Every time a certain older gentleman in our ward (I’ll call him Brother G.) gets up to bear his testimony, I inwardly roll my eyes. All around me, I see fellow ward members slump in their pews as they brace themselves, eyes already glazing over. It doesn’t matter if the meeting is running over and Brother G. is the last testimony bearer: he will have his full time at the microphone, by golly, and Sunday School be damned. Last month Brother G. spoke about the men who bravely fought for our freedom and about the glories of war—and there was also something in there about cherry picking. That’s all I can tell you, because I was reading 1 Nephi during Brother G.’s sermon and then thinking about the cobbler I was going to make later (speaking of cherry picking….). My children have started timing Brother G.’s “testimonies” to pass the time. “Fifteen minutes and twenty-five seconds,” my thirteen-year-old whispered last month after Brother G. sat down. “That was twenty seconds shorter than last time.”
When I was a BYU coed, lo these many years ago, I once listened to a girl in our ward named Sheila claim during testimony meeting that she had done everything she was supposed to do in this life, and then she said, sobbing, “I think it’s time for Heavenly Father to send some other spirit to take my body.” My roommate and I looked at each other, eyebrows raised. The very next Sunday—I kid you not—Sheila had some sort of seizure during sacrament meeting and had to be carried out. While the obviously flustered speaker tried to continue as people were running in and out and yelling, “Breathe, Sheila! Breathe!” in the hallway, my roommate whispered to me, “It looks like Sheila is getting her wish.”
Let me just say that I love our church for having fast and testimony meeting every month. I love the fact that anyone who wants to can express their tender feelings and convictions about the gospel. And I know that because we’re human and some of us are senile and we’re all broken and needy in some way, those expressions aren’t always perfect testimonies. And the rest of us listen and tolerate and love—and there’s something to be learned from that. But I also use Brother G.’s and Sheila’s testimonies to teach my children what a testimony is not. It is not a fifteen-minute sermon, for one thing. It is certainly not a time to teach false doctrine (did Sheila believe in some weird sort of reincarnation?). It is also not a confession of one’s sins, as I learned on my mission in Peru when the branch president confessed during testimony meeting that he’d gotten drunk the week before and begged for forgiveness (yes, we were glad we didn’t bring any investigators that day). It is not a description of one’s vision of the Virgin Mary (same testimony meeting) or a description of one’s vision of their son’s future role as apostle, or a description of any other vision, come to think of it (except, of course, the First Vision). It is not an opportunity to show off one’s knowledge of Church doctrine and the scriptures or to read one’s patriarchal blessing. And it is not recounting one’s meeting with a general authority or the trip taken to Branson, as wonderful as those might have been.
And yet our ward sometimes has testimony meetings full of such testimonies. Our poor bishop has read us the “Testimony” section from the bishop’s handbook and pleads with us at the beginning of every testimony meeting to keep our testimonies brief and to the point, to no avail. That only seems to make people talk longer, as if the bishop has issued some kind of challenge. Our Relief Society president once muttered to me, “If you give someone a microphone in this ward, you never get it back.”
Last month I attended our girls’ camp testimony meeting. I love the girls in our ward and I think they are all bright, lovely, shining stars, full of hope and promise. But the testimony meeting went on for nearly two hours, with lots of sobbing and crying and some of the girls getting up two or three times. “Seriously?” I wanted to say, as I sat in my camp chair, cramped and stiff with cold, campfire smoke blowing in my face. “You’re getting up again?”
I know I wasn’t as spiritual as I should have been that night (did I mention the uncomfortable camp chair and my cold, stiff limbs?) and I know that girls’ camp testimony meetings are about cementing friendships and helping young women recognize their own budding testimonies, but I wonder about our tendency to confuse emotion with feelings of the Spirit, though the two are often connected. And I think of how we need to teach our youth, and remind ourselves, what a testimony is: brief, heartfelt, firm expressions of our knowledge of key, profound truths. I’ll take that over war and cherry picking any day.
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