General Conference

I feel like if you don't know it already we can't have been that good of friends in the first place but in case you didn't I'll tell you now: I'm a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And if you have no idea what I just told you, let's try this on for size: I'm a Mormon. So now you're going, "Ahhh, yes. Oh those Mormons . . ."

Every April and October, the first Saturday and Sunday* of the month are dedicated to something known as General Conference. It's basically a time when the leaders of the LDS Church talk to all the members and anyone else that happens to be watching the right station on satellite/cable, or somehow stumbles upon the lds.org website. They go over stuff like how many members there are, how many missions and missionaries, the number of temples, the number of congregations, which in the LDS world are known as branches and wards. There are currently over 14 million members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, so that's kind of a big number.

Besides a few statistics like that, the current president and prophet (Mmhmm, we definitely have a prophet which is awesome) of the Church, in this case Thomas S. Monson, and his counselors and the Twelve Apostles (Yeah, we totally have those too. Cool, eh?) and some other leaders give these talks, I suppose you could call them speeches. In layman's terms, they're pep talks and reminders and all-around inspirations of goodliness to help us become better people, all the while testifying of Jesus Christ.

The reason I'm saying all this is because General Conference was this past weekend; well, it still is the weekend so it literally just ended. (I mean literally since the last session was barely over two hours ago.) My brother came down from Idaho w/ his girlfriend and stayed the weekend at his best friend's place and we all went together on Saturday afternoon; I even had a date, so fancy that! (My date was actually the aforementioned boy from yesterday's post about basketball.) There's the sweet Conference Center in Salt Lake City where it's held every year; it holds something like 21,000 people. So yeah, you can watch it on TV or the Internet and that's cool but going there is even cooler. (After the session was over then we went and got Culver's, so that was pretty fantastic too.)

This morning, whilst we were watching the morning session, one of our neighbor's came over and she had two tickets she couldn't use so my roommate Mckenna and got dressed all fancy and went up to Salt Lake for the afternoon session. And it was awesome.

So that was my weekend! I don't know if any of that will really make sense to people who aren't LDS who read this but if you do have any questions let me know and I'll clarify to the best of my ability. I tried to make things pretty simple but my version of simple might still be complicated, you know? I don't talk about my religion much unless asked because usually people just don't want to hear it. Religion is cool, though, way interesting and it's the kind of thing that really helps us to understand each other; at least I think it does.

*There's two sessions each day, a morning and an afternoon. And on Saturday night there's one specifically for all the guys.