Cruz's Talk in church on 7/14/24

Hello brothers and sisters. My name is Cruz Frye, I am 17 years old and going into my senior year at Brighton high school, when Brother Buttars was called as bishop I knew I had a talk coming but I didn’t think it would be this soon but here we are. I recently had 2 experiences that I am going to talk about today, the first was I was able to go on a humanitarian trip to Mozambique Africa. And the second was the young men’s trip, we just got back yesterday and we were floating the Green River. I’ll talk about the young men’s trip first. We first arrived at Rob Weavers house on Wednesday morning where we got all the stuff ready and drove to where we put the canoes in the river. Jake Farnsworth and I were partners and I don’t think any of us really knew how to steer a canoe and if Jake did he didn’t show it because we crashed into the side quite frequently and we ended up a couple miles behind the group. We didn’t see the group but we knew they were down river somewhere. Once from a distance we saw someone’s canoe stop at a bank. When we arrived at that same bank it had looked like they had walked down this little stream with their canoes because there was talk about stopping at this spot and there were footprints in the mud. But me and Jake still couldn’t see anyone so we were really confused if they kept going down river or not. Eventually we decided to try walking back in the creek a little bit to try and find someone but we quickly found that we were sinking in the mud to our waists and got engulfed with probably around 2000 mosquitoes. We were running back to the river very quickly once we got unstuck from the mud. But me and Jake found ourselves in the same situation of go back in there with a canoe or go more downstream. Jake had the Idea we should pray about it to try and find an answer to our dilemma. After our prayer I got a strong feeling that we should continue down river for a bit and 30- 40 minutes late we arrived at the camp site. It turns out they were thinking about stopping there and camping but much quicker than me and Jake realized that it was not livable with all the mosquitos and left to find another spot. Most of the group probably doesn’t know this because me and Jake were both too embarrassed to admit much. This was one of many cool and fun experiences we had there. Another cool think I appreciated was Derrik Tillison, Rob Weavers and, Bishop Buttars talking about their cool experiences on there mission but still being real with us and letting us know that it will be hard. I appreciated this especial because I am thinking about going on one soon and need to start preparing. Although there were thousands of mosquitos and the heat was boarder line unbearable I still had a lot of fun, Thanks Rob for organizing that fun trip. I will now talk briefly on my experiences in Africa, there were too many experiences that happened there I could talk for hours but really one that stuck out to me the most was when we were teaching lessons with the missionaries one Sunday. We had three visits with people planned and we taught the first one to a lady and her son. It was a good lesson and it was cool to hear her trials and how she overcame them but when we went to teach the other ones the people ended up not being home so were trying to think of what to do because we didn’t have much time left but still wanted to go do something. We ended up going to an investigator or someone that is interested in the church but doesn’t know a lot yet.  When we got there I realized it was a 14 year old kid named Yourin.  We didn’t have a lesson and we were just coming to surprise him, because he didn’t know we were coming. When we go there he was shocked and all we ended up doing was singing a hymn to him, We sang I am a child of God. But when I looked up at him he had tears in his eyes and was full out balling by the end. He said it was the greatest surprise he had ever received and That today was the best day of his life. Upon hearing this I found that I had a couple tears in my eyes which is a rare occurrence. But after that all we did was give him a hug and leave. I was amazed at how grateful and kind these people were. Because I know that if a bunch of teenagers showed up to my house and started singing I would be a bit weirded out. I am ending here because It is time to go to church but I just want to end saying I am so grateful for everyone in my life and these experiences I got to have IN the name of Jesus Christ amen.