Towards a More Meaningful Worship

[Stargazer]

On 7/7/2026 at 6:35 AM, Devobah said:

Hello all. 
I’ll be straight with you: my worship could use a bit of work; both in temple and regular sacrament meeting worship. I feel stagnant, and I often just scroll through my phone like a heathen a lot of the time. Besides doing something about that, I’ll pose the question here:

What have you done to make your worship (in the temple or sacrament meeting) more meaningful to you?

To our Catholic, Orthodox, and other Mainstream Christian friends, I would love how you make your worship more meaningful as well. 
 

Please feel free to post scriptures, devotionals, personal thoughts, or meaningful messages below. 
 

I appreciate you all! God bless you. 

One way to reduce distractions is is to sit as close to the front as one can. My late wife liked to do that (as did I), and that helped a lot to avoid distractions, and to pay attention to the speaker.

But my current wife has always preferred to sit way in the back, mostly because she is the Primary pianist and when the closing hymn in Sacrament meeting starts, she gets up to head to the Primary room. So I sat back there with her, and I would definitely break out my phone and besides using the Library app as a hymnbook, I'd also use it to look up scriptures, Wikipedia articles on things mentioned in the talk, and sometimes if the talk was not compelling, I'd distract myself with topics I found on my phone.

Another way to reduce distractions is to get called into the bishopric (an option not open to all, obviously).

If one is in the bishopric and sitting on the stand for the whole meeting one doesn't want to be a bad example, so one must mostly stay off one's phone, except for the hymn singing. When I was in this position I found that I became hyper-focused on what was happening, and listening to the speaker -- and for some reason this hyper-focus made the entire meeting much more rewarding from a spirituality perspective. And I became quite joyful about being at church, generally.

In respect of the second hour, if one makes an effort to read the Come, Follow Me topic and the corresponding scripture, this increases one's ability to appreciate the discussion in Sunday School. Same with watching or reading the assigned general conference talk in advance of the priesthood/relief society session.

Something that has improved my own worship and general spirituality has been participating with the full-time missionaries in helping them teach their investigators.

[manol]

20 hours ago, ijah Tafari said:

Hey bredda,!!!!! tank yuh fi yuh honest post—it really touch mi cause mi know dat deh stagnant feeling all too well. Mi gruo op az wahn skini Jumiekan bwai a Kinston, we laif wehn ful a vaibrant soun, chrang fambili prieya, ahn riil schrogl laik schrechin fuud a rais ahn kaaloo, ahn choch muotaim fiil muo laka bakgrong naiz wail mi main waak tu futbaal ar woriz. But wen mi come to di restored Gospel teach mi seh di Laad si dat deh likkle island bwoy an waan mek worship deeply personal. Fi fight di phone scrolling inna sacrament meeting, mi now prepare mi heart beforehand by reading jus one chapter, like 3 Nephi 11 or Alma 34, picturing di Savior right deh wid mi as mi tek d i sacrament, letting it cover mi distractions an weaknnesses like it did fi dat hungry, distracted kid weh mi used to be. Inna di temple, mi bring a simple kweschan or family name an mek di ordinances dem flow like di rhythmic music weh mi grow up wid, feeling di covenants dem turn mi ordinary life inna someting covenantal an powerful. Nephi’s words inna 2 Nephi 4:18-19 keep mi going—“O wretched man dat mi is... Nevertheless, mi know in who mi have trust”—reminding mi seh even wid wi flaws, consistent small efforts bring real Spirit. Di Laad no disappoint inna yuh struggle, bredda; Him a wait fi meet yuh inna dem quiet moment deh. Staat likl, kip aaan a ton tu Im, an wach yu worship kom alaiv—yu get dis chruu Krais. God bless yuh an yuh journey! 🇯🇲🙏

Tank yah mi bredda!  (An tank yuh too Google Translate).

 

[manol]

8 hours ago, Stargazer said:

One way to reduce distractions is is to sit as close to the front as one can. My late wife liked to do that (as did I), and that helped a lot to avoid distractions, and to pay attention to the speaker.

YES! This is BRILLIANT!  Its brilliance has to do with giving the ear/brain system the best possible chance to pay attention and understand clearly. 

Pardon me for getting a bit nerdy here, but some simple acoustics comes into play:  The sound you hear in a room includes both direct sound (sound which travels directly from the source to your ears) and reflected sound (sound which bounces off of something before reaching your ears).   As we move farther away from the source, the sound reaching our ears includes proportionally less direct sound and proportionally more reflected sound, which is the opposite of what we want for good intelligibility and (most important) good recall.  When we are fairly far back in a large and somewhat reflective room, the direct sound is often so weak relative to the reflections that not only do we have a harder time understanding the words themselves, we also have a terrible time recalling them, and that is the problem.

Let me explain the part about recall:  We can usually still figure out what the individual words are even if the reflections are dominant, but we have to focus our attention on the words themselves in order to do so.  So figuring out the actual words takes up time and attention we cannot spare!  By the time we've figured out the word that was just spoken, the next word has already arrived, so the brain is always in catch-up mode.  And our brain only has a limited amount of attention capacity that can be simultaneously devoted to different tasks.  So if too much of that limited attention capacity is taken up simply trying to understand the words, there is not enough remaining for us to remember and recall them.  So it can become quite difficult to recall the individual words for long enough to string them together into complex ideas, and then to put these complex ideas into long-term memory.  The net result is the fairly rapid onset of fatigue, and maybe even a head-ache, along with boredom, instead of comprehension and retention of the ideas being presented.  

Public address loudspeaker systems make the sound louder for listeners further away from the front, but they can sometimes make things worse!  Usually there are some loudspeakers positioned partway back on the side walls and/or ceiling, and the sound coming from those loudspeakers is delayed a little bit to compensate for the amount of time it takes for the sound to travel from the pulpit to that far back in the audience.  Unfortunately this sort of system cannot provide optimum delays throughout the audience area, so there will be locations in the audience where the intelligibility is pretty good, and other locations where it is pretty bad. 

A really good solution is what @Stargazer suggested:  Sit up front where the direct sound from the person at the pulpit is relatively loud compared to the reflections, and where we don't have to rely on the PA system in order for the sound to be loud enough.  This way we don't reach burn-out in the first ten or fifteen minutes. 

Of course it's not possible for everyone to sit in the front, but if there are some open seats up there anyway, don't let them go to waste.

This principle applies to classrooms as well, so tell your (grand)kids that there are valid acoustic reasons to sit in the front which will make a difference in their comprehension and therefore in their grades. 

For anyone wanting to take a bit deeper dive, here are the slides from a power point presentation by one of the leading researchers in this field (imo the most relevant slides are 2, 4, 5, 6, 30, and 36; slide 6 mentions a study wherein the students in the front half of the classroom did better than those in the back half of the classroom by an average of one letter grade): 

The-importance-of-attention-localization-and-source-separation-to-speech-cognition-and-recall.pptx (live.com)

Edited 23 hours ago by manol

[ijah Tafari]

Tank yuh fi di warm welcome an di helpful suggestion. Mi ago break mi posts dem inna shorter paragraphs going forward, an mi appreciate yuh sharing how yuh use scriptures an hymns fi stay focused during church. Peace be wid yuh man!

[Calm]

4 hours ago, ijah Tafari said:

Tank yuh fi di warm welcome an di helpful suggestion. Mi ago break mi posts dem inna shorter paragraphs going forward, an mi appreciate yuh sharing how yuh use scriptures an hymns fi stay focused during church. Peace be wid yuh man!

Appreciate you breaking them up, not everyone responds so quickly to my request. Thank you.