Single Post on Front Page

I'm really struggling with putting a single "featured post" on my home page. I've tried making a specific category for the post and tried modifying index.php to use query_posts with a category parameter but for some reason Atahualpa doesn't seem to finish the page when I do that.

I saw in another post a recommendation to use cat2page but that plugin is very out of date and doesn't seem to provide the effect that I need.

Is there a reason why we can't use query_posts with Atahualpa? What other option is suggested for this functionality?

Right now I have the look and feel I want because wordpress is set to only show 1 post - the problem with that is the archive pages only show 1 post as well so this isn't the solution.

Please help!

coloradoanimalwelfare.org