My period of inactivity

There were four LDS wards in Nampa when our family moved there in the spring of 1959. We lived in the Nampa Second Ward and met in an old meetinghouse built in the 1920s on the corner of 14th Avenue South and 4th Street South.

According to Mama's diary, we all went to church on Sunday, March 8, for the first time in the Second Ward. Sunday School in the new ward was a frightening experi­ence for me. In the Owyhee Ward I had been in a class that was still in the junior Sunday School, but in Nampa I was sent into the senior Sunday School and by mistake was put into the class just older than the one I should have been in. When I realized the mistake the fol­lowing Sunday, I vowed never to return again. Somehow my parents let it go, and I persisted in my inactivity for a couple months.
Then Grandma Batt came to visit. She had recently become widowed and was dealing with major life-changing events in her own life, similar I suppose to what I was going through by losing my Grandpa and moving to a new home and attending a new school and being in a new ward. Sunday morning brought the show-down. To Grandma it was unthinkable that a nine-year-old would be any­where but in Sunday School on the Sabbath. I was the fortunate one because she won.

Mama wrote on Sunday, April 26, that "Mother and all the rest of us went to Sunday School at 10:15." That was the first time any mention of my going to church appeared in her diary since the Sunday in early March.

What a pivotal period that was in my young life. I shudder to think how different my life might have been had I continued not attending church during those formative years. A scary thought.