The story of the Shher.

As a Mormon I've had to accept a couple of things about the world around me. For one, I have to realize that I'm am never going to be able to understand everything that the Lord passes down, at least in this life. Another is that Mormons, for the most part, are about families and like it or not families are loud.

In our building we have an English speaking ward, a Spanish speaking ward, and a singles ward. For whatever reason the singles ward always gets the 1:00pm slot, a fact that bugs me because I don't get off work until 10:30 am, so every other year I have to miss the church instead of every 2 years. Nevertheless, as I was walking around the building after church with my son and a young man came out of one of the classrooms to ask the people in the hall to please be quiet because they were going to pray. Ah, to be young and naive again. It wasn't that people were yelling, screaming or the like. People were talking, kids were playing. General inter-family chaos. If you have a family or go to a family ward, you know what I'm talking about.

This little incident reminded me of another incident a couple of years ago when I, at least I think I was the primary cause, chased off the BYU ward that was in our building (the singles ward replaced them after about 6 months). I was the scoutmaster in the young men's program. I would sit in on the meetings and help out. Our classes were pretty close to the chapel and every time we would go to class we would walk by this single guy who's calling was to shhh people in the hall. "these walls are paper thin," "we are having sacrament," "please be quiet," were the kind of things this guy would tell us. Made me feel like we were in a library not a church. We did our best but you try to keep about 2 dozen adolescents quiet. On one particular Sunday one of the more rowdy boys decided it would be fun to just run out. One of the young men's consulars and I ran after him. We grabbed the kid and began walking back to class and the shhher was right behind us. "You guys need to keep it down!" I turned to him and said, "you try and keep a teen quiet." I was a little short with the guy because it bothered me a little more then I should have allowed it that this guy's whole calling was to shh people, and he had been especially vigilant toward my boys. Suffice it to say, I never saw the shher again and two weeks later the ward moved to another building.

I understand that reverence invites the spirit and it's nice to have when you can have it. But sometimes I can still feel the spirit through the chaos of children playing and general well-being of all.