Prepping for RS

I'm giving the Relief Society Lesson on Sunday -  here are my thoughts and preparation so far.

I felt inspired about three weeks ago to start preparing a lesson on the purpose of Relief Society.  To that end I did a ton of reading.  I read the entire "Daughters of My Kingdom" book (the little blue book that came out awhile back) and every conference talk I could find on the subject.  I also browsed blog posts by other women and delved into the scriptures.  And then I got stuck in my lesson preparation.  See there was SO much good information but I couldn't figure out what or how much to share in a 30 minute Relief Society lesson.  How on earth do you distill 3 weeks of study into a 30 minute class (plus let others have a chance to talk).  It actually made me wonder if I was barking up the wrong tree - maybe I just needed to learn this for myself and I wasn't meant to actually teach on it.

But with prayer and some great ideas that were sparked by conversations with various people I got a little more direction and decided to focus on Relief Society principles and how they have been exhibited by women through the ages, and of course how they can be exhibited by us.

To that end I utilized as a wonderful resource a great blog called Women In The Scriptures, which gave me an already put together list of every single woman listed in the scriptures.  If you're curious - there are a LOT.  Not all of them have a lot written about them, but many of them have something written that we can learn from.  So I took these lists and went to the scriptures to see which sisters in history I wanted to talk about in Relief Society.  I decided to try to stick to more commonly known stories with the most information so that we would have a good chance at having everyone familiar with the general stories surrounding them women we discussed.


Anyway, here are the scriptures I hope to go over on Sunday:

Luke 2:36-38	Anna
Mark 12:41-44	Widow with 2 Mites
Luke 7:37-39, 44-50	Woman who washed the Savior’s feet
Ruth 1:16	Ruth
Alma 56:47-48, 57:21, 26-27	Mothers of the Stripling Warriors
Moses 5:11-12, D&C 138:38-39	Eve and her Daughters
Romans 16:1	Phebe
Genesis 24:45-46	Rebekah
1 Kings 17:10-16, Luke 4:25-26	Widow of Zarapheth

The idea is that we read them and talk about how each sister exhibits one of the three purposes of Relief Society: increase faith and personal righteousness, strengthen home and family, and help those in need.  

We will talk about how relief society existed in the original church that the Savior established.  For a cool idea about that - check out the scripture on Phebe.  Doesn't it sound like she was the Relief Society president??

I guess my main concern is that this is a lot of scriptures to read aloud - and I think that's boring sometimes.  So maybe we'll break up into small groups and have them work together?  That would be an different-style RS lesson!  I don't usually see much interaction like that.  Then they can take notes as each small group does their presentation.  Hmm... things to think about.  Anyway - I was excited about the things that I learned about these sisters in the scriptures and thought I'd share part of what I'm planning.  If I remember, I will share how the lesson turned out.  I'm looking forward to learning from the sisters.