Today I sang I Am A Child of God. It made me recall the first Tamil man I had met. It was at BYU the semester after I came home from Italy. The Field Studies Preparation Course was taking place that semester, which preceded the summer when all the FS Students would leave. I was supposed to be getting ready to take a group to Italy, but I really didn't want to go. I hadn't healed from my time in Italy. Going back so soon didn't seem right to me. Simultaneously I had been hanging around Ash and Dave a lot, and thus I was becoming more interested in India. So, I took a beginning Tamil course that was offered for the FS Students who were going to Coimbatore in the summer. It has been the only Tamil course offered on BYU Campus.
I went with my crush at the time (long story), Josh, and a handful of other friends from Field Studies. The teacher's name was Venkat and he was from Chennai. Venkat was so delightful! We all had such a great time with him that semester. His favorite joke of ours was when we would say "Naandri paanee!", both because it rhymed, and ha, because it meant "Thank you pig!" He would laugh so hard when we would tell that to each other.
Anyway, on the last day of class, he told us how much he liked being with us. He said he wanted to become a member of the Church, but his wife, who was a native of Utah, didn't like the Church and wouldn't let him.
Before the bell rang for us to leave, he asked all of us to sing I Am A Child of God to him.
And we did. It was one of the most spiritual experiences I've had. The five or six of us in class sang it while looking at him with tears in our eyes; we knew Father had a message to give Venkat, and that we were blessed to sing it to him. He merely stood in the front and looked down. When we finished, he asked to say a prayer, and prayed he did, first in Tamil, and then in English.
Remembering all of this made my Sabbath so much more special.
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