Dallin H. Oaks

(The date on the picture is wrong. It was 5/1/10)

About 5 weeks ago a counselor in the stake presidency snatched me out of Young Womens at the end of the meeting and told me he needed to talk to me. He told me that a special meeting was going to take place on May 1st where Dallin H. Oaks would be presiding and the stake presidency wanted me to go and represent the young women of the stake. So for the last 5 weeks I would get nervous stomach quite frequently.

Well, May 1st was last Saturday. I carpooled down with one of my friends in another ward that had also been asked to go. I seriously was so nervous. I had no idea what to expect, but it was really cool. We had to check in at the door, to make sure we were invited to attend. They gave us name tags that said what stake we were from and whick auxilary we represented.

There were 9 stakes involved and 7 representatives from each ward. So it was a pretty small group of no more than 65 people. Elder Oaks explained that they basically wanted to get a feel for how ward council meetings are being held. At that point I was thinking "why the heck am I here? I'm not a member of ward council." Luckily I have been attending the meetings for the last month or so since our YW president has been super busy and out of town alot getting ready for 3 of her kids weddings. So I did have an idea of how the meetings are. Elder Oaks would ask questions and have us answer. It was very informal and really neat to see that side of him. He did talk briefly about the importance of family and that a meeting has to be a really good meeting to be better than no meeting at all. He explained that the church doesn't want to take time away from familys when it's not necessary. He briefly bore his testimony and made note that he ended the meeting a couple minutes early.

After the meeting Kayleen and I waited in the foyer for a few minutes and were able to snap a quick pic with him. I told him that my son was named Dallin & he told me to give him a big hug for him. It was great. Although it was a casual, informal meeting, you can still tell that he is an apostle.

It ended up being a really neat experience and totally not what I expected.