Evening of Excellence

I have loved serving in Young Women! I really enjoyed my primary calling, working with the primary children and my awesome presidency, but there was also a lot of administrative stuff to the calling which took a lot of time and wasn't always that enjoyable. YW is also a busy calling, but it is just SO fun! I love being with my girls and their friends. I already know most of the girls quite well since many of them have spent lots of time at our house through the years. We have had some great Young Women's activities and I have really enjoyed going to them! We had a board meeting with all of the YW leaders and one of the items on the agenda was the Evening of Excellence. I had been a bit nervous for this event because in past years they went all out with fancy decorations and treats and so forth and that is so out of my comfort zone! 

One of our presidency members mentioned that years ago instead of having the Evening of Excellence on a Wednesday night, they did a special YW program during Sacrament meeting. She said it was really neat and that way all of the YW would be able to participate (several have conflicts on Wednesday nights) and all of the congregation would be able to watch, instead of just the girls' parents. I really LOVED this idea!  It was also WAY more in my comfort zone!  The rest of the presidency liked the idea too and so we got permission from the Bishop and Stake YW Leaders to do a special sacrament meeting program. My girls teased me saying that since the new YW president and I just came from primary (and had just barely finished the primary program) we missed having a sacrament meeting program and were just dying to do another one, ha ha! So NOT true! The advantages of doing a sacrament meeting program is that it puts the focus back on the girls. It also completely eliminates extravagant decorations, invitations, food -- the whole bit! We are actually saving a lot of money by doing it this way! 

It still took quite a bit of time -- writing the script, making copies, practicing the songs, and so forth. The Miamaids and Laurels were all assigned to give shorts parts or talks and the Young Women prepared four songs. One of the songs, "Ask in Faith," is one they already know from girls' camp last summer (and it is beautiful) and then we had them learn "I Walk By Faith." That is an old song -- I learned it when I was in Young Women! But it is also beautiful and talks about the Young Women's values. The Beehives sang "Learn of Me," (another older song) and the Miamaids sang "If I Listen With My Heart." Both songs included various solos and duets from the girls. We have a lot of great singers in the group and so they sounded awesome! We practiced two weeks during young women's and had separate class practices for their songs. Our final practice was still pretty rough and we wished that we had another week or two to practice. We kept it really simple. It was WAY easier than a primary program, that's for sure! We were nervous because we had never made it all the way through the program and so we had no idea how long it would be. Would it go way over time or would we end really early? 

As it turns out we ended about ten minutes early. But I would rather end a little early then go over. The girls did a great job on their talks and songs and overall we felt like the program went well. The congregation seemed to really enjoy the program also and we received loads of compliments on the program and on the girls' beautiful voices!