Even though there are no pictures in this post, it´s not an optional read!

I hope you all had a great Easter. I hope you all got to give great thought to what the Resurrection means for us. If not, your Easter was the way most of my Easters have been! I´ve always thought about the Resurrection with gratitude, but I have never been able to get past the, ¨Yay, there is life after death!¨ I guess because I´ve never had to go through the death of someone I love believing otherwise. I ask you all to meditate in what way/ways the Resurrection changed your life.

There were no bunnies or eggs this Easter and it was kind of nice!!! Even though I love celebrating holidays. GUESS who came to speak in the morning during our special MTC-wide Sacrament meeting?? Just think of the one person you´d want to hear speak out of all the prophets and apostles. Did you think of the pilot with the accent and the stories and the handsome dignified Santa-Claus look? Well, you guessed right! I was excited because, well, he´s great. Bu I honestly didn´t understand what I was going to experience.

In his talk he told the Bible story but in a deeper way than I have heard. You could feel the Spirit while he was talking, and I felt more than interested, I felt enthralled. After he closed the talk, he said, with total sincerity, ¨Please go out and tell the people wherever you are going, members and nonmembers, that we love them. We want everyone to know, so tell them for me.¨ Then he said, Ï wish I could shake each of your hands, but there are just too many of you. I´ll take the long way out though and see as many of you as possible.¨ He made his way down from the stage and started shaking hands. 

I couldn´t see him, but the atmosphere was so reverent. The talk had been so good and so full of the Spirit, no one wanted to move as he went though the crowd. It was like he carried it in a bright cloud around him, because as he came closer, I felt it stronger. It was very beautiful. It had nothing to do with him being a Mormon celebrity. Nothing. It had everything to do with him being set apart as a prophet of God. God gives us prophets to give us additional revelation, (in addition to personal revelation and what has already been revealed through the scriptures), and to be special witness of him. This is an extra tool God has given us, and God doesn´t do things half-heartedly, he does them officially. That´s why we have to be set apart. When someone is set apart, God recognizes their acceptance of the responsibility he has asked them to take on, and he starts doing what he wants done, through them. He gives them the abilities and his power and Spirit. They become his! His hands. I FELT THIS when I was set apart. All the negative feelings went away, I FELT Christ with me, and I FELT him saying, ¨You´re my representative now. You better believe I wouldn´t let you try to do that alone. Because you couldn´t! And that could get ugly haha. But it doesn´t matter. Because I´lll do it through you. I´ll be with you.¨ I realized that President Uchtdorf carried this bright cloud around not because of who he was, but because of what he had been set apart to do. 

There was an aisle that separated the reserved seats from the seats behind them, and I was sitting on the second row up. My companion had wanted to go to choir, which practices in the same room, and I have never been happier that I went to choir! He passed by and was SO close and it felt great. Then he shook the hand of the person next to me and I knew it was okay for me to stick out my hand too!

The priesthood is one of my favorite gifts from God, after the Atonement, love, and famlies. It IS the authority to act in God´s name. We´re not perfect and the men who hold the priesthood aren´t perfect, but honestly it usually comes pretty close. When you invoke the priesthood or the name of Christ in something you are doing, you are letting God know that you are using a gift He gave us, and he reaches his hand into your life to empower and guide those moments. It is through this power that prophets are called, through this power that my life has been changed, through this power that I have been changed in various turning points in my life.


Edited to add this picture with a weird format that I could not get bigger! 

Holla to SIdney Boman for finding me on lds.org hahaa! Here I am in front on Easter :D