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April General Conference

Clint — Sun, 06 May 2012 20:51:11 +0000

This year our little LDS family had the opportunity to get tickets (they were free) to go and attend the last session of General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As most of your may know, the last session is Sunday afternoon at 2:00pm. Luckily, our family also had reserved that very same weekend at my grandfather’s condo up at Park City. We arrived early and picked out seats as close as we could to the front. Our seats, if standing at the podium, were on the far right of the conference center and we were about 15 rows up from the walkway that splits the bottom from the top of the center. We were pretty close, but not quite close enough to see the speaker’s faces very well. It didn’t matter though, directly in front of us were two television sets. One was showing conference with subtitles and the other was showing conference with a sign language professional. I found myself watching the sign language TV the most because of the interesting way that they communicate. I always tried to pick out what words they were trying to sign and I always wondered if they were keeping up with the speaker or not.

We had a great time at General Conference. This was the first time that Katie was able to attend because of the time restriction. Many people may not know but youth under the age of 8 are not allowed to attend. My guess is that they want silence in the conference center so that the speakers can be heard for television and radio. Anyway, it was a great experience. I think my kids were able to feel the awesome reverence that everyone has for the 12 apostles and especially for the Prophet of God. When President Monson walked in the room, everyone stood, everyone was silent. It was something to see, that many people in a huge conference room standing silently until President Monson sat was great to witness.

Below I have posted a video of some of the Highlights from April Conference.

Temple Ground Breaking

Clint — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 00:01:50 +0000

I was going through some old video footage from an external hard drive that I have. There are several hours of video of birthdays, kindergarden plays, songs, christmas’s etc. One particular spot on my video files shows our family over at the Twin Falls Temple grounds before the Temple was built. My Dad came up with a briliant idea one day to go over to the future temple site, after the official ground breaking, and do our own ground breaking. So, my Dad got out two of his shovels, painted them both gold and marched us out to the small patch of dirt that was used by the official ground breakers.

Below is our little video of our family doing our own “unofficial” ground breaking at the Twin Falls Temple.

New Theme

Clint — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 23:39:41 +0000

I’m trying out a bunch of new themes for LDSFamily.net. I don’t know how I like them yet so you may see several changes over the next few days and weeks. I don’t want it to look girly but I want it to look like a family site. I’m afraid that most “bloggers” out there, at least Mormon Bloggers seem to be female. I know there are some awesome male Mormon bloggers out there like “a minority report” and “Mormon Online” and “Mormon Cartoonist“. But in general, the blogger world is filled with females. Hence, most of the wordpress themes cater to what a woman would love to use on their blog. There arn’t too many “dad”, “father”, “male” type themes out there so I’m doing my best to make this website look more manly without it looking to dark and rough.

So, If you like the current theme, please let me know.

Christmas Videos

Clint — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 14:51:00 +0000

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has put out of bunch of Christmas Video on their YouTube channel this year. Below is one of them. I’ll put a link to the Mormon Messages Channel below. Enjoy

Mormon Channel

Any Question

Clint — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 21:16:01 +0000

When watching this video, is there any question that there is a God that created this incredible earth? The scripture that comes to mind when watching this video would be Alma 30:44.

Mormon Channel on YouTube

Clint — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 14:19:31 +0000

As I was reading some articles from the Back Bench of the Bloggernacle, I came across an interesting piece of information I thought I would share on this website. I discovered that the LDS Church has updated all of the New Testament Stories. You can find all of these videos at this website address. http://www.youtube.com/user/MormonMessages#g/c/299A568C7EF6A6CB. The video’s are not high quality action videos but I think they are good enough to keep kids interested in the stories of the Bible. In fact, this article talked about using one of these videos for their nursery lesson. What a great idea. Use your resources (as the scouts always say) and show a quick little video about a story from the New Testament. This is also a great resource for FHE (Family Home Evening). Below is the video that the article was talking about.

Martin’s Cove Trek

Clint — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 16:47:00 +0000

This summer out Stake took all of the youth on a Pioneer Trek. We loaded buses and traveled to Wyoming and visited Martin’s Cove. We hope that through this experience the youth will learn several things. They will learn that they can do hard things, they will have an appreciation for their ancestors, they will gain a stronger testimony of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, they will bond with other youth in the stake so they will be stronger against temptation, they will rub shoulders with other stake adult leaders and learn from them, etc. Below is a little video I put together of this trek.

Geocaching

Clint — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 18:12:35 +0000

It has been a long long time since I pulled my GPS out of my Swag Box to track down a cache. I’ve just been so busy with other stuff that I just haven’t had a chance to go geocaching. Last week the Scout Master in our ward called me up to ask if I would teach a class about geocaching to the scouts in our Mormon Ward. I said yes and started to rummage through all of my goecaching stuff.

I found a bunch of stuff that I had almost forgotten about including the fact that I still have a Travel Bug out there in the geocaching world. So, I logged into my Geocaching.com account and checked it out. To my amazement, this little travel bug named “Tree chain” had made quite a few trips around this small world of ours. Below is how many miles this little travel bug has logged and below that is a picture of where it has been.

Tracking History (23,462.8 miles)

Travel History

Click on the image for a better view.

YCC

Clint — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 02:46:29 +0000

When the Twin Falls Temple was scheduled to be built and dedicated, the youth and the leaders of the Mormon Church in our area were notified that they would be called upon to create a youth celebration where the youth of the temple district would come together and put on a cultural even for the visiting Prophet. This event was called the Youth Cultural Celebration, or YCC.

At the time, I was the Young Men’s President in our ward, I was the spearhead in our organization to get the youth ready and prepared to participate in this event. All of our Wednesday night activities were canceled and the YCC practices were put in their place. Each week we would gather the youth of the stake and practice singing and dancing. This went on for 6 months. There were times, I must admit, that the practices seemed to drag on and on. Finally, the event was upon us and we went to the Twin Falls County Rodeo to put the final touches together. As we practiced the week before the dedication, it seemed like the groups would never come together and get it right.

The day finally came and the youth of each stake went and performed with excitement and will energy. The Youth Cultural Celebration was a huge success. How lucky I was to even be a part of the event. Now, when I see other YCC’s occur around the world, my eyes tear up with fond memories of how special this time was for me in the dedication of the Twin Falls Temple.

Below is a video I just watched of a YCC put on for the Prophet in Kyiv Ukraine.

Gifts for the Spirit

Clint — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 02:34:08 +0000

A few months ago we were presented a lesson in Elders Quorum that talked about the Gifts of the Spirit. There was an Ensign article a few years back given by Elder Robert D. Hales that talked about these gifts. Normally I listen to the lessons if it is something that interests me but I have heard the “Gifts of the Spirit” lesson several times so I as on the verge of tuning out. For some reason, this time, I decided to focus on the lesson and really try to learn something new. Sometimes I’ll go the whole hour and really just hash over the same topics that have been presented over and over again. For example, the gift to ponder, the gift of charity, the gift of tongues, the gift to be calm. As these gifts of the Spirit were brought up one by one, I paused and pondered one particular gift. The gift “to believe on other people’s words.” Hummm, what a lame gift that must be. Then, it hit me, I have that gift. I also started to think about how important that gift can be in one’s life. Some people go though life not believing what they have been taught and have to go out and try all of it for themselves. That is scary prospect. Instead of just believing in the word of wisdom, someone without the gift to believe in other peoples words would have to go out and try all of the vices in the world for themselves to see if it truly is bad for them. I am grateful for the gift to believe.