Anyway, my mom decided that she wanted to spend more time with the grandkids. When we get together for our "Third Sunday of the month Dinner" we only have time to eat, play a few games and then go home. So, she came up with the idea to do a big FHE once a month. I begged to host first because I've had this idea swimming in my brain for awhile but you need a big group to do it. So this was the perfect opportunity.
I sent out an e-vite to everyone and told them to create their own family coat of arms, or motto or something that would represent them. I told them that they would be "defending their family" like the people of Capt. Moroni did with their Title of Liberty. I have loved this quote from Elder Nelson who said, " Our task to defend the family is not an easy one. In reality we are raising our children in enemy occupied territory." I love the imagery of this quote! It puts things into perspective for me in a way that I can easily see and understand and fight against. So this is what set up the theme for that night.
So Jason and I stayed up one night writing down the things that attack our family or that are temptations that we have to fight against and then we wrote down what the Lord has given us to protect ourselves or use to fight against the Adversary. We looked up scriptures to go with each one and then I found some Minute-To-Win-It games to us as our challenges. When everybody came we showed off our coat of arms, made team names and got to work!
I started off by reading the scripture in D&C that talks about the Armor of God and we discussed that. Then I gave each team a set of scriptures. They each had to do the Scripture Chase to find out what the temptation/weapon was. So, for example: the first scripture was 3Nephi 6:15-16. So each time quickly looked it up and read it and when they knew what the "temptation or attack" was then they raised their hand. If they answered it correctly they got a point. Then I gave them the "weapon" scripture 3Nephi 24:8 & 10. Same rules applied to this as well. After we discussed them I issued the challenge. This particular one was Greed/Pride and the vain things of the world...to be fought against with Tithing. Putting the Lord first. So, the challenge was this: I had three cups that were filled with a different amount of coins. They were covered so you couldn't see them. The challenge was to put them in the correct order of heaviest to lightest. {disclaimer: originally we were going to cancel FHE because only two families were going to participate...mine and my parents...but in the last minute we were able to get my nephews and my brother to come and so I quickly tried to put everything together. Hindsight I would do more cups...but this was for the kids right? I made a lot of these challenges easy enough for the kids to do and simplified them} All in all we had 10 challenges.
Everybody participated and seemed to have a fun time. When we were all done I gave each of the kids a picture of a child in the Armor of God and told them that it was up to them to defend their families. Then we had rootbeer floats and cleaned up. I forgot my camera but my mom of course had hers. So when I get the pics from her I'll post them up.
