It is December 1992. My friend Kelly "Kanon" Ball and I file into early morning seminary class at Olympus High School in Salt Lake City and pick up a hymn book. We thumb through the pages, looking for an opening song. Neither of us like to lead the music (and we all know nobody looks at the conductor anyway), so we have a routine of both sitting down at the piano, one playing the right hand part, one the left hand part, and both of us using our free hand to improvise and embellish.

"The Wint'ry Day?" No, that would have been appropriate for yesterday, but the snow has stopped falling today.

A Mexican hat dance version of "Who's on the Lord's Side?" No, we did that last week.

How about the words of "Sweet Hour of Prayer" set to the music of "A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief?" Nah, too hard to get the whole sleepy class to play along.

We decide on a simple hymn: "Behold! A Royal Army." After all, the Jazz were victorious last night, and it includes the rousing refrain of "Victory, victory, through him that redeemed us!"

I'll admit that I was a bit immature in high school. But the seminary program was perfectly tailored for an immature high school student. I went to Sunday school and priests' quorum too, but seminary was always a completely different atmosphere. The lessons I learned there were presented by trained instructors in ways that may have been inappropriate for church services, but that were unforgettable experiences.

Take Brother Williams, for example. We always thought of Brother Williams as one of us, almost a peer. After all, he had only graduated from our high school a few years before, he still lived with his parents, and his sister (whom I had a crush on) was in our class.

The first day of school he began talking about the Ten Commandments. He drew the stone tablets on the chalkboard and began wandering through the class, talking. Soon he took a raw egg out of his pocket and held it up. "This egg," he said, "represents all of us. We are fragile and we need to know what to do to keep from breaking."

Suddenly, he whizzed around and flung the egg at the chalkboard with all his might. Egg guts splattered all over the Ten Commandments he had drawn. He had the full attention of the entire class.

"We don't break the commandments. We break ourselves on them," he said.

It was in seminary that I had my most effective Law of Chastity lesson, entitled, "No one wants a licked cupcake." It was in seminary that I learned to play "Do you love your neighbor?" It was in seminary that I learned that an effective missionary door approach does not involve the first missionary standing behind his companion and lobbing a Book of Mormon over the companion's shoulder so it falls into his hands as he says, "Would you be interested in a book from heaven?" It was in seminary that I learned the names of all the apostles. It was in seminary that I learned to love the scriptures enough to read them on my own, outside of family scripture time.

I went to Book of Mormon read-a-thons, and I memorized my scripture mastery verses. I crinkled all the pages of my scriptures so they wouldn't stick together during a scripture chase. I attended morningsides, and I wrote letters to our high school alumni who were serving missions during Missionary Week. All of these things were just what I needed at that time to build my testimony and prepare me for a mission.

Since high school, the years have brought a different approach to my life. I have done my fair share of real life missionary door approaches. I don't need my scripture pages crinkled because I don't do chases anymore. But my seminary experience is the basis of my gospel knowledge and testimony. It was a crucial phase in my spiritual development, and the key was that it was tailored to my needs at the time. I learned to love the gospel and the scriptures.

I also learned that "God Be With You Till We Meet Again" makes a great polka.

NOTE: This article was originally written for the August 10, 1999 issue of the Daily Universe (BYU's student-written school paper, which I wrote for that summer). When my parents came to visit last week for graduation, they brought with them my copies of my Universe ouvre, and I re-discovered this little gem. It's available on the web, but I don't recall relinquishing my copyright to the things I wrote for the Universe, so I'm reprinting it here with my own permission.