Sunday, June 22, 2008

Youth Conference

This last week I spent 2 days with more than 500 teenagers. It was a little insane, but also a lot of fun. It was a 4-stake youth conference put on by the church. They wanted to make it into a mini EFY so they held it at a university campus and I was assigned to be the leader of a group of 9 girls. Our group's name was Hope. I was originally assigned to Diligence but my male counterpart's wife who is 5 months pregnant went into the hospital so I was assigned to her girls instead; so there were 9 girl, 5 boys and 2 counselors.
Although I was a little wary going into it and very physically wary when it was over I had a great time. I have never been part of something like this as a leader. I am usually the receiver of activities not the one doer of the activities. In a group of 15 people, especially teenagers, you always worry about people not getting along. I felt very blessed in this that no one had any personality conflicts and we all stuck together pretty well. One of my favorite parts of the weekend was when some very "tough" guys were crying like a baby as they recounted their experience over the last two days.
While I will not be volunteering to be an EFY counselor in the future this experience was really great and instilled some "hope" in me that the future generations are not all going to pot.
I don't have the picture of our whole group yet but here are a few I took:

5 comments:

Kirsten said...

Had I been a leader I would of asked to be in charge of the despair and procrastination groups. Because even youth conference should have opposition in all things.

Jess said...

Hence the reason you were not a leader:)

Elizabeth said...

I have always wanted to do something like this - for some reason, telling kids what to do and then having them look up to me for my wisdom has just always been my thing...so in sum, I am totally jealous of your life. Want to trade? (except can I keep Matt? You can just move to Idaho and have no human interaction)

mike and chenoa said...

So do you have your own little swarm of Jessica devotees now? I bet Chester would have loved to help you keep the kids in line.

Jess said...

May be not devotees but I have gained many new facebook friends.