Circuit Assembly

Today we drove out to West Palm Beach, about 45 minutes away, to attend the local Circuit Assembly. Our GPS took us close but when it directed us down a narrow road and under an overpass into a little residential street and declared us arrived, well, we knew something was amiss. I immediately parked the car to figure out what to do next. No problem. Across the street from where I parked four JWs were doing door-to-door witnessing and they were very happy to give us directions.

A few words about this assembly hall. It is a large domed structure that can seat about 5,000 persons. This assembly was for two circuits combined and the attendance today was 4,181.

 

This is an overview of the elliptical building.

As you can imagine, the parking lot accommodates thousands of cars. I dropped bread crumbs along the way to the building so I could find my car again.

Approaching the main entrance.

Initial inside view. All roof beams lean on each other at the top,

a neat design. 

Looking toward the stage.

The ground floor being practically a shut out, we found seats

on the Mezzanine.

As you will notice in a photo above, there are industrial strength lights on the ceiling. The prevalence of electronic tablets produces an effect similar to a general use of flash cameras. The many tablets frequently project a quick reflection of the above lighting. It keeps the audience, as seen from the mezzanine, glittering.

The baptism was shown on TV screens since the real

thing gets blocked out by the first fifty observers.

25 persons were baptized here today.

During the lunch break you can go outside and

stroll around the entire building on a pleasant

concourse, which we did.

And we discovered outdoor eating areas.

It's Florida! Why not?

 If we had known about this earlier we wouldn't have munched

our lunch in the auditorium seats.

 Another outside eating area on the mezzanine level.

 A selfie before the start of the afternoon sessions.

This assembly had a speaker from headquarters in New York, Brother Schafer. He's a helper to the governing body on the teaching committee. He's made presentations on JW Broadcasting.

Carol and I passed by David Schafer and his wife on

the concourse during lunch break. Maybe I should

have stopped him and commended him on his talk

but instead I just let him continue on his business.

Brother Schafer is an excellent teacher. He gave one talk in the morning and, in the afternoon, he gave the concluding talk. I very much like his way of adjusting completely the lectern and the microphone before beginning to speak. He's not concerned about 20 seconds or so of silence while he gets the equipment as it needs to be.

Part of his afternoon talk dealt with the quality of (ahem) patience. He made the interesting point that patience is required when nothing much seems to be happening but in fact important things are happening. Eg: Our bones are strengthened by taking calcium from our food. It's not a process we are conscious of. We don't feel it happening. It's slow and gradual. Similarly with what we feed our mind. We don't feel the effect right away. We're not conscious of it affecting our thinking. But it does. So we must patiently persist in feeding our minds wholesome mental and spiritual food if we want our thinking to be healthy.

The discussion of patience came in handy when the assembly was over. The parking lot, big as it is, does not appear designed for a flowing exit. We spent 45 minutes stopped or inching out of the parking lot's gridlock. Later we ran into more slowdowns on the highway home. It is not unusual to pass crashed vehicles surrounded by police cars with flashing lights. Too many folks driving by ear. Too many kamakaze motorcycle drivers too.

It took under an hour from our condo to our seat in the assembly hall. From our seat back to our condo: Over two hours. But it was a very enjoyable and interesting experience.