First day at new church

We went to our new ward today (ward, for the non-LDSout there, is the name of any given congregation. We are in Spokane 2nd Ward). I was immediately struck with how very different it is from our previous ward in Tucson. This is a humble ward, made up of sincere and "real" people. In Tucson, we lived in a very affluent area. All the women were perfectly made up every sunday. They were all skinny, carried name brand purses and wore expensive shoes. At first this really bothered me about the ward, because to me it seemed that church isn't a place to showcase such things. However, I soon came to know the women and realized that, for the most part, they were all genuinely nice women and that I shouldn't judge them just on their outward appearances. Frankly, I've always held a bit of prejudice against blatantly rich people. This stems back to 7th grade when the rich popular kid in the class mocked me in front of everyone for wearing a generic Coca-cola shirt and reebok socks (instead of Nike, I guess.) From that moment on I decided that I didn't care what the rich, preppy kids thought and I sought to be as different from them as possible. Back to the story: I had a hard time overcoming these prejudices to trust the women in my Tucson church, to believe that they could be wealthy and beautiful as well as sincere in their friendships and spirituality. Once I realized that these women were wonderful people, who just had the money and time to take care of the outward appearance more than the average person, I soon became good friends with many of them.

Fast forward to the present day: Church here is completely different. Most of the women wore no make up, wore very simple clothes, and had brush-and-go hairstyles. Everyone had actual scriptures instead of hand-held pocket pc's with the scriptures downloaded. I felt a bit overdressed and even caught a few women looking me up and down, lol. The funny thing is that I wasn't dressed fancy, just a bit trendy in a brown scoop neck shirt and a patterned brown and blue skirt with strappy, chunky sandals. Needless to say, everyone was so super nice. I honestly had very little time to myself as all the women were going out of their way to greet me and introduce themselves. The cub scout master came up to me to talk about getting Zack going in the program (he's a year behind because of our time in China. No problem, she said). Of course, just like any good Mormon church, they have all kinds of activities planned like a potluck dinner in a couple weeks and a book club. The activity I find most interesting is a clothing swap planned for mid-September. Everyone brings their too-small, or no longer worn clothes and we all look through the other ladies clothes, taking what they no longer want but we might be able to use. This concept would never have gone over in my Tucson ward. As nice as those women were, they would never wear each others old clothes :) I think it's a great idea (in theory; we shall have to see how it goes in reality). Josh and Zack both have grown so much lately that they can hardly fit into any of the clothes they currently have.

I think I'm going to like this ward. It will be interesting, to say the least. Oh, one more thing: half of our ward is spanish speaking. We also have a set of spanish speaking missionaries, one of which sits up front with a headset and translates the whole meeting into spanish for the congregation members who are wearing headphones. When we sing, half of us sing in english and the other half sing in Spanish. I'm guessing they have their own sunday school and relief society meetings, because I didn't see them during those meetings. I'm going to need to brush up on my spanish speaking skillz. I was trying to remember how to say "My name is..."

People keep thinking my name is Christina, because they were Chris and Tina. I've had to correct several people on that. Strange, as it's never been a problem before.

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Last night when I was at Wal-Mart walking out to my car, a very overweight woman waved me down. She apologized for bothering me, but asked if I could help her out for a moment. She said that the car next to hers had parked too close and she was unable to open her door wide enough to get in. She was parked in a handicapped spot, and the car next to her was parked so close that it was actually over the line into her spot. I agreed to help her out and backed out so that she could climb in. I tried to be nice about it, as I didn't want to make her feel more embarrassed than she already was.

I walked over to my car and as I was backing out, I heard her speaking again. The owner of the offending car had arrived and the woman was fussing her out. The owner of the car was a young woman, probably a teenager. She actually rolled her eyes and just turned around and put her back to the woman. Quite rude. Her poor parking created a serious problem for that woman.

I love our neighborhood. It turns out that we live quite close to a historic district. On Friday the boys and I walked to the Garland Theater to watch a free showing of "Surf's Up". We've also gone to The Milk Bottle for a yummy lunch and on Saturday I walked half a block to get my haircut at a local shop. The whole block is made up of locally owned shops (even two bead shops, Wendi!) It's a fun place.