Taking Visitors

My mother-in-law was visiting us this weekend, and she wanted to go to church with me. Her biggest complaints were:

1) The service was not in English

and

2) It was impossible to follow along with the Badarak book. My church doesn't have the nice, new brown ones; it has the older blue ones. The new brown ones are easier to follow.

Afterwards, I introduced her to the choir director, and when my MIL started talking about how she wished the sermon was in English, the choir director very adeptly handled her complaints, by stating that we have a lot of people who don't speak English, and the service is in Classical Armenian anyway, which isn't what people speak, and perhaps it would work better if she looked at it as art, as a performance, rather than a religious ceremony.

She also said that if we did everything in the book, we'd be there for four hours! Hee. So true.

I elected to not sing with the choir yesterday so I could help my MIL follow along with the service. I think this was good- otherwise, she would have been completely lost.

It is kind of difficult to understand what is going on if you don't have someone to explain it to you. As a newcomer, I found that singing in the choir was by far the easiest and fastest way to get on board with what was going on.