How To Stop Noisy Children From
Ruining Your Sacrament Meeting!
We’ve all been in church when it happens…A two-year-old starts to cry! Don’t they understand what they are doing? They are ruining Sacrament meeting for everyone! Whereas this is a dramatization, it illustrates what we sometimes think when a child starts making noise in church. I am a Young Single Adult or YSA. Because of this, I have mainly been in YSA wards over the past few years. Something that always strikes me, is the utter silence in a YSA ward. We don’t have crying children, to some this would be perfect! But I wish we had crying babies, why? Because I’ve learned how to stop noisy children from ruining sacrament meeting, instead they make it. Here are three ways I have learned to stop children from ruining a sacrament meeting.
1st. Stop letting other’s children ruin your sacrament meeting.
When I’m getting ready for the sacrament and a little kid starts to cry and scream I used to get annoyed. But one of the YSA I home teach, Ryan Meservey, taught me something profound once. He served his mission in Japan. He told me on his mission crying children used to always ruin the spirit of Sacrament meeting for him, until one day when he heard a child crying and thought, “Christ cried during the atonement.”
With that in his mind, every week as the sacrament started and a child would cry he thought of the agony that Christ suffered through, he thought of the atonement. The crying child was pointing him to Christ! When he told me this story it hit me with such force. I realized I could do better if I would just humble myself and let the children lead me to Christ.
“Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
Matthew 18:3
