Our 170th Relief Society Birthday Celebration–Serve Others With Love

In March we celebrate the 170th Birthday of the Relief Society Organization of the church.  Remember I wrote about the new Bookmark and Poster here.  Our ward decided to celebrate a little early due to scheduling and upcoming activities.  It turned out to be a wonderful night.  Our theme this year in our ward and in Relief Society is “Serve Others With Love”.  We decided to have a night of enriching and edifying.  We usually do fun {you know crafty, outgoing activities} but this one we wanted to be a little more spiritual.  We also really wanted to talk to the sisters about the importance of Visiting Teaching.  It started at 6 and at 6 no one but the presidency and the bishop and his wife and one other lady were there….but due to Mormon standard time by 6:15 we had close to 40 people there, which is really good for our ward.  We started out the night with the song, As Sisters In Zion and a prayer.  We had it in the Relief Society room and decorated simple like this…

Then as our Relief Society President started to announce the program we started in on our Flash Mob Skit.   I got a couple sisters in the ward to help me out and asked them to chime in when I stood up and then got two other sisters to be our “infomercial” girls.

I stood up in the middle of her announcing the program and said, “Sister H.  I am not going to be able to do my Visiting Teaching this month.  I just don’t have time.” {Silence in the room}  “Sorry, I’m just to busy”  

She knew we had this planned and looked out in the audience and asked if anyone felt the same way.  My VT companion said, “yeah I’m her companion and I just don’t have time”

I said, “yea, and she never calls me back anyway!” {and then I laughed because she always does}

Sister H.  said “anyone else?” and a couple other people said stuff like “well I talked to her in the hall at church” or “I’m just way to busy on Facebook”.  It was pretty funny and I had to laugh when a sweet older lady chimed in and said, well my companion just moved, what am I supposed to do and I hadn’t even asked her to say anything.  It was perfect.

Then two girls came from the back of the room and started walking forward trading off saying lines from this {I found it here and don’t know who wrote it.

They added a couple of other things like, they take PayPal or they also have a new app for this service.  It was pretty funny and everyone had a good laugh!  Sister H. got up and kind of reset the mood in talking about how visiting teaching is hard and that we can think of a million excuses, but that we just need to do it!  Then we had our Visiting Teaching supervisor stand up and talk a little bit about the importance of visiting teaching. 

Next we had our secretary stand up and introduce the new purposes of the Relief Society on the poster.  Then each of us in the presidency got to speak about one of the purposes for 5 minutes.  {I will talk about these tomorrow} Then the Bishop spoke for a couple of minutes and then we closed with a beautiful slide show of pictures of Christ and pictures that someone in our ward had taken of peoples helping hands to the song His Hands.  It turned out beautiful. 

After that we went into the Young Women’s room for refreshments.  We decorated it to go with our theme of “Serve Others With Love”

We got this heart cake at Costco and then also printed off some of the pictures from the video to go in plastic frames.  Flowers in cute little vases were the center pieces and at each table setting there was a bag of yummy treats for each sister to take home. 

I also made these Water Bottle Wrappers and our Relief Society President made these purposes onto magnets. 

It was a very enjoyable night and I am so glad people came! Here are a few printables from the night.  If you right click on them and save them to your computer they should work.  Let me know if they don’t and I will email them to you.