Young Women in Excellence

We had a fabulous time at the Young Women in Excellence Program last night. The 2nd ward did a phenomenal job decorating and planning for the event. I walked inside the gym and had to double check that I was in fact at the YW in Excellence Meeting and that I wasn't crashing a wedding reception or something even fancier. The music and the ambiance were simply spectacular. Although the lanterns, popcorn, lemonade in Mason jars, and value banners were all impressive, the best decorations of all were the quilts that the YW made. They looked great (even the unfinished pieces!).

The theme for the night was "Let the Son In." I loved the way the guest speakers, Jay and Lucy Johnson, explained the importance letting the light of Christ in your life and then spreading that light to others. I loved Sister Johnson's talk so much that I'll give a quick recap here so that you look back and remember it over and over again:

Lord Byron said that "History, with all her volumes, hat but one page," or in other words, "History repeats itself." We often think of that as a negative thing, but there is much to be learned through repetition. The Lord uses repetition with us all the time and there are plenty of examples of cycles or repetitive patterns in the scriptures. In addition to the pride cycle from the Book of Mormon, we can see a pattern of how the Lord sends His people on a journey---Adam and Eve, Moses, Abraham, Lehi and his family, the Jaredites, and even the early pioneers are all examples of how these people were in one place, but the Lord commanded them to go elsewhere, and they endured a journey to get to a different, better place. This is similar to the Plan of Salvation and how we are all currently on a mortal journey to get to a better place back with our Heavenly Father. Another way to apply this concept of a journey is to consider adolescence as a journey towards adulthood. We can grin and bear it to get through the problems and the waves of adolescence, but we can also turn to the Lord for help. Looking specifically at the story of the Jaredites and the brother of Jared, the Lord helped the Brother of Jared to create egg-like barges to help them cross the ocean. There were two obvious problems with these enclosed ships---they didn't have air and they didn't have light. The brother of Jared took the matter to the Lord, and he basically fixed the first problem for him by telling him to put a hole at the top and the bottom and open one of them up to breathe. Heavenly Father fixed our first problem of mortality by sending his son, Jesus Christ, to be our Savior. For the second problem of no light, the Lord told Mahonri Moriancumer (is that shorter to write than the Brother of Jared?) to come up with a solution. Being the craftsman that he was, Mahonri Moriancumer decided to molten 16 small stones out of a rock (side note: we are not sure on the details of how he did this, but when rock is "molted", it is melted at a high temperature, so it's safe to assume that the Brother of Jared had some type of experience working with stones in this way). The brother of Jared was familiar enough with rocks that taking them to the Lord for light was something within his bag of talents. We are all similarly blessed with talents---some are athletes, cooks, actresses, writers, scholars, speakers. We can take these talents to the Lord to have them magnified and allow him to "touch" our talents with light. This way, they will be magnified and this will bring light to our journey and also to others. 

Isn't that a beautiful message? I loved it. Sister Johnson also reminded us that we could remember the importance of Christ as the light in our life by remembering that there are 16 letters in "The Lord is My Light" and there were 16 stones that the Brother of Jared brought before the Lord. Brother Johnson also shared a lovely message building on President Hinckley's quote that, "when you save a girl, you save generations."

Sadly, we didn't get to conclude the evening by sending our lanterns off into the nighttime sky, but we hope to do that another time soon. Our YW are so impressive and I'm glad they got to enjoy a special evening! Good job, everyone!