What I’m Going to Do with My Weekend

It’s General Conference weekend, which means that there will be ten hours of speeches by Mormon leaders on a variety of religious topics. This happens twice a year (once in April, once in October). It’s broken up into five 2 hour meetings. Back when I was growing up, you had to go to a Mormon meeting house to watch these. Now, it’s on BYUTV on most satellite packages, and it’s also online here, with video in English, Portuguese, ASL, French and Spanish, and audio streams in 68 languages. Let me say that again–live audio in 68 languages. In total, the proceedings will be translated into 94 languages–everything from Navajo to Samoan to Swedish to Thai.

When we lived in Utah, DKC used to translate for the Slovaks. She’d go up to a conference session, and there’d be all these people specializing in all sorts of languages, scurrying around getting prepared for what was in store. I don’t know of many events that have such a broad translation effort, all aimed solely at recreating the original message, not trying to analyze it. I find it inspiring that people from across the world can gather to listen to the same uplifting messages, coming from so many different cultural backgrounds but still believing the same thing.

Anyway. Ten hours of meetings is a lot of meetings, any which way you slice it–even if they’re mindblowingly inspirational. So what will I do? I typically line up some things to do so I can keep my hands occupied. I’ve been known to make chain mail, do counted cross stitch, and (my current favorite) declutter. (It’s amazing how much stuff you can clean when you have so much time to devote to it.) Of course, it’s also tricky to keep TRC and DC occupied during the time, as well. Thankfully, all talks are transcribed and put online (and published in the Church’s monthly magazine, The Ensign. If I miss anything, I can always reread it.

How about you all? What will you be doing this fine Easter weekend?

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