Family Dinner

June 17, 2011

We are in Utah for Manny and Tiffany's wedding. Tonight we hosted the family dinner. It was such a nice experience to get to know Tiffany's extended family and so good to see friends that are as close as blood relatives to us: Kirk and Michelle Brown, David Rusk, Diego and Luis Ortiz....

I am so thankful for the instant friends and helpers we made. There were members of Tiffany's family who I felt as if I knew already. The visiting teachers of Tiffany's mom volunteer to help us in the kitchen, they were amazing! I am so grateful for all their help and the sweet spirit around them.

Manuel sang a song to Tiffany! It was beautiful!

We had posters of Danny and Ben (Tiffany's brother) who are serving full time mission for the church in California and Argentina. It was fun to see how popular these posters were! Tiffany's mom had the great idea to make the posters and they were a hit!

EFY Miami

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We had a session of EFY here in South Florida last week. We called it EFY Miami, but it was for youth who live from West Palm Beach, all the way south to Key West, and that is four Stakes of the Church! EFY stands for "Especially for Youth" and is a program for young men and young women 14-18 years old. The youth are assigned into a small group, usually ten girls or ten boys, they have a counselor who stays with them the whole time, and they have a full week of games, classes, dances, and other fun activities. But mainly, it is a program designed to strengthen them spiritually. I learned about it when my oldest son was 15 years old and we inmediately recognized the value of it. Needless to say, all our children attended EFY as many times as they were allowed to participate. The positive impact it had on every one of my children was very obvious and I highly recomend it to all parents and parents to be.

Our "Miami Session" started with very small number of youth registered from our stake - only 21! Our goal was to have 100 youth participate, so we got to work and we ended up with 95 participants!! We fed them breakfast every morning, then sent them on a bus to the building where they met with the other three stakes and the EFY counselors. Every night they came back to us and we sent them in small groups to wonderful families who hosted them for the night. There were more than 300 youth all together from the four stakes! I visited a few times the building where they were meeting and it was impresive to see all those young men and young women having such a great time.

Once again, and now as a stake youth leader, I witnessed the powerful positive impact EFY had on the youth. Thanks EFY!!