Going to General Conference

I've never been to see Conference live, but I've always wanted to. I was able to go to a Young Women's broadcast, but that's not QUITE the same. So when our bishop announced that he had tickets for Conference, Steve, without even asking me, got some tickets for us. Jake is too young to go, so it was just Steve, Cameron and I.

We dropped Jake off with my parents early Saturday morning, and off we went. The drive was VERY pleasant and drama free.

We arrived in Salt Lake City JUST as the first session of Conference got finished. We went downtown and ate lunch at Subway. We watched throngs of people walking down the street. It was quite the sight. People after people....it was awesome.

We finished our lunch, and decided that the sooner we parked and got to the Conference Center, the better.

Parking was almost a nightmare, but because we had a pass, we were safe. We quickly found a spot, parked and off we went for our long walk.

Once we got to Temple Square the people were OVERWHELMING! I'd forgotten that people use General Conference time to protest our church. One man was holding a sign, I never really read, but he began yelling, "You cannot enter heaven unless you are born again! HAVE YOU BEEN BORN AGAIN, YOU MORMONS!? Jesus saves, but you must believe in him!" He went on and on....I wanted to laugh at him, I mean, the NAME of our church is "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints." His name is RIGHT there!

We went to the door our ticket said to enter through, and were told by many helpers that we just needed to find a door, the door with the shortest line....

We went through the metal detectors, had my purse searched and went to find our seats. Cool enough, our section is on the second level almost STRAIGHT across from the rostrum.

I kept telling Cameron that when the Prophet came in, we'd stand in reverence and wait for him to sit, and to remember the feeling he felt when the Prophet came in. We sat excitedly for a while, talked with a few members of our own ward who'd gotten tickets as well....then there was silence as people stood. If you've never experienced being in the place where a prophet of the Lord is, it is truly special. The Spirit is SO strong.

Once he was seated, we all sat and waited for the Conference to start.

I will say this, if you're prone to fall asleep watching Conference at home, it's NO different in the Conference Center. I found myself nodding off. I didn't want to do that, so I doodled. I ended up doodling a whole page of curly-cues.

The messages were wonderful (like always) and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

At the end, I felt like we should just go straight home instead of following our plans, but then I brushed off my thought and didn't say a word. Little did I know, Steve had the same "thought...." What we NOW know was truly an impression from the Spirit we should have heeded.

When it was over, we visited some friends who'd moved to Layton, and stayed to play while Steve went to Priesthood session with our friend. By the time they got back, it was late, and we HAD to leave. It was raining buckets, but we were okay. Once we got to the Idaho boarder though, it was snowing, HUGE, FLUFFY snowflakes. With the lights reflecting off of the snow it looked like we were driving through space. You know how warp speed looks on movies and television?? Yeah, we were going warp speed....except it was only like 40 mph. We had to stop at a rest area to get our bearings, because the normal night-time tunnel-vision was 100 times worse with snow. We said a prayer, and slowly made our way home. We followed some sweet person most of the way through the snow and eventually made our own way once the snow dissipated. What's normally a 3 hour drive took us over 4 hours. But we made it home by midnight.

It was a great day, and one I wouldn't mind doing again, MINUS the snowstorm.