Our Philmont Scouting Adventure -- Day Two

(Three posts in one day. Unprecedented!)

For this second day at Philmont we were able to relax and enjoy the Sabbath. There were no real activities outside of church services, so the day was dedicated to family time. It is unusual to have a Sunday where Herman is not busy traveling to other units in our stake or sitting in meetings, so it was nice to have the whole day with him, and (Bonus!) he actually got to sit with us instead of on the stand. That was wonderful.

My day began super, super early. I woke up and felt like it was time to wake up. It turns out that it was only 5 am, but no matter what I tried, I just couldn't go back to sleep. I figured it would be good to get a head start on the showers anyway, so I went ahead and woke up. I always have a hard time sleeping when I am outdoors. I think my body just wants to wake up as soon as there is any amount of sunlight. The nice thing is that I am able to really enjoy the peace of the early morning before everyone else awakens and life gets busy again. An added bonus at Philmont ... the sunrise is absolutely GORGEOUS!

The official day began with Sunday services. They went backwards to what we normally do, starting with Primary/Relief Society/Priesthood, and ending with Sacrament Meeting. It felt sort of strange to be dressed in Sunday clothes at a camping facility, but only for a little bit. After getting to the meetings it felt fairly natural. We dropped the kids off at their different primary classes. Since we were not at an actual church the kids just had their lessons out on the main lawn. The teachers were people from the conference who had volunteered to help out. Most of these were members of stake presidencies and their wives who probably didn't always get the chance to teach a primary class very often. They were super great teachers. The neat thing about this primary was that it was led by Sister Stevens and Sister Esplin, the counselors in the general primary presidency. It isn't every day that you get to go to primary led by ladies in the general auxiliary presidency. But here is something else that I noticed ... the sharing time was super cute and well done, but there wasn't anything extraordinary about it. I think that the ladies in our ward do sharing times that are just as fabulous. It is good to know that my children have great teachers, whether we are at home or away. 

I got the chance to go to a giant Relief Society meeting. There were over a hundred and fifty women there. It was neat, but I have to admit that I think that Relief Society works best in a smaller, more intimate group. In a crowd this size it is easy to feel invisible. I have to admit that I felt completely out of place at first. Everyone else totally looked like they had their acts together. I never feel like I have my act together. But with time I started to see that we were all in about the same boat. I felt more comfortable as the meeting continued. I am never one to feel as if I need to comment on every point in a lesson, and that is even more true in a large group like this. So I stayed silent and was content to just listen and absorb. It was a nice lesson. Nothing fancy, but nice. Sunday school was much the same way. Nothing fancy, but nice. 

After the first two meetings we gathered our children together with us and attended Sacrament Meeting. The neatest thing about this meeting was seeing the huge number of young men blessing and passing the Sacrament. So awesome to watch! There were ten men blessing the Sacrament and twenty-five deacons passing to our super large congregation. I've never seen anything like it. Seeing these young men perform their priesthood duties made me appreciate just how important their roles are as I take the Sacrament. I wish I could have taken a picture of the moment. It was so wonderful.

The Sacrament Meeting itself was not anything too different than we would see at home, other than the fact that it was presided over by the young men general president. That was pretty neat. The talks were actually oriented a lot on scouting, which was different. You don't often hear talks on Sunday about scouting, but they were able to effectively talk about how scouting is essential for the young men of the Church and the things that they will be required to do in these latter days. President Beck talked a lot about the way that the Church dealt with the latest decision by the Boy Scouts to allow young men who are homosexual to be in scouting. This was a big deal decision by BSA, and there have been several groups who have chosen to leave scouting because of it. The Church is a huge part of scouting, and scouting is a huge part of the young men's program of the Church, so it was going to be interesting to see just how they would respond to the membership decision. Of course, the Church decided that the membership decision did not conflict with our official Church policies about scouting membership, so we decided to stay. What was interesting was hearing how the young men general board, the 1st Presidency, and the Quorum of the Twelve worked together to come to this decision. It wasn't a vote. It was trying to decide exactly where the Lord wanted them to go. The main point that I got out of this talk was this ... Revelation requires work and sacrifice. It takes time and effort to understand the Lord's will in our life. We can't just expect answers to pop into our head without any effort on our part. We have to do the work and make the sacrifices before we will get the guidance we seek. That is a message that would be prevalent for me throughout this week. It is something that I obviously needed to learn because I felt it repeated for me over and over again in various activities.

After church we had a good portion of the day for family activities. To be honest, this seemed a bit daunting to me at first since I would be at a place where I was unfamiliar with what to do. However, there were lots of opportunities for us to spend time together, and like I said before, it was nice to have such a laid back Sunday to spend all together (minus our three backpackers). There were some sweet moments for us as we spent the afternoon together. Katie opened up a new pack of Uno cards for us to play together, and she was having the hardest time getting it shuffled. As she worked with the pack, she calmly remarked, "When I choose my eternal companion, he will need to be a good Uno card shuffler." Herman is always talking about what three qualities would be most important in an eternal companion. For this day at least, "Quality Uno Shuffler" was in Katie's top three. It all has to do with where you are in life, doesn't it? 

JoJo is a special mama's boy. He loves me so much and often finds ways to explain just how much he loves me. Today he was saying how he never wanted to leave home. He only wanted to stay with me forever. I think that he is hearing us talk about Laney leaving us so soon, and that makes him think about the fact that someday he will have to leave as well. That doesn't sound so appealing to him now as a seven year-old. I tried to explain that he would have to leave to go on a mission someday. Without missing a beat he looked at me and said, "Well, they'll have to call me to go on a mission to 'the bottom of the stairs' so that I won't have to leave you." Awwww! I love him so much! I'm sure his attachment to me won't be quite so strong in another ten years when he has to make these big decisions, but part of me secretly fears the day when that happens. I love having someone so utterly devoted to his mama.

A neat thing about the Philmont area -- the wildlife is so people friendly. There are deer that walk freely through our campsite. They don't let people just walk up and pet them, but they don't show any fear toward us either. They just come in big groups, making their way along the path like a big group of tourists checking out the "foreigners" in their land.

Our big family activity this afternoon was making our family banner for the banner parade that would take place on Monday evening. I can't even begin to explain just how much this freaked me out. We were supposed to do this before we got to camp, but we never had time to do it. I really wanted for Laney to put it together because she is so good with these sorts of things. But it ended up being the six remaining Blaus who got the chance to be artistic. It didn't help that families were displaying their banners all over camp, and most of them were amazing. It was obvious that they were not whole family projects. Obviously they were created by one talented sewer, artist, or something. I felt the same way I do about the science fair projects at school. They may want for the kids to take a huge part in creating their display boards, but it is always obvious when Mom is the one who makes it. The banners were the same. I was getting some serious anxiety about our banner because there was NO WAY that I was going to be able to create anything nearly as fabulous as the ones I was looking at. But after a little mini meltdown I felt a bit better and we got to work as a family. I had bought the materials earlier, so we were able to make a nice fabric banner. We decided to just have our family name with stick figures representing each of us. Then the kids wrote things around the edge that were important to us as a family. Finally we put 1 Nephi 3:7 as our family scripture on the bottom of the banner with "WE will go and do" underneath. It actually turned out kind of nice, and I think that it really represented our family quite well. Mission accomplished. Phew!

 

Finally, in the evening Herman and I got to go to an adult fireside put on by Brother and Sister Gibson. Brother Gibson is on the general young men's board. This was a nice fireside to attend. My favorite moment was when Brother Gibson was talking about dating Sister Gibson. They had been friends for quite some time (I think he said that he might have dated her sister or something like that). One day they were talking, and Sister Gibson (who obviously wasn't Sister Gibson at the time) said, "Do you know why I love you?" Well, apparently she had never used the "L-word" with him before, so he was taken aback at first. Finally he said, "No." Then Sister not-quite-Gibson said, "I love you because you love the Lord more than you love me." Well, Brother Gibson went home that night and prayed and told Heavenly Father that he would do whatever it took to be worthy if it would be possible for him to marry that girl and have her for all eternity. It was just the sweetest little story, and it made me think about Laney heading off into the world. She will be in that position sooner than I can begin to imagine, and I sure hope that when she meets that guy some day he will have that same sort of feeling for her as Brother Gibson did for his future wife. It is so excited (and a little freaky) to think about the amazing experiences that are in store for Laney in such a short amount of time.

So day two ended on a high note. The big show begins tomorrow.