Cultural Celebration

We've had a lot of craziness lately. This will be post one or two or three this week to catch up. We are lucky to have a new, beautiful temple close to us. At general conference awhile back the Brigham City temple was announced, and we were all very excited. I lived in Brigham as it was being finished, toured, and dedicated. Marc moved to Brigham just in time for the touring and dedication, so we got to be apart of that exciting time. We met, dated, and were lucky to be married in that beautiful temple.

However, that isn't the temple I'm writing about today. At that very same conference, President Monson also announced the Fort Lauderdale temple. I had no idea, (while I was celebrating the Brigham Temple) that that temple would also be impacting my life.

Friday May 9th, we got to do a session here! 

I was able to be a tour guide at the temple many times. It was so neat to see how the temple affected people differently. I was even able to be the guide to someone who just moved from Germany a month ago. It was a really neat experience, and the answer to his sweet mothers prayers :)

I was also lucky to be on the front lines to help our youth prepare for the cultural celebration. There were some long days, some hot days, but some really great experiences. Eleven of my young women participated, and I am proud of them for all they did. I think they were rewarded with many blessings they recognize now, and more that will still unfold.

Our stake (The Miami South Stake) was represented in orange.

They are terrible pictures, but Elder Uchtdorf is speaking to the youth here. (Elder Christofferson was also in the audience, and Elder Holland came to a Saturday practice to speak to them. I was also able to see Elder Cook when I was doing tours at the temple. It was so neat to see these men come down to our little corner, especially to support the youth.)

Our stake put on the yellow helping hands t-shirts as they rebuilt the houses that were destroyed by a hurricane in the previous number. You can watch the whole show at:

www.lds.org/broadcasts/languages/florida-cultural-celebration/2014/04

at about 22 minutes they do their first dance, with all the stakes, at 59 minutes is their own number. At the end they join the other stakes in some final numbers.

The show ended by showing some temple pictures (around 1hr 22 minutes our above wedding picture shows up) that all blend into this beautiful mural. The huge picture of Christ is made up of hundreds of peoples temple pictures. The picture was then lifted to reveal the model of the Fort Lauderdale Temple behind it. One of our friends here helped make the mural- shout out to Nick! :)

Kind of blurry, but that's me with a few of my girls. 

Not all of our youth are pictured here, but the group that we could find right after the show.Well done guys!

We took a several pictures of this group- Niko in the middle did a different fantastic face in each picture.