I must have gotten carried away. I wanted to make the point in my testimony on Sunday that we should be sensitive to the suffering of those around us. I further wanted to testify that many people have been sensitive to me in my periods of suffering. Finally, I wanted to affirm my knowledge that the Third member of the Godhead is real, that He is called the Holy Ghost, that he is also known as The Comforter, and the He is very good at what he does.
But first I felt that I needed to come up with an example of someone being aware of the suffering of a companion. So I told the first story that popped into my head on my way up to the microphone - that of the Jackson/Dickinson duel of 1806. It ran a little long, but I felt that I'd eventually gotten to my important points.
However, half an hour later, as I sat in the Relief Society room waiting for the Gospel Doctrine class to start, Bro. Neal of the Bishopric tapped me on the shoulder from behind. Grinning, he said, "I told the Bishop that was a PG-13 testimony." I laughed at first, but since then it has occurred to me that I only received 4 or 5 kind comments about my remarks and that I typically get a lot more than that. I think I grossed out my ward. Sigh... I wonder just what parts of the story cut down on their ability to feel the Spirit.
Maybe it was the absolute inability of the two men to forgive each other their real and imagined insults. Maybe it was the fact that both were hit with .70 caliber round balls and that neither of them got much good out of the experience. Maybe it was my description of how Jackson's second, General Overton, didn't even know that his principal had been hit until he heard the blood sloshing in his boot as they walked from the field of honor. Maybe I shouldn't have thrown in the part about how many hours it took Charles Dickinson to die.
I think I'll wait a while before I get up there again. I want to give people a chance to forget how I lapsed into History Teacher mode when I was supposed to be feeling and sharing the Spirit. I think I'll just sit there and smile benignly next time we have testimony meeting. After all, we can't have me slipping into stories about Catherine the Great's personal appetites and get me thrown out of the Church for an R-rated testimony. I've always had a lot to repent of; I just never thought that the way I bore my testimony would be one of them.
