Feasting

It's been a smorgasbord. A feast. A fancy 6-course meal where none of the dishes are small appetizers or desserts....all are full entrees.

Alright, alright. Enough of the eating analogies. (Maybe I'm hungry?) But I have been very literally spiritually fed over the past few weeks. The neat thing about spiritual food is that you never get overly and uncomfortably full. Content, yes. But there is always room for more. So you really can feast on the word of God.

A quick rundown of my delicious entrees?
*The Brigham City open house in August on my birthday. (See here)
*A stake fireside with guest speakers, President Callister and his wife...the Bountiful Temple president.
*The Brigham City Temple dedication.
*The General Relief Society meeting. (I got to attend live at the Conference Center in Salt Lake City.)
*Our ward day at the temple where President Callister spoke to us again before we began our service that morning. I wish for you all, the opportunity to listen to President Callister someday. He is something special. (See here for last year's day at the temple experience)
*And then of course....General Conference. The main-est of the main courses. Like the turkey at Thanksgiving.

And it was glorious, all that feasting. Spiritually uplifting and rejuvenating and strengthening, all of it. But wasn't General Conference especially special this year? Like the talks were meant specifically for me. (Maybe you felt they were all for you?) Sunday afternoon I was left wishing we still had one more session to go. And wasn't President Monson's surprise missionary age announcement amazing? The funniest part of conference...watching the faces of the youth as the cameras panned across the audience during that announcement, and realizing that mine and Bryan's faces looked similar.

After each session of conference, I logged into Facebook. (Okay, okay...hear me out.) I find it fascinating to read all the status updates wrapped around my friends' experiences with conference. Their favorite speakers, reactions to various announcements, quotes from talks. I enjoy seeing what stood out to people and whether or not it was the same thing that stood out to me.

My favorite quote from President Dieter F. Uchtdorf:
We shouldn’t wait to be happy until we reach some future point, only to discover that happiness was already available—all the time! Life is not meant to be appreciated only in retrospect. “This is the day which the Lord hath made … ,” the Psalmist wrote. “Rejoice and be glad in it.

But what really blew me away was reading the updates on Rebekah's and Julianne's Facebook news feeds. Their friends, some I knew, most I didn't... were on fire with conference! They were especially excited with the missionary news and were counting down months (or years) until they could submit their papers. They were quoting apostles, they were "loving" conference, it was their "favorite weekend." And I was equally stunned as I was delighted. I have no doubt that my friends and I were nowhere near as strong as these kids are when we were their age. We were not glued to the TV, we were not taking notes (unless required by a seminary teacher.) We tolerated the long weekend, more than anything else. I don't think it was until college that I even started to understand the gloriousness that is General Conference. But these kids....they are just young teens in jr high and high school. Teens who have to be stronger than I was to make it in this day and age. And I got a little choked up reading update after update. Wow. Truly...just, wow.

So I have feasted good and plenty over the past few weeks. And right now I am full. Thankfully there will always be room for more because I will always be hungry. But this good, full, contented feeling I have....I hope I can continue to keep that. To feed myself in such a way, even without the big entrees I have had the privilege to partake of lately, that I never find myself starving.