Youth Conference

Home again home again jiggidy jig. I just got home from our youth conference in our ward. I am the advisor to the priests quorum in our ward, so I have been gone a couple of days with the youth. We left Wednesday afternoon and got home Friday morning. We went up to our bishops "cabin" in Deer Valley. I use the word cabin loosely because his master bathroom was bigger than our bedroom. It is right on the ski slopes in a beautiful neighborhood. It was a big nice cabin and we are lucky that he was willing to allow all of us to stay there and do our activities there. We had planned on going swimming and boating, but Wednesday afternoon it started to rain down here and snow up at his place, so our plans changed a little bit.

The group that we had go up was stellar! I love the kids in our ward! They were such good sports and we ended up having an amazing experience. One of our friends came up and did an amazing morningside with the kids about his experience surviving a plane crash in Alaska. Jenny's roomate from Hawaii married this guy and not long after they were married, he went on a fishing trip to Alaska with Stephanie's (that's the girl) dad and brother and uncles and brother-in-law. They crashed in the icy waters and only Ben (our buddy--Steph's husband) and Steph's sister's husband survived--very miraculously. It was a very touching story about faith and prayer and his testimony of the reality of God and His miracles. The kids loved it! I loved it! I'll have to tell ya'll more another time.

Bishop had the kids playing this game where they passed the lifesavers through toothpicks in their mouths and then you had to stick them on the face of one of your teammates. We have such a fun bishop!

I spoke to the kids also in a little workshop I did, and then the bishop and second counselor spoke to them as well. Our themes were: "Build It" "Dream It" and "Live It". We gave all the kids these bands to remember the messages.

and they all got a blanket that had inscribed on it our theme:

I love these kids and feel super blessed and lucky to be able to work with them! Some of them are graduating, and I will really miss them, but I love the whole group! Jenny did ok sleeping by herself for two nights. It was wierd to be away. But, it was only training for our high adventure trip in July when I will be gone for a whole week. Hopefully Jackson and Christian will remember me when I get back!