RS Retreat

This weekend my Relief Society went on a retreat that was held in a house that is owned by on obviously very wealthy person.  To be honest, I can't remember the name of the owner, but I think I overheard someone say he invented the Cricut scrapbooking machine.  So yeah, the house was incredible.  The upstairs looked pretty much like a normal house only bigger.  But downstairs!  The walls were painted with a mural.  I'm not quite sure how to describe it.  There was a playhouse cut into the wall, and the wall was painted so that the playhouse area looked like a medieval cottage, and you could see a castle in the background.  There was also a theater room down there, which you had to go through a short hallway to get to.  Guess what was in that hallway?  A suit of armor!  I'm dead serious.  And the door to the theater looked like a castle dungeon door.  Inside the theater the walls were again painted trompe-l'oeil to look like old stucco that was cracking and exposing stone.  And the sconces on the wall looked quite medieval.  This all made it that much cooler to watch How to Train Your Dragon there, which we did (and I loved it!).

Enough about that, though.  The best part of the retreat was the fireside Brad Wilcox gave.  He took each of the last five words of 2 Nephi 25:23, "after all we can do," and put a new perspective on their meanings.  It was amazing.  He is such a good speaker, too.  I normally have a hard time taking notes at firesides because either the concepts are too abstract for me to figure out what to write, or they simply go so fast that by the time I've written half of a sentence they said I can't remember the rest of it and it makes no sense and then I've completely missed their next sentence and I'm completely lost.  Not with Brad Wilcox.  Everything he said was so easy to understand, and he said it with words that were easy to remember and easy to keep listening while writing.  So I was scribbling notes like crazy for most of it.  By the end, though, the Spirit was so strong I simply couldn't move my hand.  I had to just sit and take it all in.  Incredible.