Two Different Worlds

I was out of town the past couple of Sunday, so don't have any new lessons to report.  We were visiting Jason's brother and his family, who live in a very liberal area of the country and attend what is one of the most liberal wards I have ever heard of.  My in-laws really like their ward and the open-minded, progressive discussions that happen in their classes on Sunday.  The flipside is that any conservative comments are quickly pounced upon and torn apart.  Apparently my father-in-law (my most conservative in-law) had a bad experience once when he was visiting their Sunday School.

Their Sunday School lessons are a couple of weeks behind mine, so the Sunday before last we got Lesson 28, the lesson I taught that sparked such interesting discussion.  This Sunday School teacher stuck pretty close to the lesson in the manual, talking about the trials and tribulations of the early saints, and asking the basic manual questions such as "How did the trials strengthen the early saints' testimonies?" and similar.

The thing that was so strange for me was how abstractly the teacher talked about trials.  In addition to being extremely liberal, the ward is also extremely wealthy.  The teacher admitted he didn't really have any major trials in his life, but when he thought about hard things other people went through, he felt bad for them and admitted it was hard to understand why such things happened.  Someone else in class talked about not believing that God has anything to do with major atrocities like the genocide in Rwanda, and there was some discussion about God's role in those types of events.

At one point, the teacher asked whether anyone had ever experienced trials and would they like to share how they got through them, and how their faith helped them.  He didn't get much of a response, and we moved forward with more abstract examples. 

I would NEVER ask such an open-ended question in my class.  We would be there for hours, as the people in my class talked about all of their struggles just to meet their basic human needs of food and shelter.  Or the trials they have faced in their youths in war-torn countries, or the poverty they escaped back home, only to find a new kind of poverty in the US.  Someone in my in-laws' ward did mention a family that used to be in the ward and the trials they faced with their sick child, but it was all so other-focused.  Such a different experience.

I am in no way saying the people in this wealthy, liberal ward don't have trials.  Could be they just didn't feel like sharing in such an open forum.  But in my ward there is so much poverty and lack of education that the struggles people face are at a very basic level.  The struggles are there everyday, and for many of the members there is no conceivable way out of them. 

I am a big proponent of the church welfare system because I see firsthand how many people it helps.  Sometimes our bishop gets grief from the stake president for overspending our ward's welfare allotment.  To that I say there are hundreds of wards as wealthy or wealthier than my in-laws' ward and they are surely capable of picking up the slack.  We are supposed to be a Christ-centered church with His directive to help the least of our brethren.  I think my bishop must feel the same way, since he keeps overspending and the people in our ward keep having food to eat every day.