Welcome to the ward

We went to our new ward for the first time yesterday. For those of you who have never experienced the joy of a married student ward, let me first explain a few key issues. First, a married student ward is blessedly free from most mentions of eternal marriage or dating or any of the other topics that seem to monopolize the pulpit time of single student wards. Don’t get me wrong, marriage is fine and dandy and all, but it seems like singles ward bishops delight in overkill.

Although a married ward escapes that particular pitfall, there are several other quirks that make the experience just as surreal. Testimony meeting in a married ward is epic. I have never born my testimony in a married ward because I can’t get up fast enough. I’m just not the kind of guy that jets from the pews like a sprinter from the blocks just to stand in front of my neighbors and tell them, “I just wanted to say that I have the best wife in the whole wide world and I’m so grateful for her and blah blah blah. . ..” I do think my wife is the best person in the whole word for me, but I’d rather tell her that than the people in my ward. Why would I announce something like that anyway? Am I trying to make my neighbors jealous or something? “Oh, gee, Benvolio’s wife is the best in the world? Shoot, I got a second-class version.”

There seems to be a lot more crying in these wards too, particularly from the men. Maybe they’re just very sensitive fellows, and that’s why they got snapped up by their spouses, but there is definitely more male weeping than what I’m used to. And then the girls get up there and tell about all the sensitive and kind and loving things their husbands do, and I’m sitting in the congregation thinking, “Shut up, woman, you’re making the rest of us look bad! Just ‘cuz I didn’t take my wife to Disneyland last week or I don’t bake crème brulee, it doesn’t mean that I’m not a nice guy!” (I’m not kidding about that Disneyland one, by the way. Some guy’s wife in my old ward said, “Let’s go to Disneyland!” and the poor sucker actually took her in their 15-year-old car. And the worst part is that they made it there and back and they had a wonderful time, thus validating her expensive and impulsive tendencies.)

So this new ward is the second married ward The Redhead and I have lived in. We had the good fortune of ending up in the same ward as Mynamyn and Dinomight, which was really lucky and will probably keep us sane for a few months. They warned us ahead of time that there were a lot of babies in this ward, so when we walked into the chapel of the dumpy little multipurpose building, we knew there was going to be noise. But nothing could have prepared us for the cacophony of hundreds of babies wailing during the sacrament prayers. The first speaker practically shouted in the microphone, which I thought a bit odd until the ambient volume in the congregation rose as the babies got fussy, and I realized the girl speaking wasn’t unaware of her volume—she had just planned ahead. Little rugrats wandered the chapel freely and I repeatedly reminded myself that we will never have children. (I never really mean this, but some days I come close than others to being sincere.)

This irreverent ruckus was juxtaposed by some of the most doctrinally-rich talks I have heard in quite some time. Maybe it’s because we just spent a semester in a growing little Spanish-speaking branch, but these people threw down some serious doctrine. I haven’t heard talks like that since General Conference. Inasmuch as I could hear what they were saying, I appreciated the discourse. So I’m not quite sure what to think of it all, but one thing’s for sure—we will never end up in a ward like this again. Which is probably a good thing, since I don’t know if I could handle the intensity.