Saturday, December 19, 2009

Ringo, Ulysses, and Harry

I realized that I have spent an entire semester being very dedicated to the cause of the Writing Fellows without once blogging about them. I love being a Writing Fellow - it's fun, informative, and worthwhile. In Writing Fellows, we are assigned to a cohort, and then our cohort is assigned to a specific class to help those students with two writing assignments. My cohort worked with Matt Ancell's Humanities 202 class. What a blast. Each cohort is led by a fearless Senior Fellow. Mine was the ever-glorious Sarah Waggoner, fellow fellow and BYU economics student. Every email she sent renamed the members of our cohort to match some historical of fictional group. Once she was Harry, and we were Ron and Hermione. Once she was Ulysses, and we were Abraham and Robert. Once she was John, and we were Paul and Ringo. We all pulled all-nighters every time we handed back papers in order to get our response letters written, Senior Fellow included. What companionship! What camaraderie! She really watched out for us. And now the end of the semester has come, and with it the end of our cohort. Sarah, being the Senior Fellow that she is, wrote each of us a note and put it in our box to bid us each a fond farewell. As part of her note to me, Sarah included some musings she had, in part inspired by a conversation we once had in a Y lot after a cohort meeting. As a shout-out for Sarah, I wanted to share this with all of my own devoted blog-reading fans. Here are the wonderful words of wisdom:

The Church should teach airplane-sharing-the-gospel. It should be a chapter in Preach My Gospel.
Seriously. 51.2% of all member-missionary gospel sharing takes place on airplanes. (I just made that up.) Think about all the famous airplane gospel lessons of our dispensation. Gene Cook and Mick Jagger. Or, that story you tell every other week in Sunday School. Or just today, I had a conversation with a fellow student, Rebecca, who shared the gospel with a young man from Nigeria who in turn told her that he wanted to start a home with her, all on an airplane.
The chapter could include tips on how to make Word of Wisdom conversation from the drink service. How to casually bring up the gospel using the church literature one is reading. How to mention eternal families if one's seating companion does so much as touch their wedding ring.
Actually, we should make pass-along cards especially for airplanes. Something like: "people die on airplanes. Sometimes airplanes crash into buildings and into oceans. But, don't worry: no matter the outcome of this flight, you can be with your loved ones again. For more information about eternal families, please visit mormon.org." Businessmen could carry them in bulk in their briefcases.
Church membership would explode.

3 comments:

  1. Rebecca! Thank you so much! I love it!

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  2. Haha love it! You need to blog more while you're at home so I can feel like I'm still talking to you all the time :)

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  3. dear rebecca,
    i adore this post. and you.
    we kind of look like sisters, sometimes. katie hatch would probably disagree.
    love,
    amanda

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