My current calling in church is as the assistant laurel adviser. That means I'm in charge of personal progress for the laurels. I'm not doing a very good job, not really connecting with the girls, and not feeling like I'm magnifying my calling. I suppose we all do some things better than others.
As part of the personal progress team, I was responsible for planning and carrying out this year's Evening of Excellence. Our annual theme has been Come Unto Christ, and in trying to come up with something to go along with that, I watched a video the Church produced of a group of youth singing about letting Christ in to our lives. There is a line that says something about opening the door and letting Him in. I had this idea that we could use doors painted the value colors as the central idea of our evening's activities. I don't like to go overboard with Church stuff because I feel that the real message can get lost in all the fluff that accompanies it. But my fellow personal progress people, Elizabeth Elder and Tawny George, liked the idea, so we went with it.
Next question? Where do we get eight doors to paint the value colors? We sent out an email on our neighborhood Google group asking if anyone had doors they were looking to get rid of. Would you believe it, someone had two. I had a white one sitting in my garage, meaning we really only needed five. Two days after we'd decided on this door theme, I heard an advertisement on the radio for the Habitat For Humanity store. The coming weekend, they were having a 50% off all used items sale, so I went and bought five doors, all different, and they only cost me $30. I thought that was a deal. The following week I got together with Elizabeth and Tawny to paint the doors. In spite of the fact that we had a combined total of six pre-school children running around, it only took us an hour and half to paint seven doors, and no one ended up with paint on them.
The second part of the "decor" were words. This year each girl chose one word to focus on during the year that would help them draw closer to Christ. Some of the words were patience, serve, reverence, reach out, love. We put those words on the doors and then asked the girls to share an experience either about their word or from their personal progress efforts over the year.
In the end, I think everything turned out very nicely. Having each young woman stand in front of the doors and bear testimony was great, and I think visually, it was interesting. I was pleased with the way the evening turned out.
The Young Women
Back row: Courtney Bird, Regan Mitchell, Emma Austin and Madi Whitney (neither of whom can be seen very well), Sadie Tayler, Madisen Davis, Morgan Richards, Kennan Richards, Micah Richards, Anna Mason, and Rachel Oyler
Front row: McKenna Neyman, Quincy Mitchell, Pauline Benavides, Hannah Liau, Arden Covey, Kamila Stice, Juliet Tayler, Kiera Morgan, and Taraz Stice
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