a little background: my husband and i are newly fading, er make that disappearing. i haven't been to meeting in months (and life has never been better). i made the god-awful mistake of not turning in field service time for september, the same week the CO was in town. this tipped off their shepherding call radar. so, the phone calls started.
now, for reasons that are too lengthy to discuss here, we don't want to get Dfed just yet. we don't care what happens a year from now, but for now, we have to play the part a bit. my husband's relatives are elders in our current cong, so we could not keep brushing them off if we wanted all to stay peaceful....which we do at this point. no confrontations just yet. so we agreed to a shepherding call on tuesday night.
here are some things that helped us get thru it:
-scheduling the call to happen at the worst possible time for us. we chose 6:45pm. that way, the exhaustion and annoyance they saw on our faces was real. they felt like real nuisances intruding at this inconvenient time and were compelled to make it short.
-we have small children. i fed them a lot of sugar before the elders arrived. the children were not only cranky and ready for bed, but their behavior was amplified by the aforementioned child crack. the kids were IN.SANE. they screamed, they cried, they were monsters. i did nothing to stop it bcs it helped keep that uncomfortable look on the elders' faces. if you don't have kids, invite over the rowdiest neighbor kids you can round up for your shepherding call! if you live close enough, you can borrow mine!!!
-we let our super annoying, smelly, overly-aggressive-when-it-comes-to-smelling-strangers'-crotches dog stay inside. this piece of advice is key. if you do not have such a dog, borrow one for your shepherding call.
even with all the chaos that night that always goes on at our house i had artificially created, it was still hard to keep a straight face when they were talking. these guys did not even bring bibles, so it was clear their intent was to "snoop". one elder told me that the great tribulation was coming in a matter of months because "just look at how messed up health care is in our country". ummmmmmmmmmm, ok. anyway, my advice is to prepare for times you will want to laugh out loud, but plan ahead for ways to stifle that laughter. i did fail to do this part of the plan for my own call, so there were times i had a few inappropriate, but nonetheless uncontrollable, giggles. hopefully, they just think i have a raging case of tourettes. yes, that's why i haven't been to meetings. the tourettes is flaring up.