The Student becomes the Master

As I was writing this post, I came to this strange realization of how life just has strange way of taking one encounter and producing results years later. In May of 2007, I was a chaperone on the Youth Conference trip for my stake. I had a fabulous time as we toured upstate New York. As we were waiting to go on the Maid of the Mist at Niagara Falls, I got into a conversation with our new Stake President about being single and about speed dating. I had told him that I thought speed dating was a good idea and that I knew that there were a lot of other religious groups that held similar events. He said that he thought we should do something like that and that it would be a good way for Mormon singles to meet other Mormon singles. Well, fast forward to February 2008 and I was asked to help facilitate a Speed Meet event at our Stake Youth Valentine's Day dance. It was really fun to watch the youth interact and get to meet new people. I also watched and learned some things that could improve the event for next time. Ok, now fast forward another few months and I decided to attended my first speed dating event and to my shock and surprise, I actually had a nice time. I am so glad that I actually went not only because it was a good experience but because a few month later, the mid-singles committee put me in charge of the speed dating portion of one of our events. I do not think that I would have been able to pull off the event without my previous experience. The night was a huge success and after the event, it only took me 16 hours (seriously, that is not an exaggeration) to send out emails to all of those participants that matched with other participants. Apparently, they got such good feedback that they even discussed it for quite a while in the High Council meeting with the Stake President present. I just started putting the chain of events together but isn't it interesting that in May of 2007 I would have a conversation which would lead me down certain paths that would put me in charge of an event a year and half later? Totally strange. They are planning another speed dating event in January and I told my committee leader to just put me in as co-chair of the event with another cute male co-chair (good thinking, huh:)). I have been able to work out some of the bugs in the system and hopefully the next event will not take me 16 hours to recover from. We took a survey after the event and there were many people who had actually gone on dates with people that they met at the speed dating event.

Here are some pictures from that night.

Go Speed Racer, Go!