Dear Family and Friends,
What a week this has been!! Sister Owens got an unusually large dose of the mission field this week as the Branch Relief Society President. She is supposed to submit her list of Ministering Sisters to the Branch President for approval and she hasn’t met hardly any of the sisters she is supposed to assign. She has been checking visiting teaching lists from the past and finding out that some of the sisters don’t even know they had visiting teaching assignments. Monday the Primary President told her that she is taking the summer off and will start again when school starts. So, for now Sister Owens is running the Primary and the Relief Society probably for the summer. We have been keeping tabs on the Rogers family (the ones we did the service project for down on the river). Sister Rogers left to be with her daughter while she had surgery. The day after she left their son had an ambulance come out and get his dad and take him to Tuscaloosa to the hospital. That was two weeks ago. She came home after a week but the hospital wouldn’t let her husband go home. He has been in and out of intensive care for the two weeks. We have been going up at least once a week to see him, and her when we could catch her there. Every time we would visit him he would beg us not to leave him. But of course, we had to. We were sure he was very near dying but the hospital kept telling his wife they just had to keep him until he got a little stronger, then he could go home. She had to go home for a break and we told her we would go stay with him Friday from 10:00 AM until 3:00 PM. She got a call from the nurse at 9:45 AM that he had passed away. He was alone when he died. We met her at the hospital and started to make arrangements for the funeral and family luncheon. Both of Sister Owens councilors and her secretary have been gone all week and she couldn’t get ahold of any of them. She called the Branch President’s wife (the other active sister in the branch) to see how they usually handle the food for the luncheon (this was Friday). She told her to just call the sisters and have them bring food to the church. There was one active sister in the ward besides Sister Owens and Sister James that would be in town before Sunday. All this came on top of being gone for over 12 hours on Thursday for Zone Conference.
The first part of the week was spent trying to clean up the records for the branch and see where some of the sisters live so we could visit them. We sent a text to one sister that never answers our calls and never answers her door when we come by. She didn’t answer the text but we were in the town where she lives so we went to her house anyway and she actually came to the door. Of course the first words out of her mouth were, “You have caught me at a really bad time.” She actually said she wanted to meet with us and set a time for next Thursday for us to come back. I guess we’ll see if anyone is home then (I am entirely too pessimistic).
The highlight of the week for Sister Owens was the cut and perm she got on Wednesday. Sorry, but the $75 didn’t make it such a highlight for me. But she has been much more pleasant each morning since Wednesday, so that is good.
It has been so sad to observe things with the Rogers family since the death of their father. When I was there to administer the sacrament for them the week before he went to the hospital he said he wanted to get better so they could get back to the temple. They are endowed, but have never been sealed. Sister Rogers was hoping for a miracle – that the Lord would heal him just one more time so they could go. “But it just didn’t happen this time.” The children don’t get along. The three of them will be at the funeral, but will then go their separate ways. They won’t sit down and eat together. It is so important to take care of the important things in life and make sure things are in order with the Lord. John junior had nothing kind to say about his dad the day we met him at the house when they took his dad to the hospital. When we met them at the hospital after his dad passed, he was so distraught, I can’t imagine how he was feeling. Everybody in the family has had a lot of fun for a lot of years. But they have never really bothered with the things that really matter. What we do with “this day of life” is so eternally important.
Actually we had another Senior couple tour this Saturday and it was just the thing we needed after our week. We toured a confederate soldier cemetery, a museum full of George Washington artifacts, the old courthouse in Columbiana (built in 1854). The new one they use now was built in 1906. There are records in the courthouse dating back to before Alabama became a state. The church has a camera installed and they are digitizing all the old records. The elders and sisters assigned to the area spend several hours each week digitizing records. The cemetery was so neat and we learned so many neat things in the Washington museum that we can’t even start to tell you anything because it will make the email too long (I know, they are already. Sorry). I have to tell you one thing though. The artist that was commissioned to do a life sized statue of George Washington had him lie on the bed at his home and covered his body with a sheet and did a plaster cast of his face, which was used for the statue. It is a perfect likeness of George when he was 50 years old. The bust in the attachments (attch1&2) was made from the same cast as the statue. His granddaughter was playing in the back yard while they were creating the plaster cast and she looked through the window and saw him lying on the bed. She thought he had died. They had to pause the process and assure her that her grandpa was not dead. I never knew that George was Martha’s second husband. Their two children were actually Martha’s grandchildren from her first marriage that they adopted. We found out lots of other neat stuff.
Interesting what you find walking through a civil war cemetery (attch3).
The gospel is true. Make sure the important things get done everyday and every week. Then there will be no regrets.
Keep the commandments and read your Book of Mormon!!
We love y’all,
Elder and Sister Owens
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