A friend of mine posted on Facebook yesterday about how he was the only member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in his high school when he was growing up in Goshen, Indiana. He still lives in that same town and now his kids are the only members of the Church there.
Another friend commented that for years she and her siblings were the only members of the Church in their school system in Middlebury, Indiana. I joined the Church my freshman year and the oldest sibling in her family was a grade younger than me. My freshman year and my first year as a member of the Church I went to school as the only member. It worked out okay, since I was pretty use to not fitting in, so being a member of a religion that many have misconceptions about was not horrible, but it would've been nice to have someone there with that common life experience. The following years, one by one her siblings trickled into the high school and another family of members moved into town with high school aged kids. Although, since they were in the younger grades, we didn't have classes together and were generally in different parts of the school, so it was still like being the lone Mormon.
By the time I graduated high school there was still me as the only member of the senior class, a couple of girls in the junior class, a couple of girls in the sophomore class, and a freshman girl. I believe the freshman class of a couple of years later, that my brother was in, filled out a little more. More people were moving to Middlebury to commute to the bigger towns.
As I heard from the kids in the Elkhart and Concord school systems, where our chapel was located, I perceived that having a few more members in their school wasn't much of a comfort to them either since the class sizes were much bigger, everyone had different things going, and there were a lot of pressures that perhaps I didn't have to deal with in my small town.
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