Helaman's Camp--Thursday

Thursday,

Thursday forwards a little less detail than Wednesday did, most of it was meetings and I can’t recall which meeting happened when. We woke up at 6:10, it really bugged me that they could just round to the much more even number of 6:00, really, ten more minutes wouldn’t make that much of a difference and it looks so much more nicer my way, but hey, whatever. We started the day with companionship study and personal study time. As a companionship we would kneel and pray to be guided in our scripture study for the next two hours. It was awesome. Richard and I found many great scriptures that we shared with one another, it was sweet. I read a bit in Isaiah, and he transferred his markings from an old set of scriptures to a new one.

After study time we went to breakfast, but before every meal we always had a fifteen minute choir practice in which the tenors, baritones, and basses would compete to see who could go to dinner first. Bro. Jones who was leading the choir was a tenor so he was always partial to the tenors, and most of the basses would always cheat and leave for dinner regardless, while the baritones were always honest and only left when excused. I was a baritone. The food was awesome, did I already mention that? Oh, and they somehow managed to perfect the art of powdered juice mixing. Because throughout the camp there was always some kind of juice for us to eat that was perfectly mixed and tasted divine.

After breakfast was our first zone and mission meeting. At the zone meeting Richard and I taught the lesson after our district leaders had given a 5 minute thought. We taught the plan of salvation through a Socratic method of question prompts. It worked well, and after we had gotten through the doctrine involved we both shared our testimonies, the spirit was defiantly there by the end of the lesson, it was just a pity that half of our zone had drifted off to a state of distraction and wasn’t paying much attention to it. Then one of the bishops took a turn to speak, it’s always cool to hear a bishop speak, plus he was a little better at keeping everyone focused on his lesson, but only a little. If the boy’s didn’t want to listen, they weren’t going to listen.

We then had a little object lesson about carrying the weight of sins with us in which a leader lead each zone on a winding path, pausing at key points to hand out papers that gave us instructions based on a predescribed scenario. Some people had to pick up large rocks some small, some meant to pick up a small rock, but then found out it was bigger than they had thought.  Eventually when everyone was carrying at least five pounds of rocks we came to a place where a bishop would speak to us about repentence and what we could learn from carry the rocks along the path. Then we did the same thing, only we picked up smaller rocks and had a similar discussion before we could put them down. Then we went up to the top of a hill, where a ramiumptum had been ram-shakily put together, and talked about all the different ways we could relate this too our lives. It was pretty cool.

Lunch and choir was amazing as it always was with hamburgers and hot dogs by the bucket load. Then we had a service project. Each zone was assigned two projects, Richard took one district and went to fix a sprinkler pipe, and I took the other to mow down the weeds and sage brush that was choking the “parking lot” (a semi-less weedy area of dirt where the leaders had decided to park their cars) needless to say we broke 3 shovels trying to pry up sage brush until someone found a rusty dull hatchet that I was able to successfully use to but a hole in my pinky and chop a few bushes, then we got a chain that we hooked up to a car and made short work of the rest.

After that we put our Sunday cloths back on and went to another zone meeting where the DL’s taught a lesson before another bishop took over, and then another mission meeting before dinner.

Dinner was the best EvEr!! Smoked briquette that had been cooking since Sunday, it was Celestial! Then we had another mission meeting, split into two sections because it was so long, and here is where the trouble starts again. 3 of our zone members decided that they didn’t want to listen to the second half of the mission meeting,

Once Richard and I found out that they were missing we contacted the Area presidents and the other zone leaders to try and find them, we figured that they might be in a different tent just hiding from us, we’d had other delinquent behavior of the sort previously in the day. We spent a good hour of our sleep time looking for them before we found two of them. For some stupid reason they had thought to go “cow tipping”, we had been on top of the highest hill around just 8 hours ago for the repentance object lesson, it had been clear then that there wasn’t anything around us for miles, and yet they decided to go cow tipping, needless to say they got a heavy reprimand of sorts. We finally decided to go to bed; Richard was feeling rather downhearted because he took responsibility for their actions as his own because he was their leader, yet again something I admire him for, and we woke up to find the third young man had somehow entered our tent without waking us up. This ends the 2^nd day at Helaman’s Camp.