General Conference

I'm not going to do a recap like Lisa does but I do appreciate her blog.  I just wanted to mention a few things about conference this weekend and some of my impressions.

I absolutely love General Conference!  I look forward to it for six months until the next one.  Lisa and I were talking a few weeks ago and I mentioned that I think they should make it quarterly instead of semiannual.  :-) Especially in these perilous times in which we live.  I know it is a lot of work for the general authorities especially for the Prophet and apostles to prepare at least one talk every six months.  I guess I should be grateful that it's semiannual.

Anyway, some of my thoughts from this weekend's conference thus far are that each session seems to go by so quickly.  It seems like it just starts and we are already singing the intermediate hymn.  Some topics that stood out to me were the plan of salvation or great plan of happiness, missionary work, we don't do missionary work to increase Church numbers -- we do missionary work to bring joy into people's lives, Joseph Smith, The Book of Mormon, Joy regardless of circumstances because of faithfulness in following Christ, staying close to Christ and not falling away even when we don't completely understand everything, repentance completely washes away any trace of sin, we live in perilous times -- stay close to the gospel of Christ.

I haven't seen the priesthood session yet but I did watch President Monson's talk from it.  Interestingly, he spoke of the Word of Wisdom and keeping our bodies healthy and clean.  He told a cool story about a young man in the Navy in World War II who I guess went overboard somehow and -- my volume is low on my computer so I couldn't hear very well :-) I hope I get the story right -- anyway they threw a rope down to the four people needing rescue and they had to climb the rope 40 feet up to the deck of the ship.  This particular young man started climbing and after getting about a third of the way up his arms were burning with pain and wasn't sure he could make it all the way.  He knew if he didn't keep climbing he would meet certain death in the cold ocean.  He said a prayer to Heavenly Father  and told him he had always tried to live right and kept the Word of Wisdom.  One of the promises in the Word of Wisdom is to have strength.  He told Heavenly Father he needed to receive the blessing from keeping the Word of Wisdom to have strength to finish climbing the rope.  After he finished his prayer he received the promised blessing of strength and made it up the rope without even breathing hard when he got to the top.  To me the story illustrates two things: first that the Lord will bless us when we keep His commandments.  Second that the blessing was always available but sometimes we have to ask.  Prayer is a form of work and work is an eternal principle.

There is still one more session but I wanted to put my thoughts down thus far.  I thought the MTC choir was exceptional on Saturday afternoon session.  I felt that the first song they sang was an extremely powerful testimony of the Prophet Joseph Smith.  I loved that all of the songs during a session were missionary songs.  It brought back memories of my own mission and my time in the MTC.

If you missed conference and didn't get a chance to see it yet, you can watch the individual talks on LDS.org now.  Within the next couple of days they will have the transcripts posted.  I highly recommend watching General Conference.  It is very inspiring and highly uplifting.

That's my two cents.