Elder Bednar comes to Texas!

We were so lucky to have a special stake conference with Elder Bednar! It was incredible. Dan volunteered to help with the shuttle (since they were expecting 2000+ people and our parking lot is not that big) and had to be there at 8:00. The meeting didn’t start until 10:00, so we decided to be really smart and all just go with Dan so that we could get a soft seat in the chapel. When we got there we realized that we weren’t the only people with that fabulous idea. We got there 2 hours before the meeting started, and still ended up sitting almost halfway back in the cultural hall. It didn’t matter though. The biggest miracle of the day was that our kids sat perfectly reverent for 4 hours- throughout the whole meeting and the 2 hours before in hard metal chairs. We couldn’t walk around the building beforehand, because they made it very clear that there was no saving seats, and Dan was driving shuttle, so it’s not like one of us could have stayed behind to explain. I was very grateful they were so good. Elder Bednar’s talk was wonderful, just like I knew it would be. We were very excited, however, at the beginning of his talk. He told us that he had asked our stake presidency what he could do for the members of our stake, and they told him that our stake consists of a lot of graduate students and young families just starting out. He basically geared his whole talk around students and young families. Here’s the key points that I remembered:

*Happiness is not in the absence of a load, it is simply choosing the right load. It is so easy to think “I would be happy if only I didn’t have to….”, which is simply not true. We will always have something, we just need to choose the right things that will give us “spiritual traction”.

*Being a busy student (or a busy anything, for that matter) does not excuse you from serving in the church. When Elder Bednar was a graduate student he was married with 2 kids and served as the YM president and seminary teacher. WOW! Interestingly enough, he was the only one out of the 5 students in his graduate program (the other 4 were single guys with no other commitments besides school) who finished the program.

*Sometimes when we are raising our families we think we are “too busy” for family prayer, scripture study, family home evening, etc. THAT IS A LIE! (with heavy emphasis on that last sentence). He was VERY bold and direct on this one. I loved it. I think he even threw the word stupid in there a couple times in this part, after which Jacey’s eyes got big and she leaned over to me and said “Ooohh… Mom, the apostle said stupid! (which is a bad word in our house :)

*The real teaching in our home doesn’t necessarily come from the lessons we prepare for FHE, scripture study, etc. The real lesson learned is that we do these things consistently, even when it’s hard, because we want to be obedient and make the gospel a priority in our lives.

There was so much more, but I just don’t have all day to write about how wonderful it was. Another interesting note- at the beginning of the conference Elder Fluckiger (who is the seventy over this area) was talking about Hurricane Ike. The closer it got to making landfall, the projected path was supposed to go through Galveston, Houston, then come up through Dallas. Ike made landfall early Saturday morning. Elder Bednar was here along with President Uctdorf, Elder Nelson, as well as a couple members of the 1st quorum of the seventy. They were watching the forecast very closely from Utah earlier in the week, trying to decide if it was still safe for them to come. Elder Fluckiger prayed about it and felt like they should still come. So they got on a plane to come down here, even though the forecast hadn’t changed at all. After they got there, the storm turned east and missed us altogether. How cool is that? I'm so grateful for the opportunity we had to be at this conference.