I got to thinking Sunday about the mosquitos of Mormon. Haven't heard of them, you say? Me, neither. But I bet they existed. There is a scripture in the Book of Mormon in the 18th chapter of Mosiah about the waters of Mormon. It goes like this:

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30 And now it came to pass that all this was done in Mormon, yea, by the waters of Mormon, in the forest that was near the waters of Mormon; yea, the place of Mormon, the waters of Mormon, the forest of Mormon, how beautiful are they to the eyes of them who there came to the knowledge of their Redeemer; yea, and how blessed are they, for they shall sing to his praise forever.

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t has been said that the word "remember" is one of the most important words in the world. At my age, that can sometimes be quite the task. Recently, though, I had some experiences that helped jar that memory. For the second month in a row, I had the opportunity of attending two very small congregations of my Church. It made me remember.

One of those small congregations I got to visit was the Crawfordsville Ward in Indiana. It is the waters of Mormon to me. While that little tiny building that is really only half a chapel isn't the most elegant to look at, it is beautiful - to me. It is where I learned important truths that are most precious to me.

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When my family joined the Church, the Crawfordsville Branch at the time met in a little house in the middle of a town park. There were only 6 families that attended. It had two rooms - one for the adults, and one for the kids. They had to arrive early Sunday morning to clean up the beer cans left from the Elk's Lodge meeting that was held the night before. Eventually the branch grew enough to move to a small, 1-story home where the front two rooms had been converted into one larger room with a small stand at one end so we could hold sacrament meeting. The basement was segmented off into small classrooms for Primary and Sunday School. It was here that we scrimped and saved as much as we could in order to provide the 30% of the funds we needed to build our own building.

 

And finally we got it - but without a chapel. You see, phase 1 of the building was some classrooms, bathrooms, and a large multi-purpose room that could be opened up big enough for us to hold Sunday services. It had those hard metal chairs that were so cold on Sunday mornings that either you could get them to warm up from your body heat, or they would numb your rear end to the point that it didn't matter anymore.

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