Spiritually Fed & Frustrated -gfh

This weekend gave us an interesting combination of being spiritually fed and being frustrated.
Saturday was our turn for the Worldwide Leadership broadcast on the new church handbooks. We loved it! I am so grateful for the inspiration and leadership of our prophet and apostles! There is always a focus on love and the individual and helping the individual and families received exaltation. Even tho I'm not really in a leadership capacity our branch president gave me one of the new handbooks. It is very inspiring to read through it.
Almost immediately following the broadcast was our Saturday evening session of Stake Conference. Speakers on the family and withstanding the temptations of the world and strengthening individual testimonies cemented the purpose of the church and those things learned in the Leadership Broadcast.
Sunday morning was Salt Lake broadcast of stake conference for 17 countries in Africa including 52 stakes and 53 districts!This was the BIG ONE that I really look forward to. It's kind of like General Conference all over again but with counsel very specific for Africa.
HOWEVER this is where the frustration comes in. For the last couple of weeks there has been a flyer posted on the bulletin board at the stake building about a big bike race scheduled for the Sunday of Stake Conference. Elder H and I chatted about it. Thought what great fun that would be ...never mind that we don't race and that we don't ride on Sundays...but we're all for bike events! And we noticed that a large part of the route was in the area of the stake center.
We left plenty early for conference Sunday Morning...but not early enough as it turned out and we should have done some pre planning. After two hours of maneuvering and strategizing and map consulting and a determined GoGo (our GPS) insisting that she knew the way and continually finding ourselves facing orange cones with fast and flashy cyclists whizzing past, we realised we couldn't get there from anywhere! We could see the black and white checkered flag on the GPS map but we couldn't maneuver ourselves in anyway to get past that main bike route. It was like being on the wrong side of the river with the bridge out! We thought about parking the car and walking the 2kms left to our destination but one doesn't just abandon one's car in an unknown neighborhood here in South Africa. We thought later that our journey would have made a great video with an aerial view showing us trying to conquer the maze but constantly finding a dead end. We knew we were sooo close. We started out certain that we could overcome...but finally realized that the bike race had won and we would be spiritually frustrated instead of spiritually fed that day.
We returned home and watched the DVD "Joseph Smith, Prophet of The Restoration" to try to satisfy our appetite.