Here's a few more pictures from our YSA Conference last week. The first two are from our Speed Dating game...they really enjoyed that! There is a picture of Sasha in his uniform...one year of military service is required in Russia. Sasha is part of the honor guard at the Kremlin...very good assignment. It was good to see him...his year is up in November and then he will come home to Saratov. He enjoyed conference - the spirit of conference was very different from his daily experiences and he was sad to leave. There are also three pictures of our service project. We were assigned to find some quotes about the various aspects of temple attendance...we found some great ones. They were laminated and the young adults cut them up and made pretty magnets for people to put up. We told about our first temple experience and how ill-prepared we were. They were kinda blown away when I said there were only fifteen temples on the earth when we attended our first time! Now there are over 140! Things are changing! The object of this project was to provide food for thought for them and for their friends prior to their attendance in the temple. Hopefully these quotes will assist them in asking the right questions to help them prepare. The young people really got into making these magnets and were VERY creative.
We were blessed to be group leaders for the YSA Conference. We didn't find out about that assignment until the day before conference started when someone had to cancel. The assignment was physically demanding...devotional every morning at 07:30 and another one every night at 20:00. We had a staff meeting after the youth went to bed at 10:30 (I didn't say they went to SLEEP at 10:30! They had an assigned hour of personal study each night and stayed up late doing that and discussing it. We couldn't believe how faithful they were in following that direction) so we were rarely in bed before midnight. It was such a fantastic and sanctifying experience to be with these great young adults - the future of the world and the future of the church in Russia and in the other four countries represented in our group. In our Thursday night devotional, Elder Marchenko, the Area Authority Seventy, was hanging around near our group as we knelt in family prayer and we felt prompted to ask him to join us. He said the prayer and afterwards I hugged him and he said he was hoping we would ask him to join us. Neat. Even neater was our last devotional Friday night. We had planned to show a short video on Standing In Holy Places and then discussing that idea and had decided to have the final devotional in our room. As we walked to our room with our twenty-three young adults I felt prompted to change that idea. We gathered in our room and I told the kids about how we always asked our own children to knock on our bedroom door when they got home at night and come sit on our bed and talk about their day. It was cool because our laptop had various pictures of our family coming up on the screen as we talked and many of the youth were watching that. Lots of the kids talked about some neat things they were experiencing and we ended by singing I Am A Child Of God...many of us were in tears and we ended with a kneeling family prayer. I blessed them in the prayer as a father would and afterwards we both broke the mission rules about hugging members of the opposite sex. Elder Marchenko told me afterwards that I had no choice but to do so...![]()
It was poignant when I hugged one girl - maybe twenty-eight years old - when she said she never had a Dad and this was the first time she had ever been hugged by a Daddy. All our group called us Mama and Papa - except for one of the African guys who called my Daddy. I loved it!
Many of the youth were sad to leave...many of them don't have happy places to return to.
FYI - whenever this blog inappropriately says "I" or "My" or "Me" it really means "We" or "Our" or "Us". Usually when I write a post I am exhausted or in a hurry and I forget. I also know how to spell pretty well - my various spelling errors are caused by fat fingers or being in a hurry. I really never forget my companion. Really!
I have a fantastic companion...our mission experience has been the best thing we have ever done for our relationship...as we grow closer to our Savior we also grow closer to each other and to the Holy Spirit. I don't think we will ever be the same. For me that's good thing.
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