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Posts Tagged ‘Youth’

This weekend I had some extra time to just sit at the table and read the newspaper.  It doesn’t happen that often so I tried to enjoy it.  I read through the comics and then looked for something else to read.  On our kitchen table was the New Era.  It is a mormon magazine for teenagers.  I cracked open the cover and read down through the titles of the articles.  One particular article caught my eye so I opened to the page.   It was an article entitled The Popular Table.  I read down a few paragraphs and liked what I read so I decided to start over but this time, I would read out loud.  My 11 year old daughter was sitting at the computer playing games.  I wasn’t sure if she was listening, but I read the article anyway.

I completed the article and with a little bit of feeling crackling in my voice, I put down the magazine and looked at my little girl.  She peaked over the top of the laptop monitor at me and said, “I had to do that exact thing this year in middle school.”  I was shocked by both facts that she had to decide whether to sit at the “Popular Table” or not, and that she had been listening.  She then proceded to tell me about her experience of  having to decide whether to sit with the popular girls with bad language and popular clothes, or sit with a group of girls that had her same morals and standards.  She even told me which table was the popular one at her school.  I grinned and felt warm inside knowing that she had made the hard decision and that she knew how to choose good friends.  The story would have been great if it had ended at this point but somehow, it got better.

Out of the next room behind the wall and on the couch came a lower voice that said, “I had to make that decision too”.   It was my 13 year old boy from the living room.  He had been eavesdropping on my reading and wanted to chime in with his version of what had happend to him.  He loves to play sports and all of the popular kids were on his baseball and basketball teams.  He was popular but, year after year these teammates began to change.  Eventually, Andy had to make the decision to leave the “Popular Table” and move to a table with boys with his same standards.

I am so happy to hear that both of my kids have made the hard decision to find friends that have the same standards and values that we have as members of the LDS Church.   It is not an easy choice because the appeal and the pressure from the “Popular Kids” is hard to resist.    I am blessed to have two wonderful kids that have made the tough decisions. These decisions will guide them to a happier and more fulfilling life.

I started a little project with my little girls a couple of Sundays ago. I wanted to try some stop motion video editing so I decided to do a little movie about “The Family, a Proclamation to the World“. This was a document written and signed by the leaders of the LDS Church, namely the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. The document is quite long. I thought we could get through most of it in an afternoon on Sunday, however, it turned out to be a little bit bigger project. Below is that I have so far. After watching the videos over and over to edit them and get them right, I still found it fun to watch and hear my girls talking about the importance of the family. They have such cute voices that I would watch them over and over again. Enjoy.

I subscribe to a YouTube Channel called Mormon Messages.  Every once in a while there are a stack of new videos that they post on their channel.  Some of them are really cool and some of them are pretty good.  Reciently I watched a Mormon messages video about President Dieter F. Uchtdorf’s talk in General Conference last earlier in the year.  It is a little story about how little kids react when given a choice of whether to eat something immediately or be patient and get a bigger reward later.   The video is just awesome so I thought I would post it on my little LDS Family website.  The video is entitled, “Continue in Patience“.