Repentance

Yesterday, I taught Ben's class in Primary. The kids are obviously quite young and the lesson was on repentance, so I wanted to make sure and teach them well, but knew many of the concepts were over their heads. I had prepared the lesson ahead of time and it went better than I thought. Even though the kids were only three and four they participated and were really good.

I taught them the steps of repentance on their level—we need to feel sorry, we need to ask the person to forgive us, we need to try to fix it and then we need to try not to do it again. I went over the steps several times, several different ways. To illustrate them, I told a story in the manual. It was about a little boy Ricardo who goes to the store for his mother and while he is getting what she asked him to, he sees some candy he wants. When the storekeeper isn't looking, he puts some in his pocket. On the way home, he eats it and starts to feel bad. He ends up telling his mom what he did, going back to the storekeeper to apologize and giving him money to pay for the stolen candy. The kids were really into it all and seemed to be listening and I was glad.

Last night at the dinner table, Jacob asked everyone what they learned in Primary. When it came to Ben, I asked him who his teacher was. He pointed to me and smiled. I then asked him if he learned about repentance and he said "Yeah, I did." Knowing he had really listened to the lesson and that he had a good memory, I said, "And what do we do when we need to repent, Ben?"

He replied, "We give people money."

Nice.

I think that went well.