A hush fell over a gathering of Primary children, ages 3 to 11 years, in makeshift assembly lines at the Sudbury Ontario Stake building of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on September 17, 2016, as they received instruction from their leaders for the task at hand.
An hour later these Mormon children could not be coaxed by their parents to leave their stations as they worked well into the supper hour. The goal was to assemble 1,000 colouring kits, which would be used to alleviate anxiety of children awaiting attention in hospital emergency rooms located within the boundaries of the Sudbury Stake.
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Table after table of the volunteer children, assisted by some older youth, gave a shout of joy and shared hearty high-fives as their work was completed. The final kit count was 10 per cent above the goal. This means 11 hospitals, rather than the original 10, would each receive 100 kits to provide children with a temporary diversion in an otherwise stressful situation by engaging in a familiar activity — colouring — as they wait to be seen by doctors.
“On a practical level, our goal for this activity was to produce colouring kits for children who visit emergency rooms,” said stake Primary president Beverly Carr-Lawton. “But our spiritual goal was to help our Primary children become ‘doers of the word, and not hearers only’ (James 1:22). When we teach the importance of helping and serving others, then provide opportunities for hands-on participation in such service, those wonderful teachings come alive — for our Primary children and for all of us.”
President Boyd K. Packer (1924–2015), former president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, said, “One of the great discoveries of parenthood is that we learn far more about what really matters from our children than we ever did from our parents. We come to recognize the truth in Isaiah’s prophecy that ‘a little child shall lead them’” (“And a Little Child Shall Lead Them,” April 2012 general conference).
Contributed by Sandra Poirier