Week 20 - Dwight

 

Now that picture brings back a lot of memories!  It was 1991 when several of us took a road trip with David and Jean Whaley to the Washington, D.C. Temple.  Wow, was I ever really that young?  And Sister Potter, while a smidglet more mature is still as pretty as ever!  Thanks David and Jean for sending this photo this week to remind us of this historic event for your family.

Even though a lot of our appointments fell through this week, we still had a lot going on.  The young missionaries get the opportunity to go to the temple twice a year and this was the week for our zone to go.  It was a great session and while at the temple we saw several people we know from our distant past (including Sister Boney and Brother Pace).

Elder Vern P. Stanfill of the Seventy was in our mission this week.  Two zone conferences were held with half the mission in each.  Some of you may remember, Elder Stanfill's most recent General Conference talk, given this past April, was entitled "The imperfect Harvest."  Such a wonderful conference.  We feel armed to be even better missionaries after this experience.

Other than instructions from Elder and Sister Stanfill and President and Sister Stevens, we were impressed by two talks given by two recent converts.  Brother Brad Whitley, a former protestant minister, told us about feeling something was missing and finding what it was when he read the Book of Mormon.  Sister Katie Menard explained how a friend helped her to find the gospel.  She's now engaged to that friend!

Brad Whitley, us, Katie and River Menard

Wednesday night we took Jay and Decandis Faison to the Primary Activity Days at the church.  On the way home we told Jay (10 years old, baptized in September) that one of the apostles had died and that he would soon be replaced.  He said "Aww, I wish I was old enough to be an apostle!"  Jay was given an assignment to speak in Primary and he worked on the talk all by himself and gave it today and did a fantastic job.  The primary kids clapped when he was done!

I spent several hours this week with a good, long-time friend of mine, JR Rouse.  I call him Junior.  I hope we are being a blessing to each other.  He's teaching me some things and I'm attempting to teach him a few things too.  I met Junior when I was 5.  Now, 60 years later we have rekindled a friendship that will last forever.

JR Rouse and Kit Kat

My sister Linda Heath and her husband Donald are here visiting for the next few weeks.  We met them at The Peach House restaurant for lunch on Friday.  Our cousin Melissa Wiggins works there.  The food was really good, but not nearly as good as the dinner Linda made for us today at her daughter Kari's house!  Kari lives in the house our family moved into 63 years ago.  It's the first time I've been in that house for many years.  There were 10 in our family.  Still not sure how we all fit in that house!

Melissa, Kari, me, Linda, Donald

We visited hospitals three times this week to give blessings, administer the sacrament, and hopefully brighten someone's day.  Visiting with our friend Judy today, who's sister is in the ICU, we were reminded how precious family is and how unpredictable life can be.  We love our family, immediate and extended, so much. This mission is giving us a chance to get closer to some of them.  We're also finding that, all of us have a family connection through our Heavenly Father.  There are so many people that we love and feel a connection to that's hard to explain.  We feel we've known many for a lot longer than a few weeks or months, as if our relationship predates earth life.  Maybe it does, but in any case we're finding that the relationships we're developing and the love we feel is making this mission so worth any small effort we are making.  Love you all!