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Despite a nefarious reputation, I still work in the nursery of my LDS ward. It's coming up on five months since the connection between the bishop and the Holy Ghost went horribly awry and I was called.

This isn't the longest I've held a church job, nor is it the shortest. Years ago I was the ward's magazine representative for three weeks and two days.

But then it got out that along with official church publications such as the Ensign and the Friend, I was also hawking advance subscriptions for Repenthouse and Prayboy.

The shortest church job I held was working splits with the full-time missionaries. It lasted less than six hours and probably would have been shorter if I'd had a cellphone back then.

The missionary leader asked for my release. I was never sure if it was the Tabasco sauce necktie I wore or because I said being called of God didn't automatically make a person less of a dumba—.

Anyway, I'm still in the nursery. For two hours every Sunday, my partner Eric Alldredge and I supervise about a dozen mucous minions under age 3.

It isn't as hard as I thought it would be. There are but two rules. First is that the kids have to stay in the nursery. We can't take them to IHOP.

Second, there has to be more than one adult in the room at all times. While there's probably some other important reason for this, for me it's so that the kids don't take the outnumbered adult hostage and begin issuing demands.

We're supposed to have a structured lesson, prayer, snacks, coloring time, singing and a screaming, fit-pitching, hand-to-hand melee known as "playtime."

While correlation and structure have their place, we're talking about small children here. And me. We don't need no es-tinking correlation.

Eric and I roll with the flow. The kids play with toys, which can be parlayed into an important gospel lesson if they start clocking one another in the heads with them.

We have singing time. Sister Adams comes in and leads the children in Primary songs. The kids love it, especially when a song can be turned into a contact sport.

Singing time has even influenced me. I had a nightmare last week that I was in hell, sentenced to sitting on a small chair and singing "Book of Mormon Stories" for eternity.

When singing time is done, we have snacks. Fruit chews, goldfish, animal crackers and water. Boring. On Fast Sundays we're going to have waffles and other stuff that causes everyone in the building to salivate.

The two-hour block ends with bubbles. Yeah, there's a bubble machine in the closet. The last 10 minutes of nursery is turned into a '70s disco as the kids chase the bubbles and scream.

Nursery is great. I've learned all sorts of important gospel lessons that seem to get missed in priesthood meeting and Sunday school.

For example, in nursery there is complete honesty in prayer rather than saying what other people expect to hear.

"… and so I can have Elmo first" is a lot more real than "… that we might all be able to apply this lesson in our daily lives."

Maybe I'm learning something from these kids. For once, I have a church job that I like well enough to behave in order to keep it.

Also, unlike the rest of church, I have grown really attached to my minions. Big surprise. There's more to love.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley. Find his past columns at http://www.sltrib.com/lifestyle/kirby