Sometimes I Am Way Too Literal

Today I embarrassed myself at church by being overly literal. (I say embarrassed, but most people probably have forgotten about it already. I just embarrassed myself to myself because I thought I was smarter than this.)

It all started when the stake president taught in Relief Society. First he told stories about his youth. I wanted to be generous, so I thought, I'll tell myself these are mildly interesting stories. Then he said that he hoped we learned something from the stories, so I reflected on what I learned:

• The stake president grew up in Salt Lake City.
• His paternal grandmother outlived her husband by many years and carried a black bag on the bus to the temple once a week.
• She didn't talk about going to the temple much, but she set a good example.
• When the stake president was a boy, he didn't use a envelope to pay his tithing—he would go to the financial clerk's office and just give the financial clerk a nickel or a dime. He's not sure whether everyone paid their tithing like this back then, or just the kids.
  
• When the stake president was twelve, the priesthood met in the mornings, and he had to give a talk, but he didn't want to. His dad made him do it though.
  
• Sacrament meeting was in the late afternoon after a big midday dinner except when his mom was doing stuff for the Relief Society and wasn't home to cook for him.
• The stake president felt sleepy during sacrament meetings when he was a kid.
• He felt the Holy Spirit really strongly after he was baptized.
  
• The stake president is two years older than the stake Relief Society president.
• The stake president's dad and uncles were construction contractors.
• The stake president's family were not active in the Church until the stake president was five, but then they decided to come back.
• When the stake president was a teenager, he tried to climb over a fence and ripped the hem of his trousers. He said two swear words and felt really bad about it later, but he was glad he knew what it felt like to lose the Spirit for a bit because it made him recommit to keep it with him all the time.
  

See, I learned a lot! Somehow, though, I felt like the stake president meant something else when he said he hoped we'd learn something, but I honestly can't think of what it would be besides the fact that stories of his youth are mildly interesting.

Next the stake president asked us to raise our hands if we'd been on missions. A lot of women in the Relief Society have been on missions, which is cool. Then he asked us to tell him what the legacy of our mission was. I was a little wary after the confusing stories, so I kept my answer to myself, which would have been that I invited people to come unto Christ and some of them got baptized. Then he said that the legacy of his mission was a love for the Irish people, and I was glad I hadn't answered.

By then it was getting late, so my filter was rapidly crumbling. The stake president asked us if we knew what was in Ecclesiastes 3, and I was like, "That's the one about how there's a time for everything, right?" but kind of softly because of the wariness, so we all opened to it. It was as I'd said, which emboldened me. Now I'm back on track with this lesson, I thought. I'm good with the scriptures! He asked someone else to read the first verse twice.

"What does that make you think of?" he prompted.
"That song by the Byrds," I said. Two seconds later I realized that wasn't what he was looking for, so it probably sounded like I was trying to be the class clown or something. But I wasn't. I literally hear that song every time I read the first part of Ecclesiastes 3, so when he asked what the verse made me think of, I gave an honest, literal answer.

What made it worse was that he didn't know at first what song I was talking about (which is weird since he is old), so he asked me to sing it. I said I didn't want to mostly because I wanted him to change to subject and get back to whatever he was actually trying to talk about, but he pushed it. He asked me to recite the words of the first verse, and I said, "Well, they're basically right here," gesturing to my Bible, still open to Ecclesiastes 3. He looked bemused. "You know," I said, gearing up to sing after all: "To everything, turn, turn, turn, there is a season, turn, turn, turn, and a time to every purpose under heaven." Luckily for me one of the other sisters joined in because I was starting to seriously lose my nerve. However, after the second "turn, turn, turn" the stake president looked like he finally remembered the song and his face became remarkably less interested in the whole thing.

"Okay. What else does that verse make you think of?" he asked again, looking over my head to the people behind me. He probably had thought that Ecclesiastes 3:1 made me think of a country song or something with a deeper meaning and that my contribution to the class would be a cool story about how the song and the chapter had changed my life. But no. The song I had thought of was basically Ecclesiastes 3:1–8 set to music.

I shut up after that, and it was hard to pay attention because of the embarrassment. All I remember was that he showed a picture of a tree that was broken into a winter part, a spring part, a summer part, and an autumn part and read part of a talk about how our life goes through seasons, but it didn't make sense to me. I understand one analogy of the seasons and life: childhood is spring, young adulthood is summer, middle age is autumn, and old age is winter. That makes sense, but this was a more spiritual analogy about how sometimes things in our lives are great like spring but we should harvest spiritual power in summer because then comes autumn when we get depressed and reflective and then we have a winter period in our lives when everything sucks but then it's spring again.
In my experience, however, life goes straight from great to completely sucky, and then you may be reflective, and then things could suck again, but then they're wonderful, so it would only make sense to compare life to many season cycles if the seasons were like in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "Winter changed into spring, spring changed into summer, summer changed back into winter, and winter gave spring and summer a miss and went straight on into autumn." See, literal!