I love Relief Society. I always have really. It was not a difficult transition for me to make from Young Women many years ago. Sometimes, however, we forget the purpose of Relief Society. Visiting Teaching can help remind us of that.
This past week, I got to go visiting teaching. I was telling a good friend who is not LDS about Visiting Teaching. I explained that we visit other women in the ward and share a message with them. She was surprised to find out that I had yet another responsibility like that in the church.
Being a Mom of young kids, sometimes I don’t get to go that often. Things come up, people get sick, we plan a date, and then it falls through, and it had been a couple of months since my VT companion and I had gone. But, this past week we got to go again. I was surprised at the feeling of happiness I felt just by simply visiting another sister in our ward.
Two of the women that we visit teach are single women much older than me. So, without visiting teaching, I may have never gotten the opportunity to get to know them. It is so easy in church each Sunday to keep your head down, and just try to control the chaos that is your children, and not look around to see what kind of friendship you might be missing out on. Relief Society keeps us from doing that.
We were talking about the message this month and it is all about the history of Relief Society. My companion really wants to serve a humanitarian mission, and she brought up the point that being a member of the Relief Society, IS a humanitarian mission. We are all on the mission to reach out to those around us. LDS or not.
I was so thankful to be reminded of that. Sometimes it can feel frustrating in certain stages of our lives because we can’t do all the things we want to do. But, Relief Society and visiting teaching gives us the chance to do little humanitarian missions all the time through our service of each other.
We have the opportunity to build camaraderie with other women. I love that word. The definition of camaraderie is: “Mutual trust and friendship among people who spend a lot of time together.” We should be spending time with the sisters we visit teach. Get to know them. And, through that, you will feel your spirit grow as well.
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