Family Home Evening

Mormons—those strange but pleasant neighbors of yours stealing away to church every Sunday morning, piling child after child into the Yukon, those kind friends of yours nervously handing you a copy of the Book of Mormon with a personal message scrawled in the inside cover, Yes, those Mormons, sending out sons and daughters to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ two-by-two all around the world. I'm one of them and oh how we love being peculiar.

Being as quirky as we are, we feel comfortable when we congregate. To us, though, it’s more than just chummy friendship, our church group is a family, and, like other Christian denominations, we follow the custom of referring to each other as brother or sister. We recognize, though, that there’s no family like the nuclear one, and, of course, that there’s no place like home. In keeping with this culture, church members worldwide follow counsel from church leaders to hold a weekly Family Home Evening  where siblings and parents gather to strengthen family bonds.

Taiwan, this island 6,000 miles away from the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, Utah, is home to over 50,000 Mormons. The church here is organized the same way it is in the rest of the world. Heck, even the architecture is fairly standardized, especially the interior design with those famous half-carpeted walls, and familiar typography on room labels. And just like those well-groomed, white bread Utah neighbors in the West, the culture-rich, not-so-white-bread church members here the East, get together for a weekly family night.

Being among the young single adults here in Taiwan has been a special experience for me in this regard. Not to leave us out of the weekly family night tradition, the local members of our congregation take turns in hosting a family night on Sunday night for the singles. Every week we get together, share a meal prepared by the host family, enjoy a spiritual lesson lead by one of our peers, and top off the evening with a game or activity. Here’s a peek into one such family home evening – last night held at Sister Ding’s house here in Taipei:

Tonight's feast was Spaghetti with meat sauce with a side of broccoli and
potato salad. Eating the meal with chopsticks added to the authenticity. 

After dinner, Meiyi, seated left, presented a spiritual lesson on baptism. We separated into two groups--those baptized when we were 8-years old (the earliest age a person can receive baptism in the Church) and those who were baptized as converts later in life. We discussed our feelings about baptism as well as our memories of when we were baptized. It was a humbling experience to listen to the feelings of these my Taiwanese brothers and sisters and how, though an ocean apart, we all came to know Jesus Christ.

To cap off the evening, we did what the Taiwanese do best. Not build extremely tall buildings or establish successful, international computer companies; no, we played our favorite Paper, Scissors, Rock super-game which allowed us to wave our arms and say "hulu-hulu" and "huala-huala"

Family Home Evening is the highlight of my week here in Taipei.  It's in a language that I haven't quite mastered yet. It's with people I've only known for a month. But I couldn't feel more at home spending an evening with people I can without doubt call family. LM