Fortress of Faith

My heart is swelling with pride. For the past two months, my teenage daughters have sacrificed time every Wednesday and most Saturdays to be a part of the Fort Collins Temple Cultural Celebration.

These two were up bright and early to be at the stadium by 8 am. 

By this point they were both ready for it to be over.

Nearly 4,000 youth from 13 stakes in the Fort Collins Temple district came together in song and dance to present Fortress of Faith. Neither Bay or Kars are big on the dancing thing so there was a lot of humor involved on their part.

From what I heard, more than 17,000 people filled the stadium—

Waiting for the show to start

The celebration was a series of song, dance and history of the Fort Collins area. There were numbers that represented different cultures of the early settlers.

The girls YW president's family was sitting near us. Once their kids caught sight of us, we had some little visitors for a good part of the show.

Our Stake did a couple of numbers at the end of the show. The focus was on some of the natural disasters in the area and the faith building experiences surrounding them.

Bailee and Karsyn are the first two standing on the 20 yard line

It was a long process and an especially long and HOT day of final rehearsal. The finished product was pretty amazing to see and I am so so happy these two got to be a part of it. I hope they feel the same way too.  Apparently they were on the Jumbotron quite often as the cameraman was right in front of them most of their performance. We were too busy finding them on the field but several people who watched the live stream passed that on. You can see a recording of the cultural celebration at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUk15MS__S4. The girls part starts at the end and you can see them close up for a half a second around the 1:01:20 mark.

The following day they went to the Temple Dedication with their YW leader. They had spent several hours crocheting the edges of these beautiful handkerchiefs to take with them. I am so proud of these girls of mine and am grateful they got to have this experience. I hope it will stay with them forever!