New Beginnings - Come unto Christ

Last Sunday was New Beginnings for the young women in our ward. New Beginnings is an annual event for all young women and their parents. This event provides an opportunity for leaders to express their love for the young women, encourage parents to help their daughters in Personal Progress, and introduce new young women to the young women program. 

New Beginnings is usually closer to the beginning of the year, but since this was the first New Beginnings for a lot of our girls (we have a ton of new Beehives and new converts) we wanted to give them a chance to work on their Personal Progress a little bit more. And I'm so glad we did. We had 2 new girls complete the entire Faith value in less than a year. Also, recently we have been experiencing a surge of young women attendance and participation. We still have many inactive girls, but we went from having 1 or 2 girls on Sundays to 8-12. It has been an amazing experience to see friendships form among the young women and watch this increase of testimony and faith happen.  

Every year, the youth general presidencies along with the prophet choose a theme for the youth to focus on. This year's theme is "Come unto Christ and be perfected in Him and deny yourselves of all ungodliness" (Moroni 10:32). Along with this theme, we incorporated a lot about coming unto Christ by going to the temple. I am so excited to have the temple open so soon and go to the temple with these girls. 

LouLou's first time conducting music. She did great. 

We had so many girls and families show up (all but 3 girls came), that we didn't have enough seats for everybody. The girls sang a beautiful musical number with Vicky, our youngest, on the piano. The food was great. The messages were inspired. I am so thankful for this calling. It can be very hard at times, especially when the young women aren't cooperative or when you put so much effort into something and you don't see the immediate results. But this activity and recent experiences have been a testimony to me that your efforts in the gospel are never wasted. I'm so excited for this upcoming year with these girls.