I'm Scary, But Loved

Tonight for Young Women's we had all the YW combined. There has been a lot of "murmuring" about our ward young women's camp, b/c other wards are doing cool stuff like going to Nauvoo. I have had camp planned since I heard we were doing ward camp in November. But, I hadn't told the YW  yet b/c I wanted it to be a fun surprise. I realize now that that was a HORRIBLE idea. They need to be involved and help plan it, b/c it is THEIR camp, not the leader's camp.

Also, we have New Beginnings coming up soon so we needed to make assignments for that. I told them we were having an "INPUT/OUTPUT" activity. They were going to give their input and then we were going to send them home w/ a warm fuzzy (output). There was NO paper in the library at the church, so I couldn't make copies of the list of things we needed to go over, which made it a mad house when we were trying to plan.

I finally gave up trying to have the girls volunteer for what they wanted to do for New Beginnings. After 5 minutes of trying to yell over them talking I just said forget it and I'm going to assign things out and just let them know what they need to do.

After that we moved on to camp. I gave them each a list of things I had planned, but said none of it was set in stone and that we could change whatever we wanted. We discussed some different dates b/c some of the leaders can't come when we had it planned. But, if we move it to the next weekend then we'll have 4 YW that can't come. We also discussed different locations but if we have it at a state park then there goes half our budget just to cover the $7 per day charge and $24 campsite charge per day. So, everyone voted on my keeping my plan.

After all that crazy, we needed everyone to leave feeling good. Plus, we had 20 minutes to kill. I had printed off a sheet for everyone w/ a blank heart shape in the middle of the paper. I had everyone write their name in the middle of the heart. Then we all passed our papers to the person our our left. We all wrote down something nice about the person whose name was on the paper. By the time all the papers had been passed around we each had about 20 nice things written about us.

We still had time to kill, so I had everyone go around and pick ONE thing on their paper that meant a lot to them or made them feel really good. Some were funny and some were really thoughtful & insightful. I shared this one from mine. It made me laugh that they're a little scared of me, but that they still love me. I think that's good, b/c that means I don't put up w/ their drama. But at the end of the day they know I LOVE them so much.

Then we still had about 5 minutes left so I had everyone go around the circle and say one thing they love about themselves. I was surprised how hard it was for some of the girls to come up with something. I think we're so quick to compliment others and notice the good in them, but we aren't as quick to do that for ourselves.