My Story Matters

Tonight was the Newport Beach Stake Women's Conference.  The theme was, "My Story matters".  I was the rep on the committee for my ward, so I had a BIG hand in putting the night together.  We had an amazing speaker tonight.  Claudia Bushman, Dr. Bushman is a historian by training and has taught at Columbia University for many years. Her books include How America Discovered Columbus, In Old Virginia: Slavery, Farming, and Society in the Journal of John Walker, Mormon Sisters: Women of Early Utah, A Good Poor Man’s Wife, Mormon Domestic Life in the 1870s: Pandemonium or Acadia, Mormons in America (with Richard Bushman), Building the Kingdom: A History of Mormons in America (with Richard Bushman), and many others. She is one of the founders of Exponent II, a Boston-based magazine focusing on Mormonism and women’s issues.

She spoke tonight on the importance of writing down our stories.  We are all Latter Day Saint Pioneer women and our stories are of the utmost importance.  Who will tell our stories if we do not?  And if by some chance someone does tell our story after we pass, it will not be the full, unedited truth.  

I was so inspired tonight to really be diligent in my journaling.  I am pretty good about keeping this blog up, but I want to make sure my life stories, weather good, bad or ugly, are told.  It will be so meaningful to my kids to know that I left my history for them to read and remember.  How sad it would be to leave them with nothing.  I truly learned that My Story mattered.  

After the program, I sang with 5 other women, and speaker,  we went into the cultural hall for desert and displays.  The room was filled with stories of women in the Newport Beach Stake.  There were great ideas on how to keep journals, blogs and scrapbooks.  One idea just jumped out at me.  A sister in the Stake keeps a 365 day scrapbook.  She takes a picture each day and adds it, along with a small write up about the picture to a book.  365 days in pictures.  I LOVE THIS IDEA.  It totally inspired me to do one for myself.  And maybe even one for my girls.  I really wish I had this inspiration before Joshlyn's senior year.  It would have made for a great graduation gift.  


Anyway, I learned that 
"If you do not write, you will forger.  Ir you do not write, you will be forgotten".  
"Write to be read".  
"We never know what our adventures will mean to others".  


Thank you Claudia.  I am so inspired.




Angela