CEANA- EFY

Sorry, I haven't been able to catch up on stuff, but I decided to start with EFY since that is the thing I would have blogged next. This year's theme was Being An Example of the Believers 1 Timothy 4:12. For all of you who don't know, EFY stands for Especially For Youth. It is a week-long camp, I guess you could call it, where kids from our church that are 14 and up go for a spiritual week. It's not like Girl's Camp, which is actually camping. At EFY we stay in dorms (at Weber State University, in this case), and we are around LDS members the whole week. I think you will catch on as I explain the days...

Monday morning- Grandma Afton drove me down to Ogden, where the university was, and we got checked in all right. Apparently the people there were worried about the swine flu, so they were checking everybody's temperatures. We got a CD with this year's music on it (every year they hand out a special EFY CD with music on it about that year's theme), a lanyard (name tag), booklet, and movie. The movie has lessons on it that are based on this year's theme. I got my room key, and we were told that we were on the 10th floor of that building. Thank goodness for elevators! I had a window in my room, so I had a nice view of Ogden. It was esp pretty at night. We got my stuff put in my room, and we were going to head out for lunch. We had some questions about what we were supposed to do, so we decided to ask the girl next door, which I later (in the week) found out that her name was Savannah Astle. A.K.A the girl I was closest to at EFY. If you are reading this, HI SAVANNAH! Anyway, we asked her, then Grandma found that she hadn't had lunch yet, so we decided to treat her to lunch. You see, check-in was at 11am, and they weren't feeding us lunch that day. We ended up at Subway, and we got to know each other better. We talked about family, and her past year at EFY, this year was her second year. So she kinda knew how the flow was going to be like. We came back on campus, and we said our final goodbyes, and Savannah and I headed up to our rooms. We went into her room after I finished getting settled in. We weren't roommates...yet. We ended up chatting for at least an hour and a half on her bed, waiting for our rommates to show up. Neither one of our roommates showed up. At all. It was the same way with another one of our girls too. So, we only ended up with 7 girls in our group. We talked about where we live, and school, and where our roommates could be. It was good bonding time, I thought. Later we were having a meeting in Savannah's room with all of our girls and our counselor. Our group included me, Savannah, Hollie F., Hannah C., Ashlyn D., Annie D., and Michelle B., and our counselor was Kristen L. We had a get-to-know-you game, and we said random things about each other, like how I am allergic to green peas. I love to eat them, but I am allergic. Anyway, we did that until we had to go down to meet our other half of our "company", which was the guy half. There was a 2:1 ratio, guys to girls, well, almost. There was 12 guys, not including our guy counselor. It was pretty awesome! We played some team-building games, but we still kinda separated ourselves, between guys and girls, which is not how it was by the end of the week. :) We played a game that was kind of like duck-duck-goose, except the person who was it (mostly the counselors) said duck, and they would have you answer a random question. It was pretty funny, we had some good laughs. Our company name was Contend With Anger by the way. All of the other groups had different names too. The next thing we did was walk over to another building where we had a "rules/regulations/orientation" presentation. It was also a preview about what we were going to do that week. We also met our session director, Bro Smith. I liked his devotionals/FHE lessons throughout the week. He is a good speaker. After that we had dinner, and our whole company pretty much sat together. I remember us having salad at every meal, except breakfast, every single day, but I can't remember what the main course was. After dinner we went back to where we were before for the rules talk. Bro Smith gave his first devotional (for this session) on being an example in word and conversation. In the little booklet they gave us at registration, it also has room for notes too, so I was able to take some good notes. After that we spent some more time with our company, and we set some goals. Goal #1: to be the most grateful group in this session. Goal #2: to be able to read Moroni 1-9, so we could read chapter 10 as a company on the last night. I think that is what we started with. We couldn't have too many goals, because then we wouldn't be able to concentrate on anything but our goals, and anyway, it was a good start. After that we went back to our dorms, and we had a small devotional, just with the girls, given by Kristen, our counselor. She gave a great devotional on recognizing the Spirit. After that we had lights out.
I thought that this was the longest day, because I didn't really know anyone, and we didn't really know what we were doing, and we had a lot of time to kill. It was a pretty good first day though.
It is almost 11:30 here, so I am going to go, but I will get the whole week in+ ASAP.
Pics are coming next week!
Missing you, hope you are having a wonderful summer!
Happy Sammich