pitching my tent

Late September/early October means a lot of tent pitching goes on in our family. During the 2 week term break, Little Possum and MOTH go to the annual district scout camp and Turtle goes to stake YM camp. Tents, sleeping bags, camp fires and camp cooking, insect bites and a ton of activities.

First weekend of October we pitch our tents again, albeit a little more figuratively. We gather for General Conference to hear the word of the Lord through His servants, the prophet and apostles. Just like the people did in Mosiah 2:5-6. Every family pitched their tents with the door facing the temple and king Benjamin in order to hear his words. 

General Conference is a spiritual feast - and the better prepared I am, the better the feast. "No ordinary blessing" president Uchtdorf called it in the article by the same name in Ensign Sep 2011. The introduction is my favourite. A member was telling his neighbour about general conference and listening to a modern day prophet and apostles. The neighbour was impressed and wanted to know what the prophet had said at the last general conference. The member couldn't remember and the neighbour said:

 “You mean to tell me that God speaks to man in our day and you can’t remember what He said?”. 

 I laughed when I read that....  then asked myself whether I would've been able to give a succinct answer.....   I couldn't.

This last GC there were 2 statements about GC that struck me:

GC is a spiritual feast, but it's not supposed to be a quick hit like a giant spiritual chocolate bar. It's supposed to be more slow release.... something I return to again and again. Study, learn, act.....

I have always written notes at conference, notes from the talks and notes of impressions I receive. This time I thought I would do a little better, so in my handbound journal (can you hear that? The sound of me tooting my own horn) I wrote notes, but left spare pages at the end of each talk so that I could go back to the talks later and have room for more notes as I study them in depth. 

As soon as the talks were available to print out, I printed out each talk to tape into my conference journal.

 I tell you - the biggest discovery I have ever made is that I can choose to print out the talk "booklet-style" which means I can print out a whole talk on one sheet of paper. I copy and paste the talk into Word first. Then I may have to reduce the size of the text and tweak the spacing (the talk needs to fit on 4 pages). And .... Print.  How cool is that?!

The result is my own personal General Conference study journal. 

Using it - well that will be me pitching my tent regularly.

Smores optional.