My first Shabbat

Shabbat shalom everyone! You know what is great? Singing a sacrament song about the sacrifice that Jesus made for us, and being able to see the place where is happened by looking up from your hymnbook! Really, that is a wonderful feeling and a little distracting at times as well! In fact we learned today, the the archetect for the building when he was taking people on a tour soon after if was finished was asked about all of the big windows the he put in. "Won't that be a distraction to the students as they try and listen to the professors?" they asked. He replied, "well, then they can become poets instead!" What a great view on life! Sacrament services were packed today because of a buch of tour group that all ened up being here at the same time. We had 60 over the amout that our branch president was expecting, meaning that we had ~425 people at chruch today! How's that compared to all ya'll?! Being a testimony meeting the spirit was very strong and it was so easy just to feel the love and the unity that all of the people had for one another. It was also great because in sunday school our teacher had been living here for a while, and so as we are going through the Old Testament, she was able to offer a few neat insights from this culture, and my priesthood teacher is a studenet at Hebrew University and so he was able to offer neat linguistic insights into the topic that we were talking about. Overall it was a great church experince.

Anyway, other than that, the day was a normal day. We had a fireside about the creating of the Jerusalem center and all of the many struggles that they were able to overcome to build this wonderful facility. You can really see that the hand of the Lord was in the making of this place and that He really wanted it to get done. Elder Holland said that the Lord had kept this piece of land set aside for thousands of years to make sure that the JC could be built in our time. We are now a great symbol of peace here as we have both Jews and Arabs working here as friends in a community that cannot even have them ride the same bus at the same time. This place truly is a miracle.

Anyway, I hope that you all are having fun reading. I just uploaded a few pics to my earlier posts so that you can see a little of what I get to see. Tomorrow is a free day and so i'm sure that I will have lots of advertures to tell you about then!