my first EFY session

I successfully completed my first week of EFY! It was so much harder and exhausting than I imagined it would be, but I had some really good experiences that made it worth it. I was a counselor over fifteen girls who were all between the ages of 13 and 15 and I guess I forgot what an emotional and somewhat awkward stage of life that is. :) It was a rough time getting everyone up and going in the mornings and separated from cell phones and on time to meetings and wearing modest clothes all the time but we made it through! I loved my girls so much!! It's amazing how Heavenly Father can bless you to feel a little bit of the love He has for His children when he puts you in a position of responsibility over them. It blows me away sometimes when I think of all the little things He does for us and the people/experiences He leads us to in our lives that help us to learn and grow closer to Him. I was struggling with some things myself and there were so many times throughout the week when I just felt the Savior's love so strong and knew my prayers were being heard.
My favorite part of the week was probably the devotionals we had every night. We all got in our pajamas and would gather in one of the girls apartments to study the scriptures together and I taught them a lesson on one of the Christlike attributes from Preach My Gospel. It was so cool! I haven't had very much experience teaching in church and stuff besides Visiting Teaching so I felt like I grew so much! I loved it when I was teaching and I could feel the Spirit so strong and I knew that Heavenly Father had something He wanted my girls to learn and understand. I loved how excited they got about the stories in the scriptures! It was so fun to watch how interested they were and to see when the Spirit touched their hearts. It was such a testimony to me that the light of Christ is something you really can see in people. It makes them so beautiful! Wow that sounded really corny.... I also loved saying prayers with them after devotional right before we went to bed. Honestly, I just loved them!! It's cool how feeling the Spirit can bring you so much closer together.
My other favorite part of the week was Thursday when we had the Young Women's activity. All of the girls in our session (there were probably about 200) gathered in the chapel and we had a morningside type thing from our session director. (Oh that was a cool thing too...my session director was the same one Jami and I had when we went to EFY at BYU-I! It brought back so many memories that I love) Anyway, the first thing we did at the YW activity was stand up to say the YW theme. I was feeling kind of emotional and tired that morning anyway, so as soon as we said "We are daughters of our Heavenly Father who loves us and we love Him" I just started to cry. Then we sang the EFY medley and the girls sounded so pretty singing the Sisters in Zion part so that got me going again and I pretty much just cried for like 2 hours straight. I'm pretty sure my girls thought I was crazy. :) I haven't cried for so long...it was kind of wierd. It felt good though and I felt so peaceful and loved. Bro. Kunz (our session director) spoke about when the Savior came to the Americas and the people got to feel His wounds and spend time with Him "one by one." Then he had us imagine what it would be like if the Savior walked into the room and we all had the chance to spend some time with Him just by ourselves and how it would feel. The spirit was so strong! It was amazing and a huge answer to my prayers! I realized that I am so lucky because even though I can't see the Savior face to face right now I still have the chance to pray and spend time with Him every day. I think I've been so focused on myself and other things that I forgot to really spend time with Him and feel the peace I need. So yeah...this has pretty much turned into a novel but it really was so amazing!

Our company's name was Made of Light and we had so much fun getting to know each other. It was cool to watch the kids "bond" and build friendships. They were so funny!
My girls!

Our guys were seriously so amazing! They were so funny and so thoughtful! It was cute to see how they helped each other build their standards and testimonies. They made up a ribbon dance to the song Colors of the Wind from Pocahontas for the Variety Show that was so funny I thought I would die laughing! I tried to video it but my camera ran out of batteries halfway through so it didn't work. The little boy in the middle front of this picture was dressed up like Pocahontas and the rest were behind him doing an interpretive dance with streamers. It was beyond description. :)

The counselors were really cool and fun to get to know as well. The girl with black hair on my right was my roomate and so was the blonde girl in the picture below. They were both way cute and fun girls and I'm so happy we had the opportunity to know each other and be friends!

Pizza night!

Two of my girls during scripture study. These two were so sweet and pure! They reminded me of the kind of person I want to be and I'm so greatful I got to know them for the week.

This kid was amazing! His name is Taylor and he was in our company. The picture isn't very good so you can't really tell, but his left arm was cut off right below the elbow when he was born. He had such a good attitude though and it was really cool during the variety show because he played the guitar while his friend Kade, who was also in our group, played the piano and sang. They were actually really really good but the coolest part was watching how Taylor played. He taped his pick to the end of his arm on a little cup thing and used that to strum the chords. He was so awesome.

For our service project we knitted hats.