retreat, treat, eat

The relief society sisters met at a huge house in Heber to treat, retreat, and also eat. Sometimes you have to retreat to move forward. I'm not sure about the others, but I personally retreated from my job, my family, my messy room, my clean hair, and my sleep. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who retreated from sleep, though, because I went to bed at 1:45am and there were still a slew of people up.

Much of the evening was filled up with spiritual and sisterly togetherness. The RS pres. gave us an interesting thought on visiting teaching where we ended up comparing visiting teaching to a supportive bra (a truer analogy was never set forth).

The bishop also gave a great message about how we use our time and what is important to us. He had us make a list of all the things that were important to us in this life. Some were very general in their list, and some were more specific, naming such things as forks, cute clothes and hair. Bishop then asked us to decide what matters the most to us on our list and then modified that to deciding what should matter the most. That's when I realized marriage wasn't even on my list. Maybe that's my problem. Then he asked us what we thought would be most important 5 years from now. That was when I finally scratched "pegged pants" off my list.

Before bed we were able to cram in a few more activities that included eating brownies and ice cream, playing the game "scream" (through which we discovered there aren't a lot of screamers in our ward), tricking the 20 questions orb of magic by picking "the temple" as our mystery item, painting each others toenails, and putting early to bedder's bras in the freezer (ok, I wish...it just would have fit so perfectly with the theme of the night. eg: visiting teachers often feel like they are left out in the cold...?)

This paragraph was supposed to be devoted to my sleeping hours, but I think I won't toy with your patience by replaying for you all the Neil Diamond songs I sang in my head (and maybe a little out loud) to entertain myself as I didn't sleep.

In the morning, we took the shortest, most beautiful, most full of horse dung - hike (walk) I've ever been on.

Cudos to the relief society enrichment (er... I mean, "meetings"?) committee for putting it all together!