L. Tom Perry....ALOOOOOOOOOOOHA!

About a month ago they made an announement in church that L. Tom Perry and President Monson were coming to Hawaii for a Regional Conference. Its always exciting to hear a prophet or an apostle speak in person. They also announced that they would have a priesthood choir sing at the conference. And since it was a Regional Conference basically all the members in the state of hawaii would be coming to this. So to sing in the choir meant that I would have a guaranteed seat up front.
About a week before the confernce we found out that President Monson's wife fell down and hurt herself pretty bad and that he would be attending to her and therefore would not be coming to Hawaii. A lot of people were bummed but at the same time we were still excited to be having L. Tom Perry come.
I was kind of nervous that being in the choir would draw too much attention to me, well specifically the beard. I thought that in the end they would make me shave it, but I played my cards right and I'm still sporting it. In the choir we sang two songs, "How Great Thou Art" and "Beautiful Savior," two songs that are now on my list of favorites.
Minutes before the conference started and everyone was seated waiting for it to start Elder Perry turned around and looked at all of us in the choir. He got up from his seat, walked over to our choir director, who is also a student, and said, "Music is the most important part of all church meetings, and it's all relying on you." I already told you this was minutes before we started, as if we weren't nervous enough already.
I got over the nerves fairly quickly when we started singing, actually when my neighbor started singing. They organized us according to height, so of course I was up in the front along with mainly Asians and Philipinos. I don't think the guy next to me hit the right note even once. Right before when we practiced a little bit I realized that that was going to be the case so I helped him out and told him to sing his parts in "piano", which means softly. I still heard him but it didn't bring us down, it atleast put a smile on my face.
After the conference when I was walking out I was stopped right before the front doors. They had started clearing a path for Elder Perry so that he could leave and be on time for his flight out. He was shaking hands on his way out and it looked like I was in line to shake his hand as well. When he got to me he shook my hand and then suddenly he grabbed the back of my neck, shook me around a little bit, and said, "look at this group, this group can change the world." That's the second apostles hand that I've shaken but the first time that my whole body was shaken by one.