18 Lives and the Book of Mormon

The weekend before we left on our big vacation, mom had the opportunity to play a small role in a huge 5-stake regional youth conference (over 700 youth) held in Grand Junction. The culminating event was a production that has been a year in the making. Mom was in charge of hair and makeup for our stake which included about 80 youth. In the months leading up to the conference mom had been to many meetings regarding the logistics and had organized a couple of hair and make up training nights for the youth. The multimedia production was called "18 Lives and the Book of Mormon". It told the story of a seminary class of 18 students, the struggles they face and how the Book of Mormon helped them overcome those trials (see the trailer here: 18lives.org) . Each stake was in charge of staging one of those stories. We were able to stage Nephi and his impossible task of building a ship. The whole experience was so memorable and literally life changing. One highlight was watching and meet a special guest who cam to play Christ in one scene. His name is Robert Allen and he is famous right now for acting as Christ in photographs from "Reflections of Christ" (www.youtube.com/watch?v=glQYsxJhv_E). Him and his family are simply incredible. It is hard to explain in words the feelings mom felt as she watched and participated. The youth she spent time with and got to know were so amazing! Soon there will be a DVD of the whole production and she would love to share it with anyone interested in watching it. There were 5 performances and mom was able to get all of us into see one of them which was pretty cool.