it's the most... conference-y time of the year.

So it’s that time of the year again. All of us Mormons gather around the TV, eat until we’re sick, and then take 5 naps over a 2-day period. Haha not really.

But kind of.

But for seriously, I just really want to express how much I love General Conference. It’s such a reassurance to me that the church is true. The brethren are so kind and sincere and genuine, and their messages call you to action without being too harsh. It is obvious to me that they’re speaking to us what the Lord would have us hear. I love that the brethren check up on us every 6 months to make sure we remember what we’re supposed to be doing. I know I’d definitely forget if I didn’t have that reminder bi-annually. So yeah, I basically just think conference is pretty great.

One of the talks that stood out to me was the one that Matthew O. Richardson gave. I thought it was interesting that he is the 2^nd counselor in the General Sunday School presidency of the Church. I really liked how his talk was easy to follow; it was easy for me to focus on what he was saying. He started off with a short anecdote about a little girl he’d met when he was in the MTC. The little girl had asked him if he was a “real” missionary. He used the word “real” throughout the rest of his talk to make certain points. For example, he told another anecdote about how he climbed a high mountain in Oregon with his kids. When they all got to the top, he exclaimed to his daughter that she was a “real” hiker.

He kept using the repetition of “real” to discuss his point about learning by the Spirit. He urged us to become “real” learners, learners that utilize the Spirit to help receive personal revelation. Because he kept revisiting his main ideas of being “real,” the audience felt like they could become "real" as well. I’d say this technique was very effective.

Another technique he used was parallelism in sentence structure. He used a lot of verb phrases in list form. One in particular that stood out to me was “It [the Spirit] cannot learn for us, feel for us, or act for us.” This is just one of many examples of this type of sentence structure. This technique keeps the audience’s attention for the whole sentence, because they’re waiting to see how it will finish. Another example is the phrase, “real life, real learning, real teaching.” There’s that word “real” again. Here Elder Richardson combined his explosive “real” technique with the sentence structure. And he came up with one smashing phrase.

All in all, I found Elder Richardson to be an interesting and skilled orator and I greatly enjoyed his talk. 

I definitely didn’t take a nap during this part of conference.