Just a Typical Mormon Sunday School (Joel and Amos)

Well, I wrote about our Sacrament meeting today so I thought it would be appropriate to continue to the trend by talking about our Sunday School lesson.
This year, every congregation's Gospel Doctrine class is studying the Old Testament.  Today we talked about the books of Joel and Amos.  The lesson from the official manual can be read here.
Our Gospel Doctrine teachers do a good job of not following the manual, which I appreciate. They do follow the topic, but what they teach is from their heart, not out of the book. Today Brother Jerry (that's his first name, not his last. He always just calls himself Jerry, so I do too.) taught, he's a great older guy born in (i believe) 1940 who has seen and done some incredible things in his life. I am fascinated by his knowledge of history and science.  He tells wonderful stories about WWII, about working as an engineer and computer programmer in the mid 1960's (reminds me of a Kurt Vonnegut novel every time!), and is Jewish Baptist Native American who converted to Mormonism as an adult, so he has quite an interesting history.  Everytime he teaches I feel like it's a university class!
So today, he got out his big Old Testament map and pointed out where Israel and Judah were located at the time. He gave the historical context for Amos (750 - 800 BC) and discussed how he was from Judah but spoke to Israel. He then gave historical context for Joel (estimated ~800 BC) and how he was from Israel but spoke to Judah.  We discussed the importance of listening to the prophets - both ancient and modern - and how civilization tends to advance rapidly when there are prophets on the earth, whether or not those advancements are attributed to believers or not it is an interesting pattern.  He talked about the advancements in just his time, (doing math by hand and programming by binary in the 60's) and the past 100 years, and how every new technology has in some way helped the work of God go forth.
One of my favorite moments from this class was reading Amos 6:1: "Wo unto them that are at ease in Zion." We need to pay attention to what the prophets say and never stop learning about the gospel and the scriptures, because it will always provide us the direction we need in life.

A Video about Prophets