Cakes and Virtue

Today I had to speak to the young women in Annandale ward on the topic of "Virtue." I found a cool object lesson that I decided to try out on them to make a point. It involved making and decorating a fancy looking cake. It was my first cake that didn't involve cute little pretend characters like Elmo so it was a bit intimidating. I made all the pink flowers, added the yellow middles and dried them in the flower forms. When they had hardened enough to be handled, I put them on the cake and stored it in the Tupperware thing to protect it from little fingers that always seem to find every cake I ever make. When I took the top off the Tupperware at the church the next morning to put it up on the front table where I would be speaking, I was so sad. By closing up the container, the moisture stayed in and had essentially melted all the flowers. Instead of being nicely formed cherry blossoms, they had melted into slightly flower shaped pink lumps with yellow accent dots. Oh well. Another lesson learned. When using Royal Icing you must leave it open to the air. Back to the lesson. I told them I had brought a treat for them to eat while I was teaching and asked Taylor to pass out a piece to all the girls. She came up and asked if I had a knife. I told her to just grab it and give everyone some. She picked up the whole cake and headed to the kitchen to get a knife. I grabbed the cake back, set it on the table and said, "No, I mean just grab it and give everyone some." Then I stuck my fingers in the cake and grabbed a big messy chunk and handed it to her. She was surprised as were the other girls. Then Taylor decided this was really cool. She took the cake in her hand and handed it to Jaime, who didn't quite know what to do with a hand full of cake and frosting. Taylor was excited now and I had to put the breaks on the lesson to keep us from all getting messy. I handed out baby wipes and cleaned my hands off while we talked about the difference in the cake before I stuck my hand in it and after. The cake began pretty, delicate, fancy, good, clean and appealing. After it had been damaged, it was in a sense ruined, ugly, no longer desirable. We talked about how if we maintain a virtuous life it is beautiful, delicate, pretty and we are happy. Once we have allowed something or someone to strip us of our virtue we have become less desirable, damaged and will be unhappy. Just as only someone skilled at cake decorating can repair the cake and make it beautiful again, only Jesus can help us repair ourselves. Of course, the best way is to hold onto our virtue in the first place. We talked about places the world is stripping natural virtue from society and how it is happening "by degrees" so that people aren't even noticing the slippery slope (degrading media, language, immodest clothing, cheating, general lack of honesty, etc). Then how do we keep the virtue we have? The church published this week the new Personal Progress requirements on their website and they are perfect. If we can understand the things taught in each goal we will live with virtue. They are: maintain sexual purity, invite and be worthy for the holy spirit to be with you always, prepare for marriage in the temple and to be worthy to enter the temple, understand repentance, seek to know God by studying the scriptures. What awesome goals! I'm excited about the new value "virtue" being added to the Young Women Theme.