EFY

A couple of weeks ago I got the opportunity to go to EFY at the University of Utah as a counselor. It was AWESOME!!! I went to EFY twice when I was the age to go and was really sad when I couldn't go anymore because I was paying for my trip to Central America instead. But the EFY office called me up and asked me to be a counselor! It was really cool to actually be paid to go to EFY--sure, it's more work than just going as a regular person, but you still get the amazing experience! The theme this year is "Be Thou An Example" and the session director was Brad Wilcox. I believe he was actually the session director for one of the years I went as a participant, but I'll have to look that up to be sure. He is such an amazing speaker and SO funny!!! There were three teachers for the various classes (which I thought was a little weird because when I went to EFY we had twelve or something--although the BYU sessions are a lot bigger than the U of U sessions) Brother Diamond, Brother Smith, and Sister Welch. They were really good! I loved their classes when I was able to go. Plus, Brother Diamond was from England so he had a cool accent :). I had twelve girls in my group and there were two other groups in my company--one other group of ten girls and one group of 16 boys. My co-counselors were Matt and Amelia and they were so much fun! Amelia was actually a girl I went to high school with! One sad thing about Matt though was that on Tuesday (which also happened to be his birthday) he got sick and had to be sent home. Which is sad enough on its own but that also meant that me and Amelia had to control all three groups without too much help (although one of the building counselors took over the boys' devotionals so we didn't have to worry about that). But one major problem came on game night. Our group was meeting after dinner to walk down to the institute building but three boys weren't coming. And, being girls, me and Amelia couldn't go into their dorms to get them out. We had to track down a guy counselor to go in to get them and, begrudgingly, they came out. But then on the way down they started running away from the group to go back to their rooms and I had to chase them down and stop them. Then, when we were at the institute building, we discovered they were gone again. We had like half of the coordinators/building counsellors trying to find them and eventually they showed up. But aside from that we didn't really have any problems--even those boys were really good most of the time, not to mention funny. Also, one of my girls had a birthday while we were there--Baylee--that was fun. She's so cute! And I know this is random, but it's one of the things that sticks out the most to me--the dances were SO hot! It's really quite disgusting if you stop and think about it because not only was it hot, it was humid! And just where do you think that humidity was coming from? Answer: the massive amounts of sweat coming off everyone in the gym which consequently had no air circulation whatsoever. But it was still fun--although I was still glad when I had dance duty which meant that I got to go and guard the exits for the building and get out of the stifling, disgusting heat. I'll try to remember to upload a picture of my group, but I haven't put it on my computer yet

Family

This weekend I have had the opportunity to really contemplate about the subject of family. On Saturday, April 11th my grandpa Don Walter Kleinman passed away. It was a blessing for him that he was able to go pretty quickly and without too much pain, and it has also proven to be a blessing for my family as well. We have all drawn closer together and been kinder to each other in the few days since his death. It has also been a happy time anticipating the arrival of my extended family from Phoenix--some of whom will be here later today with the rest following tomorrow. Also, my sister Brooke flew in last night from California and will be here until Saturday! I love having our family all together like this. My family is the most important thing to me in the world--I would rather do things with them at home than go out with friends. And that is one of the main reasons that I love having the Gospel of Jesus Christ in my life. Through Him we can all live eternally as a family. Having been sealed together in the temple for time and all eternity, there is not much that could stop us from being together forever. It's a very comforting thought during this time of Grandpa's death. When my family went to visit my grandma and tell her the news she seemed to take it very well and I know that is a product of the comfort of knowing that they can be together forever.

Temples, Temples, Temples...

It seems like every time I hear a lesson of a spiritual nature lately it has something to do with temples. Some of these are to be expected, since I'm in a family history class, and we've been studying the portions of the Doctrine and Covenants that have to do with revelations about the temples, but I hear about them from more than just those two classes. This past weekend was the Latter-day Saint General Conference and I was surprised at how many of the speakers talked about the temples. Maybe it's just because I've been learning so much about the temples lately that I noticed it more than before, but it was a recurring lesson-learned throughout General Conference for me. There was a time in my life when I went to the temple every week with my sisters and a few of my friends. We would wake up early before we had school and go to the temple before we had to get to school. Despite the early hour we had to go in order to be able to make it back for school on time, I really loved attending the temple regularly. I felt the blessings of attending the temple in my life as well--I just felt like my life was going more smoothly than it would have otherwise. I knew the benefits that would come to my life through regular temple attendance, but I didn't fully understand the extent of the blessings. While I've been learning about the temple this past little while I have realized more of the blessings that can come from going to the temple--not only personal blessings but more about the blessings that we can bring to those who have died and still need their temple ordinances performed for them. The blessings are literally endless. A couple of years ago I went to Central America with a seminary group for a Book of Mormon lands tour. While we were there we attended a ward conference in Guatemala. With what little Spanish I am able to understand this is what I got from their Sacrament Meeting: You should do everything in your power to be able to go to the temple (whether he was talking about for the first time or on a regular basis I didn't catch)--even if it means going without meals to be able to save up money for transportation to the temple. This ward is located only a few hours away from the temple in Guatemala City but it was still quite a sacrifice for them to be able to make the trip to Guatemala City in order to attend the temple. And here I am within fifteen or so minutes of two temples with many others nearby and I am no longer attending regularly. I get caught up in life and miss out on all of the wonderful blessings of the temple--when others would make great sacrifices to even be able to go once. I think that's one reason why the messages of the temple have been hitting me so strong lately--I need to make better use of them.

Protection

Over the past week and a half I have had many events occur in my life that were a little out of the ordinary for me. For one thing, I went with my sister and two of my neighbor friends to visit my other sister in California. We drove through the night on our way there and we drove through a blizzard on the way back. Then again, this past weekend I drove with some other people in my family and met my sister from California halfway between us to exchange cars, becuase I am buying her car from her. On the way there we had to deal with tremendous wind--wind which had blown over three semis that we passed. And on top of that I had a lot of end of the semester schoolwork to do. But somehow I made it through it all. Throughout these experiences it struck me again and again how important this life is. We're here for a purpose and when we keep that purpose in view (whether it be increasing in knowledge through schoolwork or building a testimony of the Gospel) the Lord will take care of us in whatever way we need. I saw that when we had troubles on the road. Those two drives were the two scariest drives I've ever been on, but I felt protected the whole time.

Eternal Symbols

This past week I studied varous religious paintings in the Museum of Art at Brigham Young University. The details and the symbols used in these paintings blew me away when the educator from the museum taught my class about some of them. I've seen these paintings many times before, but every time I see them I get some new meaning from them. It's easy to miss significant details in paintings (at least for me) and when those details are overlooked, you miss part of the message the artist was trying to portray. One of my favorite paintings I studied (which I actually only really studied on a previous visit to the museum) is the one above. The main details I got right away: the chairs (one standing upright the other tipped over) and the red and white cloths. It represents Christ's atonement and our final judgement. Christ is represented by the upright chair and the white cloth because he is pure. We are the other chair and the red cloth. But as said in Isaiah 53, "Though your sins be like scarlet they shall be as white as snow." Through Christ our cloth can become white--we can become purified when we submit ourselves to His will. I needed some prompting for some other details though. At first I didn't even notice the faint circle encompassing the whole scene. The circle can represent many things, from eternity to inclusion. Simply put: Christ's atonement is for everyone and is eternal. One final detail I will talk about is the dark rectangle behind the chairs. At first glance it appeared to be just that to me, but after looking a little closer it looked like a tunnel which you had to pass by the chair to enter. This suggests that our final judgment once this life is over is not the end. We can live forever through Christ--for eternity. I love this painting and I'm sure there are so many things I can still glean from its symbols.

Personal Histories

On Saturday (Feb. 27th) I attended the Church History Symposium at BYU for my Doctrine and Covenants class. A lot of what the speakers at the symposium talked on was more technical than I really understood, but when Elder Marlin Jenson spoke at the end it struck me that a large part of the history of the church is the history of its members. I feel like I need to write my personal history--as much as I dislike writing, I feel like it's something I should do. I've begun the process a little bit because of my family history class, but there is still so much that I need to do. We are required to write about five episodes of our lives for my family history class, but that's not quite enough. A daily journal is the ideal way for me to do this, but I've never been good at writing regularly. The closest I have to it is this blog and I don't say too much about my life in here...so I have a lot of work to do. One line from Elder Jenson's talk really stood out to me. He said, "If God has commanded it, do it." It's as simple as that. We have been commanded to keep a journal/create a personal history and we just have to do it. It's going to be hard for me, but I'm going to try!!

The Publishing of the Scriptures

We didn't have Doctrine and Covenants this past week because 1)there was a holiday and 2)he gave us a day to visit the Crandall Printing Museum. I didn't visit the museum because I already had for his class last year. It is extremely interesting and I encourage anyone who can to go and check it out. They take you through the history of the printing press, beginning with the Gutenberg press, up until the present time. I had never realized how detailed a process it was to create the printing press in the begining--what with the casting of the letters and getting them to face the correct direction, the consistency of the ink, and the organization of the letters into pages, etc. Having grown up with printers hooked into computers I never appreciated the process of printing before. Aside from the invention of the printing press in all its complexity, it also never occured to me how perfectly everything worked out for the printing of the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine of Covenants. The church was lucky to have access to a printing press in the the places where it was needed in order to bring forth the scriptures. Because of the invention of the printing press, people all over the world have been able to read the words of the prophets, old and new. It made access to the scriptures affordable to the common person. Without it, the gospel would not have spread as it has and there would be people all over the world who would not have the joys associated with reading the scriptures.