I See... The Super Silent Sacrament Meeting

Years ago, at the pleading of General Authority whose name I can no longer remember, I was invited to conduct an experiment with prayer- instead of compiling a long list of wants and needs and requiring the Lord to instantly provide them, present Him a long list of received blessings, then wait in silence for revelation to flow forth. It was wildly successful, and since then, when I find my prayers becoming too casual or rote,as if they were being manufactured at and then pumped out of the prayer factory, I spend more time on my knees thanking and thinking.

However, the Mormon Third Eye, in it's quest to apply more conventional gospel learning strategies in less unconventional ways, thought “what if I applied this same strategy to sacrament meeting? What if, from the minute I walked in the chapel door, until the moment the opening prayer for Sunday School gospel doctrine class concluded, I was completely.... silent?

So I tried it one bright lucky Sunday morning. I told no one, not even my own wife, as I snuck into the lobby. It required some careful planning and a lot of active nodding, aggressive handshaking, and smiling with my eyes in order not to offend fellow ward members genuinely happy to see me, but I made it to our pew without a word. I proceeded to spend the next 75 minutes of sacrament meeting in utter silence, without any spoken commentary about the BYU game the night before, the boy with mismatched socks passing the sacrament, or how many times the youth speaker used “like” in her talk.

The results of this experiment too were astounding. Sacrament meeting was transformed into a river of revelation. So... don't be offended if one Sunday morning I reverently decline to respond to requests about how my week; I could be having a Super Silent Sacrament!