Not Your Typical Sunday

Have you ever wondered what the Mormon Tabernacle Choir does while traveling on the Sabbath day while on tour?  We have the most incredible sacrament meetings, for one thing.  We also had a wonderful fireside on Sunday night, and while I cannot share the details, it was a real treat.  On other tours (i.e., not this one), we have visited Nauvoo or some other sacred site.  But at the end of the day, it is not your typical Sabbath at home; we are a small army that is travelling, so we stay in hotels, eat, and perhaps travel in buses.  In other words, we are employing other people to host, feed, and transport us, causing them to work on the Sabbath day, and it’s unavoidable.

Some meals are catered or provided by the hotel, feeding us en-masse.  At other times, that is simply not practical, so we are issued per-diem money and left to buy meals on our own.  Such was the case on Sunday.  Lunch was “per-diem”.  Our hotel, though magnificent, was not within walking distance of any non-hotel restaurants, so we had two choices: the expensive steakhouse or the small coffee shop (with sandwiches) in the hotel.  Most of us opted for the less-costly coffee shop.  My wife and I split a sandwich, a yogurt parfait, and a lemonade.  The coffee shop sold a popular brand of coffee and our lemonade came in a cup sporting the coffee logo.

As I exited the coffee shop, I spotted the member of the First Quorum of Seventy (one of the Church’s general authorities) and his wife who are accompanying us on this tour.  They were sitting at a table, enjoying the same meal as we.  I held up my cup to the Seventy and his wife and said with a big grin, “Join the Mormon Tabernacle Choir!  Get a drink from Starbucks on the Sabbath day!”

The Seventy’s wife smiled at the joke and said, “You’re such a rebel!”