Demonstrations During Church

We go to church in the annex next to the LDS Tokyo Temple.  In the area are many embassies, and the China Embassy is just a few blocks from the temple.
One Sunday, I was sitting in Relief Society when all of a sudden, we could hear a large crowd in the street outside.  Someone was shouting into a bullhorn, and the crowd was angry.  Because they were speaking in Japanese, most of us in the room could not understand what they were shouting about.
I must admit, I got really scared, and so did several of the other women in the room.  My husband was in the next room, and my children were all scattered in various Sunday School classes in the floors below. (The annex is 5 floors total.)  I didn't know what the crowd wanted or if they would try to come into our church building....I just started to make a plan in my head for how I was going to quickly find all of my children and get them safe.
The kids also heard the shouting in their classes and became alarmed.  They told me later that their teachers told them what to do so that they would be safe and went on quietly with their lessons so as to try and keep all of the children calm.  We were all pretty scared--except for Raymond.  He could understand what the crowd was shouting about and knew that it didn't have anything to do with us....they were walking past the temple/church toward the Chinese Embassy to protest its existence in Japan.
The political situation between Japan and China hasn't been very good since WWII, and often a group will coordinate a protest against the Chinese Embassy having a presence in Tokyo.  Most of the Japanese people that we know do not agree with these protests and told us that it is very embarrassing for them.  They told us that these people do not adequately represent the feelings of the majority of the population.  They are a loud minority.  We have loud minorities in America, too, so we understand what our Japanese friends are trying to explain to us.
These protests have happened a couple of times during our Sunday church meetings, and even though we now know that they are in regards to the Chinese Embassy and not the Mormon church, it has still been unnerving to us as a family because of the history of the LDS Church.
The kids are aware of our church's history of persecution.  Throughout most of the 19th century, families who belonged to our church endured horrible atrocities simply because they were Mormon.  Last summer, we traveled to Nauvoo, Illinois for our summer vacation.  The city of Nauvoo was formed by Mormons and they were driven from it in 1845 and fled to the Rocky Mountains where they could finally worship how they wanted to in peace.  The kids were able to walk on the streets of Nauvoo and learn about our church's history there.  We found the plots of land that both mine and Raymond's ancestors owned as farms.  We talked to the kids about their heritage and how their ancestors were forced to leave their farms in Nauvoo and had to cross the plains and make a new home in Salt Lake City, Utah.  We honored our ancestors for their bravery and determination to carry on in their faith in spite of persecution and really, really hard trials.
While we were able to gain a deeper understanding of who we are and where we came from as a family and as Mormons during our time in Nauvoo, it became very real to us during that first protest when all we could hear were angry shouts from a mob outside of our church building and we didn't know why they were there.  We felt the very real emotion of panic and fear during the first few moments of the protest.  Here we are--foreigners and Christian, with an angry mob outside of the church building.  Nothing happened, but the kids and I--and several others in our ward--felt a little slice of the sheer terror that one feels when you think an angry mob is coming to persecute you and your family.  It helped us to better understand what our ancestors must have felt when the angry mobs approached their beloved city of Nauvoo and forced them out at gunpoint.
The second time the protesters went by our church, we were just getting ready to sing the opening hymn in Relief Society.  The chorister told us to sing so loud that we would drown out the shouting of the large crowd outside.  We don't have a piano, so it was just our voices against their's.  We sang loudly of Christ and love and we were able to drown out their angry shouts.  This reminded me that Satan's power is very real and very strong, but Christ's power IS and ALWAYS will be stronger. (Not that the protesters were evil--they aren't.  Their shouting was just scary to those of us inside of a Mormon church and their anger seemed to represent the evils of the world in my mind at that moment.)  Christ will always overcome evil. 
I don't think we will ever forget the protests that went on outside of our church building in Tokyo or how it made us feel.  It made us ever more grateful for our freedom to worship how and who we want.  What an awesome and sacred right that is.