What Makes You Beautiful

So, last Saturday Bobby and I did something I'm not sure I ever thought I would do...we chaperoned a church youth dance.  Seriously, as someone who grew up mostly avoiding chaperons at church dances I never suspected I would be in that position.  Anyway, we put on our dress clothes (did I mention it was church "Prom", seriously, who thinks up this stuff, I certainly didn't wear anything prom-y, but we did wear church clothes) and off we went.  We took a few minutes at the beginning of the dance to scope out places a couple could "hide" to make out (just in case...after all, I know where I was at that age) and then we started to watch the kids come in.  We didn't end up needing to have scoped out those places, either the kids we were chaperoning were much better than I was or they were just better at hiding...

I don't work in the Young Women's organization (I'm in Relief Society), but I know some of the young women in our ward pretty well because they babysit my boys for me.  I was so excited to see them at the dance.  They looked absolutely gorgeous, seriously, breathtaking, and they didn't have to show too much skin to look that way.  Seriously how beautiful are these girls?

And that boy?  He just turned 14 recently and this was his first dance.  I don't know him very well, but I always thought he was the shyer type...oh how wrong I was!  That kid danced pretty much every single slow dance and even got a phone number, FROM AN OLDER GIRL!  He sought out girls who were alone or hadn't danced and I'm sure he made the night for several girls who may not have been asked to dance if it hadn't been for him, what an awesome kid.  I hope that my boys are that sure of themselves and brave enough to dance every dance!

I have some observations from the dance, some things I thought about as we walked among those kids that night...

First was just how beautiful the girls DID look in their modest dresses and how I hope that my boys someday find girls who are confident enough in themselves to be that beautiful in their modesty.

Second, the geeky boys who dance too hard and have too little rhythm but obviously know their music (and know the best music, stuff that is older than them but timeless and amazing), they will someday soon be the cool kids even though they aren't now...I hope they know that.  In their early 20s when the girls start to care more about what you know and when they have grown all the way into their too big feet and they decide to cut their hair and when they've lost their braces they really will be the ones the girls like best and they will be the kind of cool then that matters and that lasts.

Third, I was familiar with almost all of the music they played at the dance, some of the music is stuff that was played at dances when I was a kid (the Electric Slide and Cotton-Eyed Joe are apparently timeless classics) and some of the music was newer.  The kids did dance, most of the kids spent most of the night dancing (there was of course a fair amount of standing around, but there was an impressive amount of dancing as well).  I was really struck by the song that was OBVIOUSLY the crowd favorite that night though.  I had heard the song before but didn't know it well, so I looked it up this week.  It was "What Makes You Beautiful" by One Direction.  I know, I'm old.  I mean, I know who One Direction is, but I couldn't have told you the name of any of their songs before this.  That night I was impressed that the boys were really singing the song (shamelessly in most cases) to the girls, they were enjoying it.  The girls were singing the song to each other.  And they really meant it.  It made me so happy to think that all of these young people were really TELLING each other that they ARE beautiful...and trust me THEY ARE!

As I was researching my third observation I found these two videos:

The quality of the dub on the first one is a little better, but I love the clips of talks from the General Authorities at the beginning of the second one (I got tears watching them both, I won't lie).

How awesome are these boys?  Right now I am raising boys, not girls, but I hope that when they are teenagers my boys aren't afraid to tell the girls how beautiful they are and I hope I am raising the kind of boys that can see beauty in ALL girls/women and that they are brave enough to see and openly appreciate REAL beauty in the girls around them and I hope that I have boys who are the kind of cool that matters and that lasts...even if they are geeks in the interim.