Lead Me, Guide Me

I am a physician with a busy practice, a wife, a step-mother of three terrific young adults, a sometime-triathlete, an electric bass-player, and a newly-called ward Young Women's president.  This blog is a place for me to talk about ideas and issues related to leading an group of young ladies through what can be wonderful, treacherous and wonderfully-treacherous times.  My goal is to help them develop their testimonies and become strong, faithful, LDS women and leaders.

Fortunately, I spent the past year as a counselor in the YW presidency.  This gave me at least a passing understanding of the time and effort involved in the calling.  I knew that I needed to have a terrific board whose strengths fill in my weak points.

Lots of prayer, thought, fasting, thought, prayer and thought went into the selection of the YW board.  Everyone that came to my mind was called and accepted their callings willingly.  They definitely are what I and the girls need.  They are deep thinkers, intelligent, thoughtful, creative and loving.  I feel like we are on the same page when it comes to where we need to go with the girls.

One of my counselors asked what I needed her to do, after our first presidency meeting.  My answer was, "Pray.  Study your scriptures.  Read the Handbook.  Go online to lds.org, read and watch everything you can in the Young Women section."  That was the way that I wanted all of us to start.  Get the overall vision of Young Women's from the General YW Presidency, then figure out what our YW need.

Our ward demographics skew to the "newly-wed and nearly-dead", giving us a small group of youth.  I have known most of them since they were in Primary and I was the Primary president.  We have fifteen girls on our roster, of which approximately half attend church regularly or semi-regularly.  Our girls are also very active in sports, music and other extracurricular activities.  This makes planning activities a little tough.  One thing that I knew would be important was transitioning from having the leaders plan all of the activities and events to having the girls be the planners.  Not only do I feel like they will be more likely to come to activities and bring their friends if it is something that they want to do, it will teach them important leadership skills.  I'd like them to feel comfortable calling someone and asking them to be a guest instructor if they want to learn a new skill, or contacting an organization to ask about and schedule a service project, or working together to come to a mutually-acceptable decision on what activities to pursue, or cultivate a new talent through an activity.

This transition will take some time for the girls to get used to and good at, but I have faith in them.   I also have faith that I was called by inspiration, as was my board.  Great things are in store.  Stay tuned!