I think that parents of UU children sometimes are not aware of the profound effect that UU RE is going to have upon their children.
(I can hear you all laughing: you know what I mean.)
Actually I think that even the Sunday school teachers and youth conference organizers are not always aware of just how profound an effect they're going to have.
I've sometimes joked with a friend and said the experience is like being stolen by fairies.
An innocent person wanders into a certain part of the woods, or maybe they disappear from their cradle as a baby. They spend a single night, or maybe a brief moment or an eternal year, in the fairy land amid the music, the laughter, the earthy but unspeakable beauty. And then they are dropped back into the human village, to try and resume a normal life. But they are forever changed. They can hear the faint sound of the fairy music. Sometimes they bring great gifts to their people; sometimes they spend their whole life haunted, trying to go back, following the fairy song.
YRUU conferences are a fairy land, a forest surrounding a Magic Pool. Once you have bathed in it, you are changed forever. You become something different than what you were. You have experienced something; your sense of what is possible has changed. Your relationship to what is possible has been altered. You have become a fairy, or a unicorn, or something. It's as strong an experience as making love for the first time. It changes you. Even if it only happened once. If you have been to the Magic Pool, you are a different kind of person. Your hopes and fears and dreams have been changed.
I think that this experience of the Magic Pool is the UU conversion experience. Most people don't become committed UUs from some intellectual theological decision. If you ask UU leaders, most will tell you: what made them really become a UU, what made them decide to become a minister or a lifelong lay leader, was a UU summer camp, or youth conference, or leadership retreat. That was when they really understood, really fell in love, really knew that this is what matters. It was the Magic Pool.
People will work year-round on administrative committees just for the chance, once a year, to drink from the Magic Pool. Once you have tasted it, it becomes the center, the source of meaning and renewal, the place the soul comes alive. UUs tend to call this "community," but I think the right word is something more like "communion." It's powerful stuff. People will shape their lives around it. We have to have it. It's what make us human again-- or maybe fairies again.