll call her. Who is in the Relief Society Presidency in her ward. She does A LOT! She is so busy all of the time helping others in the ward. This is GREAT. Thank goodness for the Relief Society! But....I couldn't help but wonder sometimes, as she was about to leave the house to help a sister in her ward, where that person's visiting teacher was? Why were they not being helped by their visiting teacher? (And maybe there is a good excuse...maybe they did contact them, but that sister was busy.. Maybe that sister who should be there for this person, has never offered any help...Who knows...)

Thinking outloud, I told Cade how I thought it was important to be an in-tune and helpful visiting teacher. One that is going to do more than just stop by every month and cross it off her to-do list afterwards. (Oh...by the way, I never have been good at visiting teaching. So, no, I wasn't boasting myself up. This was an area that I knew I needed to be better at).

I also thought, it's really important to let our visiting teachers serve US. That is probably the hardest part of visiting teaching; it isn't serving those we visit, it's letting those who visit us, serve us. I'm the last person who wants to ask someone for help. And if I do need help, I want to just ask my family that is close by. (I have really great visiting teachers in this ward, who I can tell genuinely would help if I needed it...) I don't want to be a "burden" to anyone. But, we have visiting teachers for a reason, and they need to be put to work. They need to learn through serving others. Their families need to see their example of serving. It's a pretty neat part of our church if everyone does their part.

I have a good visiting teaching companion in this ward who has been in touch with me and good for me when I could actually find it easier to just not make phone calls and set up appointments. Last week I called a sister to make an appointment to visit with her. She was available that Saturday. So we scheduled it for then, but before I hung up she remembered she actually had something that day, so without asking about the next few days, I just skipped right to the next Saturday, the Saturday after Christmas. We scheduled it and that was that. Friday night I checked in to see if we could still come by and visit. And it was a no-go. She was sick. But, she did accept my offer to let me make her family dinner that night instead of visiting her that afternoon. And I gladly did the next day. I was glad that we had our appointment set for the next weekend also. I was glad we caught her and things were set for us to visit when she was in a position to accept help.
Making dinner was such a good thing for me to do. I don't know that I ever have made dinner for a family before. I think this was a first. It was kind of exciting.. But it felt good most of all to do some service instead of just checking a name off the list. And to also not have something like that left up to the Relief Society Presidency to handle when I could and should do more. Once again, I'm not trying to say, "Look at what I did"..but I'm sharing a little something that made my heart happy yesterday--Serving. And can't wait for another opportunity to help again. I'm so glad she let me help.

My companion ended up making dinner for one of our other sisters and her family, they just had twin baby boys. That worked out well for both of us to serve two of our sisters in the same day and in the same way.:)