Our Reenactment of the First Relief Society Meeting

I've been waiting to post about this till I got the pictures and it has just about been killing me.

Every year in March LDS women around the world commemorate the birthday of the Relief Society which was organized by the prophet Joseph Smith on March 17, 1842 in Nauvoo, Illinois. In the past our local Relief Society has just had a nice dinner and a simple program... but this year someone got the brilliant idea to reenact the original meeting. I got SUPER excited about this and volunteered to write the script and organize the actors.

As I started to write the script I realized that I wanted it to be historically accurate and that I wanted the actors to say the words that the real people would really have said. So being the overachiever.... super nerd... that I am, I made a trip to Salt Lake City to look at Eliza R. Snow's (the original secretary) minutes taken at the first meeting. The church has them digitized at the new Church History Library and it was so incredible to be able to see Eliza R. Snow's handwriting and read what was said that day.

I copied her notes word for word and then wrote my script making sure that the right people said and did the right things. In almost all the cases (I had to make a few exceptions for the times they used parliamentary procedure) everything that people say is exactly what Eliza said they said.

Getting everything organized was a lot of work but I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it.

Besides... I got to be Emma.

And Jon was Joseph...

Doesn't he make the perfect, most handsome Joseph?
I told him that if he was a better actor he could totally be in all the church movies.
It was kind of strange kissing him when he was in costume :)

This really was such an amazing project for me and it turned out to be an incredible experience for our Relief Society. I think one woman, who was one of the actors, explained it best. She said, "It felt like Joseph and Emma and all the rest were really here. Like they were standing in the background watching us."

It really did feel like they were there and it is kind of hard to describe how beautiful it felt. We had our own little piece of history.

Researching, writing, planning and participating in this reenactment really strengthened my testimony of the Relief Society and of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. I realized what incredible people these early Saints were and how my life has been so blessed because of their courage and faith. I am so grateful to have such a great spiritual heritage. It makes me proud to know that I am helping to carry on the work that these women began more than 150 years ago. It is just as important today as it was then and seeing what they went through has made me a more dedicated follower of Jesus Christ.

If you would like to read the full script that I wrote you can access it here or email me at heatherlady at gmail.com for a copy. You are free to use the script for your own use as long as you give credit to where you got it from. In fact... I hope you do use it because learning about the incredible history and mission of the Relief Society is really powerful and helps women understand that as Emma Smith said, "... sisters, we are going to do something extraordinary!"

If you want to see some professional pictures they took of us go here

Oh, and just because I'm kind of proud of it... I made my dress. I've always wanted to sew a civil war era dress, call me crazy, and I figured this might be my only valid excuse to do it. It was so much fun to wear!