Youth Conference

      Not too many weeks after the YW retreat we had our ward youth conference. We had awesome connections in the ward and we took the kids on 4 days of adventuring (through a scout camp) in Jackson. I was only there for two nights and only got to participate in a full day of Kayaking, which was wonderful, scary and thrilling. I got lucky and partnered up with Audrey and we spent the day trying to avoid all the obstacles, with pretty good success. We never flipped over or fell out (thank goodness) but we struggled a time or two at staying on the right or best course. All of our efforts earned us the nickname of Upstream Fairies and we will laugh about that for a long time. The girls all did really well navigating after we made a few partner changes and I was so impressed with how the older girls took care of the younger ones. I'm also so proud of how adventurous our girls are, they are awesome!!
     After the weekend was over, it happened to be fast Sunday and many of the girls shared their testimony and how it was built over the weekend through the experiences they had during youth conference. Most of them were related to our kayaking adventure. Maybe that was because we felt like we needed heavens help from time to time, haha! But it was really easy to relate that experience of floating down the river to our life here on earth and the gospel. As we travel down the river we usually can never see the dangers that are ahead or under the water, which is why we need guides, leaders, prophets to steer us in the right direction and give us rules that we need to follow. It's all for our physical and spiritual safety and we just need to trust in them. As our kayak would get off course, we had a friend who is a river expert that would direct us from across the river or paddle over to us and tell us exactly what we needed to do to get back on that path. That's just like the Savior. He will reach out to us and help us when we are lost, confused or haven't made the best choices. It was a great learning experience and I am so glad that I got to have my own testimony strengthened on that trip with such great people!!