Sunday School

Looky here, we made the "Mormon Times' What's Happening" section.
Probably one of a handful of times cute little Oklahoma's been on that list.
So this is the culmination of the last half year's practices & activities that have eaten our lives that our youth and youth leaders have been focusing on.

There have been about a zillion emails marked URGENT, URGENT, READ NOW, LAST ONE, NO-SORRY NOT REALLY, READ THIS NOW.

There have been lots of forms to fill out and forms that required parents' signatures that we didn't know we needed to get.

There has been costume confusion and lots of not hearing what's been said.

And there's been one Sister the mrs. (adults are called by Sister and Brother and their last names by tradition in our church), a young women's president on the edge, who did NOT have a panic attack last Sunday and who DID have the beautiful thought while driving to church this morning that there will be no more of those emails. There can't be. There is not enough time to deal with things and get all the youth's costume stuff together like they asked by Thursday morning at 6:50am when we are meeting to travel down to the awesome Youth Conference that the performance is just a third of. By this time next Sunday it will all be over. And I was a little bit sad.

Yes, me, the mrs. has had a change of heart.

When I first heard about this whole thing, I was a little frustrated. They'd be taking away "our" time with the girls. It'd be a lot of work. I might have to sew something (eeekkkk & phew I didn't have to).

But, as the months have gone by, the three wards in our building joined forces to help our kids learn their dances and songs together.  And after a couple months of that, the stake started to have all the practices together as a stake - which was a huge blessing. I've met some wonderful women from those other wards that I don't think I would have met otherwise and I am thankful. The kids have learned their dances & had opportunities to get out of their normal lives a little bit.

It's been awesome to watch them practice a "Bollywood" number that is just so fun to do! It's been fun to watch the ones that chose to do the "Polka" practice with partners and without. It's been fun to listen to my miss s talk about her take on the whole thing.

But I think one of the big things that hit me happened yesterday.

miss s and 15 other kids from the choir for the show had the opportunity to go to a recording studio & record tracks that will play with two songs that the entire cast will be singing in the performance.  She asked me to come with her & of course I said yes.

There was a 14 year old girl at the studio- the studio owners daughter. She was so excited to see the kids there. I guess earlier in the month there had been another group there recording instrumentals for the performance. She told us that she had that music on a CD and was listening to it before bed because it was so beautiful. She helped her dad and hung out the whole time with us. (Well, I don't know what she did while some other moms and I went on a sandwich run to possibly the slowest Subway in Oklahoma or the entire USA.)

When we were serving up the sandwiches, the people in the room were talking about missionaries. Because I knew the young lady wasn't LDS, I whispered to her what a missionary was (in our church) and what the people were talking about. Somebody said something about being recently baptized and she said, "I want to do that. I need to get baptized." Wow.

Now I don't know if she meant baptized into our organization or just baptized in general, but I really think that all these LDS youth have made an impression on her and that she's felt the beautiful, peaceful spirit that comes through the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The chaos of the past months slipped away.

I don't know what will come of it, but hopefully she will have the opportunity to learn and make a choice that will bless her live eternally.

And I will not let 24 out of 30 empty costume bags, URGENT emails and some missing signatures stress me out.
The picture is way bigger than that.
Way bigger.
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PS-The stake has really done the majority of the work on the costumes, they are awesome! We only have to collect a few items from the youth to add to their stake costume bags.
And 5 out of the 16 kids recording were from our ward. Pretty awesome.
And, as always, here's a link to mormon.org if you are curious or have any questions, or email me :).