FAIR's Rising Generation

Posts Tagged ‘priorities’

I know you’re not supposed to express nervousness (and a few other emotions) when giving a talk, and I’ve automatically applied this rule to the blog posts. So, for your sake I won’t mention how nervous I am about doing a good job on this.

As this is my first blog post, I’ll introduce myself. My name is Christi, and at the age of fifteen, I am the youngest FRG member.

I’ve been wondering and wondering what I could possibly write about. What could I say that would make any difference to people I both know and don’t know? As the youngest member and just being me, I expected myself to write something different (I usually do), and I hope I’ve come up with something decent.

Recently the youth in my ward went on a temple trip, and thank heavens for it, or else I wouldn’t have been able to come up with anything to write.

This trip was special because we had two new beehives who hadn’t been in the temple before. It’s been over a year since we’ve had any new Young Women, so of course I was determined that they would enjoy their visit and feel the spirit.

It seemed to me that our temple trips had been getting less and less spiritual lately. I figured that it was because I was getting more and more used to the temple and the wonderful people inside it. However, after this temple trip I saw the real problem.

We started off by leaving the church late and in a hurry as usual. As soon as the driver had a free hand she turned on her iPod stereo and we listened to High School Musical and a bunch of mainstream songs to which everybody except for me knew the words. All we did the entire way was listen to music and talk about things having nothing to do with the temple.

Just before entering the temple, my friend leaned over and reminded me to turn off my cell phone. I’d just gotten my phone, and the thought of taking it to the temple had never crossed my mind. I asked myself why this hadn’t occurred to me and answered stubbornly, ”I have my priorities straight.”

Since we had more people than usual, we kind of rushed, and it seemed that we were done far too soon. Then a certain section of the young women (cough cough Beehives) took probably about half an hour in the bathroom playing with their make-up, talking about how excited they were to go to Dairy Queen. Dairy Queen after the temple has been a tradition since who knows when.

There were so many things wrong with this trip that it felt like a slap in the face to everybody above the age of fourteen. Nobody said anything, but I’m pretty sure that we were all hoping for a change–something to turn this around and make temple trips the spiritual experiences they had been before.

It saddened me greatly to have the beauty and overall wonderfulness of the temple overshadowed by improper motives, thoughts and conversations. For me the temple has always been a place of great peace and spiritual harmony where we fulfill very important practices which are key to our religion. However, it’s very obvious that the younger young women (cough cough Beehives) didn’t completely understand this. The older ones (including myself) could not prevent ourselves from being swayed; when you can hear a thirteen year old humming “Poker Face” right beside you, it’s hard to feel the spirit.

I didn’t really know what to do about it, in fact none of us did. But hey, that’s what the Bishop is for, right? He had the idea that instead of going to Dairy Queen we stay at the temple and have a picnic on the grounds. It’s things like this that have me convinced that the Bishop knows everything or can read our minds or something.

I think most of us breathed a sigh of relief. What a horrible thing it was to have our love of ice cream get in the way of our love for the temple.

Although nothing particularly miraculous or amazing happened while we had our picnic (which, lo and behold, the Bishop had been prepared for), I have the feeling that it’s the beginning of a better understand of the temple for all of us.

I cannot emphasize enough to you how truly important it is for us to get our priorities straight. Simply asking yourself questions like ”Which do I love more? The Temple or Dairy Queen?” can pave the way for better understanding and more spiritual experiences.

This story doesn’t really have much to do with the temple, but it’s a perfect example of how we must decide before we get into situations who we are and which spiritual path we wish to take.