Kearney 1st Ward
Young Womens
Announcements
Wednesday Night Activity: Combined YW activity this week, July 10th at 7:00 at the church. Each young woman will be making their own personalized genealogy tree with Sister Lopez.
Youth Conference: Youth conference for 14+ wIll be July 18-20 at Northwest Missouri State University. If you did not get your packet of materials please let Sister Patterson know! If you signed up for youth conference and you are no longer planning on attending, please let Sister Freestone know.
July Calendar Dates
July 10: Combined activity; 7:00pm @ the church "Fingerprinting Genealogy Trees"
July 17: Combined YM & YW activity; Pool Party
July 18-20: Youth Conference
July 21: 12:15 BYC
July 24: Class activities
July 31: Personal Progress activity
Come Follow Me & Personal Progress
July: Ordinances and Covenants
“In the ordinances ... the power of godliness is manifest” (D&C 84:20).
This month, your Sunday lessons will focus on ordinances and covenants (see lds.org/youth/learn). Each week as you partake of the sacrament, you renew your baptismal covenants and promise to “always remember Him” (see D&C 20:77, 79). But how can you always remember Christ when you have so many other things to think about throughout the week, such as your homework or activities with family or friends? Is He supposed to be in your thoughts every moment?
Well, the answer has a lot less to do with whether you can concentrate on your algebra equations and your baptismal covenants at the same time and a lot more to do with how you live. Are the choices you’re making ones that Christ would make? Are you following His example in your everyday life? As you strive to live as a follower of Christ, that’s one way you can honor your covenant to “always remember Him.”
So, what can you do to live more fully as a follower of Christ, to always remember Him in your actions? You’ll find lots of inspired ideas as you prayerfully study these talks from the most recent general conference:
- “‘Come unto Me’” by President Henry B. Eyring (lds.org/go/73Joy)
- “Followers of Christ” by Elder Dallin H. Oaks (lds.org/go/73Follower)
- “A Sure Foundation” by Bishop Dean M. Davies (lds.org/go/73Sure)
As you read or watch these talks, study what they teach about the ordinances and covenants you’re discussing in your Sunday lessons. Are there stories you can share in your classes or quorums or with your family? Are there things you can do to help others make and keep sacred covenants? What can you do to better keep your covenants? As you seek Christ, the Spirit will guide you in your study and help you know how you can fulfill your covenants and always remember the Savior.
The Spirit of Elijah
A young woman and her family discover the unanticipated blessings of family history work.
To learn more about how you can do family history, visit the Youth and Family History pages.
Church News & Events: Sister Marriott Shares Her Testimony of Faith
Even before she joined the Church, Neill Foote Marriott grew up knowing there was a God and that He loved her, due in large part to the example of her parents, George and Antonia Foote.
“My father was a pattern of our Heavenly Father,” said the new second counselor in the Young Women general presidency. “His love and acceptance for others was unbounded. It was a simple and natural transfer of the love and trust I had for my earthly father to trust and love my Heavenly Father. It came naturally as I grew.”
As a 12-year-old girl, following a tender experience during the singing of a hymn, she made the determination to read the Bible every day and to kneel down when she said her daily prayers. That steady commitment set a course for her teen years. “The cumulative effect was that my love for Father in Heaven grew and I trusted that the Savior would take care of me,” she said.
She was 22 years old when she met a “Mormon” for the first time. Born and raised in Alexandria, Louisiana, she had moved north after graduating from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, with a degree in English literature and worked as a secretary at Harvard University. There she met David Cannon Marriott, who told her and her roommates, “I have some friends I want you to meet.” These friends showed up in black suits and ties, carrying suitcases full of books, pamphlets, and a felt board.
“[The missionaries] were wonderful young men,” Sister Marriott recalled. “I was touched by their earnest interest in the gospel because there were not a lot of young men that I knew that were truly interested in religion.”
Despite a favorable impression of the missionaries and the Church, she remembers having many questions and thinking, “This is a good church, but I can still stay a Methodist and believe some of the things they believe.”
The missionaries taught her and her roommates often for seven months. During that time she was blessed with many “sweet experiences” involving reading the Book of Mormon, meeting the mission president, and learning more about Church doctrine.
As she listened to the missionaries teach about the plan of salvation, she said, “The lesson filled in the missing pieces of my gospel understanding. … I knew that what they were saying was true. I really was a daughter of my Heavenly Father. He was my Father. I recognized the truth in the teaching that I did live with Him before I came here. That really opened my heart to the truth.”
Then, as she and some of her roommates were preparing to leave for the summer, David asked them, “How do you feel about the Book of Mormon?”
She had planned to say something different but found herself saying, “Well, I think it’s true,” to which David responded, “So what are you going to do about it?”
She promised to honestly and sincerely pray about it. And she did. She relates that through this honest prayer she learned clearly that, indeed, this was the Savior’s true Church on the earth. The next day she called the mission president and told him she needed to be baptized.
After her baptism, she and David remained friends and eventually began dating. They were married in June 1971 in the Salt Lake Temple, and after living in four different states they made their home in Salt Lake City. Sister Marriott stayed home with their 11 children while her husband pursued a career in business.
Sister Marriott has served in many Church callings. Her first calling as a new convert was to be a member of the ward genealogy committee. One day while she was organizing her family history into information on separate family lines, she “felt like these deceased ancestors were very close and very interested.”
Sister Marriott said she has developed a love for the temple and with help has found and prepared close to 1,000 ancestral names for temple work. She has served as an ordinance worker in the Salt Lake Temple, as stake and ward Relief Society president, ward Young Women president, Cub Scout leader, Gospel Doctrine teacher, and food storage specialist. She also served with her husband as he presided over the Brazil São Paulo Interlagos Mission from 2002 to 2005.
Three months after beginning their service in Brazil, the Marriotts’ daughter Georgia, who was studying violin performance at Indiana University, was struck by a truck and killed while riding her bike near the university campus. Though devastated, Sister Marriott said she was fortified by her knowledge of the gospel and Georgia’s Christlike example.
Georgia had a goal to share the gospel with someone new every day. At her memorial service in Indiana, many of her friends from the university attended. Her family made available copies of the Book of Mormon with Georgia’s testimony pasted in the front cover. All 250 copies were taken.
“[Georgia] was a real inspiration to me on the mission to always stand forth and share my faith,” Sister Marriott recounted.
For example, in a small town in Brazil, Sister Marriott felt prompted to share information about the Church with a man at a counter in a market. “I felt Georgia there urging me on. I talked with him, and he gave me his name and address and said he’d like to have the missionaries come.”
She isn’t afraid to testify, her husband said. “As she’s had different callings, in all the various assignments we’ve shared, the thing that is key and everybody knows is that her faith in Jesus Christ is the most singular and most important part of her life.”
“The Savior is my anchor,” she agreed.
In her new assignment, Sister Marriott hopes to share the same testimony she received as a young woman. She wants young women to know that “they are loved by their Heavenly Father with the deepest, most glorious love.
New Era Message
Conviction with Compassion
Some time ago I was invited to speak in a stake single-adult devotional. As I entered the rear door of the stake center, a 30-something young woman entered the building at about the same time. Even in the crush of people moving toward the chapel, it was hard not to notice her. As I recall, she had a couple of tattoos, a variety of ear and nose rings, spiky hair reflecting all the colors now available in snow cones, a skirt that was too high, and a blouse that was too low.
Was this woman a struggling soul, not of our faith, who had been led—or even better, had been brought by someone—under the guidance of the Lord to this devotional in an effort to help her find the peace and the direction of the gospel that she needed in her life? Or was she a member who had strayed a bit from some of the hopes and standards that the Church encourages for its members but who, thank heaven, was still affiliating and had chosen to attend this Church activity that night?
However one would respond to that young woman, the rule forever is that in all our associations and actions, we must reflect the full breadth of our religious beliefs and our gospel commitments. Therefore, how we respond in any situation has to make things better, not worse. We can’t act or react in such a way that we are guilty of a greater offense than, in this case, she is. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have opinions, that we don’t have standards, that we somehow completely disregard divinely mandated “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” in life. But it does mean we have to live those standards and defend those “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” in a righteous way to the best of our ability, the way the Savior lived and defended them. And He always did what should have been done to make the situation better—from teaching the truth, to forgiving sinners, to cleansing the temple. It is no small gift to know how to do such things in the right way!
So, regarding our new acquaintance of unusual dress and grooming, we start, above all, by remembering she is a daughter of God and of eternal worth. We start by remembering that she is someone’s daughter here on earth as well and could, under other circumstances, be my daughter. We start by being grateful that she is at a Church activity, not avoiding one. In short, we try to be at our best in this situation in a desire to help her be at her best. We keep praying silently: What is the right thing to do here? And what is the right thing to say? What ultimately will make this situation and her better? Asking these questions and really trying to do what the Savior would do is what I think He meant when He said, “Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment” (John 7:24).
My young friends, there is a wide variety of beliefs in this world, and there is moral agency for all, but no one is entitled to act as if God is mute on these subjects or as if commandments only matter if there is public agreement over them.
I know of no more important ability and no greater integrity for us to demonstrate than to walk that careful path—taking a moral stand according to what God has declared and the laws He has given but doing it compassionately, with understanding and great charity. Talk about a hard thing to do—distinguishing perfectly between the sin and the sinner! I know of few distinctions that are harder to make and even harder sometimes to explain, but we must lovingly try to do exactly that.
Read the entire article in the July 2013 issue of The New Era
Contact a member of the Young Women Presidency
Xio Freestone President 824-1480 xiomarafreestone@yahoo.com
Amanda Lopez 1st counselor 401-7122 jass4ever@sbcglobal.net
Maggie Anderson 2nd counselor (801) 793-8038 maggieande01@gmail.com
Aimee Patterson secretary 678-8453 aimeeportie@gmail.com or apatters@nkcschools.org