Youth Conference 2021 - A Great Work

Pictured: Youth Conference 2021 activities and participants.

The Fayetteville North Carolina Stake of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recently held their annual Youth Conference. These conferences help bring youth together to serve others and engage in experiences that will help them grow spiritually.

This year, the youth participated in two different projects. They worked with Fayetteville Urban Ministry to clean and sanitize their bus transportation. They also worked with the Fayetteville Area and Local Transportation Museum to clean out storage areas and catalog their contents. The youth can often engage in service with their local congregations, but they are less often able to work in larger groups on projects outside of their comfort zones and reward circle. Meaning, it is a charitable opportunity that avails them only the reward of loving their fellow persons when they serve. Not everybody thoroughly enjoys the work, but everyone participates, and everyone receives the opportunity to choose to take from it what they will.

The second day of the conference included activities intended to help the youth grow spiritually and culturally. They learned about the similarities between the writings of Isaiah and today’s Internet memes. They didn’t associate the beautiful poetry of Isaiah with memes; instead, they compared the symbology.

Symbols, words, and relationships that were easy to understand for Isaiah’s contemporaries are often complex for us to understand without understanding the context of the time. It’s the same for today’s memes. It’s a communication method that relies on contextual understanding to receive the message.

The youth also were treated to an etiquette dinner and a fireside with great messages, including one from the Fayetteville North Carolina Stake President, Jeff Quick. He invited the youth to continue doing their best to come unto Christ and challenged them to read the entire Book of Mormon by the end of the year. The youth, in large part, came away spiritually fed and happy.

We hope they are happy and hope that they will follow the counsel of their leaders and that they will continue in their efforts to become better people and more complete followers of the Lord Jesus Christ.

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