YSA convention day 3 Afternoon" Black hole of mancutta"

Well Dinner pasted relatively quickly, well it seemed like it. We had been asked to stay in our church clothing in respect to the Sabbath. Although once again several YSA interpretation of this was especially interested. They were initially going to be showing a film but decided against it for whatever reason so there were just CES workshops instead. Which were very interesting. The first was overcoming weakness and was very good. Although the teachers regular use of chocolate as a example of different peoples weakness did have a unintended effect. Yep you've guessed it, I and a lot of other YSA came out of the lesson which a desire to go and get a bar of chocolate from somewhere. Whoops! I think we might have missed the whole point somewhere. Either that or it was just like that thing where if your near someone else who is scratching a lot you start to feel real itchy as well. So i.e. he kept mentioning chocolate we started to want it.

The second CES class was entitled " When men meet mountains" and was very good as well. The teacher showed us a video of a sixty year old fell runner who to raise money for charity planned to run 60 peaks in something like 100 hours and it was the equivalent of running to the summit of Everest one and a half times. At one point he was four hours behind schedule and though he would have to drop out as when he was younger he had broken his back and they though he'd have trouble walking again yet alone run! But he still managed to make up the time and succeed. It was amazing. Sw and SW also came into the class as well, so I went for dinner with them in a different dining room to the usual one I had been going for breakfast in. On the plus side going with them meant I got in the queue nice and early and managed to get cheesecake for desert which later people missed out on. To quote Nelson Muntz, " Ha, ha!" We also had quite a interesting discussion over dinner about the sacraments talks.

After dinner we adjoined to the OP hall to have a go at the quiz ( we ended up third over all, no idea how that happened as I'm sure it was nothing to do with me :-) We got a nasty surprise though at the state of the hall. It was absolutely disgusting, there were bags, bottles and remains of sandwiches everywhere. The bins inside were full to overflowing and it was obvious people hust hadn't been bothered to take their rubbish outside. SW not sw who had gone somewhere to catch up with a old mission companion, got us moving and we cleaned the place up in short order. In fact surprisingly short order, so why the YSA who owned the lunches hadn't done this I'll never know. I had to excuse myself after a while to go and take a couple of ibuprofen as my knee was hurting again. I'm so glad I was inspired to buy some to take with me otherwise I didn't know what I would have done. I joined up with the others again soon after and headed over to the cantana ( I think that's how it was spelt). or musical.

Regardless of how it was spelt or how you want to refer to it it was brilliant and I really felt the spirit there. Which to be honest I think is why what happened next totally infuriated me. We headed back to the OP hall for refreshments, many YSA headed back to their room and immediately got changed out of their Sunday clothes as no one challenged the first few people pretty soon the majority of people started to go and change. When we got to to OP the refreshments hadn't been laid out and some of the leaders were trying to get them laid out as people poured in. To be perfectly frank if what had happened in the service project was a scrum what happened then was a riot. I know people have said before that they have felt times the spirit has withdrawn but I don't think I can remember feeling it fleeing so acutely as it did then. This was bad enough but what really didn't help was the return of a old problem. Not many people know this ( well now just me you and the entire internet do). Sometimes I can get claustrophobic. it hasn't happened very often and only once has it caused a full blown panic attack which happened during a caving trip when I was in the ATC. I was having problems the previous night at the ball stuck in the queue for the photo with so many people at right next to a speaker but on Sunday night with so many people in the building I just couldn't do it. I tried three times and each time it felt the same.

So I went for a walk. Mainly to try and get my head together and to try and maintain that feeling of peace and the spirit I had felt in the centre . To be honest it had shaken me to be honest, with everything that's been going on at the moment I've been concentrating on keeping everything in 'check' and to not overwhelm me, it just what I felt in that centre blew all those shields away and it was pretty overwhelming. So I needed sometime alone to try and get my head together. I did go back into the building and tried to find someone free to talk to. But they were all busy and having fun and try as I might I just couldn't seem to open my mouth to ask if someone had sometime to listen or to talk. I just couldn't do it, so I did something which in retrospect wasn't the smartest thing to do. I went to bed without saying a word.