General Conference

We had the opportunity to go to the morning session of General Conference on Sunday, October 3. We had to be in our seats by about 9:00 am in order to be ready for the Tabernacle Choir broadcast. All of downtown was packed with people and cars, so Rara & Papa dropped Ryan & me off at the corner by the church museum, and we went and got seats. Then they parked and came in and found us.

While Ryan and I were standing in line at our door, Chad Lewis (former BYU and NFL football player) started walking toward us. I said to Ryan, “There’s Chad Lewis!” just as he approached us. We said hi to him. Ryan thought that was pretty cool. Well, truth be told, so did I!

General Conference was great. Just as I have done for the past several years, I prepared a “conference packet” for Ryan to work on during conference. He had a lot of fun working on it through the session. Our session included talks by the members of the First Presidency as well as a couple of members of the Quorum of the Twelve. One of the talks was the somewhat controversial talk given by Elder Packer. I’m not going to comment on it either way, except to say that I’m disappointed that so many of my friends who were once active members of the Church are now using this particular talk to spew hateful messages themselves. For those who are arguing that it was a message of hate against a particular group, many of their comments could be defined in the same manner. With my family history, of course some of the things that Elder Packer discussed were very sensitive. However, I felt that, overall, the message was given with the spirit of love and encouragement, not hate, blame, and guilt. That’s my two cents.

When the conference session was over, we took Ryan's picture between pictures of some of his heroes, painted by one of my heroes. We also had a complete stranger take a picture of all of us outside the Conference Center.

Later Sunday night as we were doing Ryan’s bedtime routine, he said, “Mom, I have a new life plan. I’m going to play football for BYU, then be an engineer, then be a general authority.” Quite the aspirations! As one whose original life plan didn’t quite turn out (nor the back-up plan, nor the back-up, back-up plan), I tried to be encouraging, while still expressing that he may not necessarily be the one that makes some of those decisions. At least one of those is something that people generally can’t pursue and accomplish strictly on their own. We had a good discussion about it. I believe that Ryan is capable of many great things in his life, so it will be fun to see which “life plans” come to pass.

UPDATE: This is PERFECT! It's what I've been saying for over 15 years!