Fwd: Week 63: Back in the Saddle again (with a vengeance)

Dear Family and Friends,

Sister Owens has been feeling better every day so we decided to start venturing out this week.  Monday she stayed home and did a little laundry and I went without her to the church and did some clerk work.  Then we took the sisters out to Greensboro in the afternoon and evening.  We had a couple of sisters we had to follow up with for addresses on their daughters and the sisters had an appointment with a single man at a park that evening.  He is a member who knew the elders when they were in Greensboro and they had a branch there.  He and his sister are on the branch list and we had tried to locate them before but could not find the address.  We were excited to find out where they lived and he was pretty excited to meet with the sisters.  Neither of the ladies we wanted to see were home (it was a holiday).  Neither of them would return my call I had made previously.  We all went to the park and waited for Jonah for twenty-five minutes and called him once and texted him twice with no response. We finally left to come home and on the way he called and asked if we were still at the park.  He said he was sorry but he was asleep and didn't wake up.  So we had a nice test run for Sister Owens but didn't really accomplish anything as far as the work goes.  It did tire her out quite a bit.

Since we tired her out pretty good we decided to keep her home Tuesday to get ready for Wednesday when we had committed to take a sister to get a medical test in Birmingham.  So other than some of our P-day chores she just spent the day resting.  Wednesday we had to leave at 6:20 so we could pick up Sister Borden in Greensboro by 7:00.  We were a little apprehensive about going to Birmingham because they have closed all the freeways into downtown to do some major revamping of the roadways into town.  We found out the test she needed was actually being done at a facility in the outskirts of town so we didn't have to deal with that at all.  On the way home we got a call from a sister in Greensboro and told her we would stop and see her after we dropped off Sister Borden.  We visited with her and found out she has been off work for a few weeks because of blood clots and heart problems and she was going to need help getting her rent paid for June.  We didn't get home until 4:00 and Sister Owens was too tired to try to go to Coordination meeting with the sisters and Brother Smith so we called and told them we wouldn't make it.  When we don't get there Brother Smith has to meet with them in the parking lot because he can't be in the building alone with the sisters.  It is starting to get pretty warm now so that isn't really very fun.  We discussed the rent situation with President James and he said we could use fast offering funds to help her.

Thursday morning we picked up Ollie and took her to the church to help her with her checkbook.  We can't take Sister Owens in their house anymore because of the heavy cigar smoke from her husband's smoking.  In the afternoon we went to Book of Mormon class in Greensboro.  Brother White was there after having his dialysis in the morning.  He looked really good.  Sister Owens told him he forgot to bring his pillow down  He said he wasn't going to use it.  He sat up in his chair for the whole class.  They removed a stint in one arm that has not been used for quite some time and placed another one in his other arm.  If it works they will be able to remove the port they currently have in his chest for his dialysis.  It should reduce the amount of pain he has been experiencing everyday lately.  After class we went to find the sister's landlord to give him the check for rent and get a receipt.  It was a very frustrating wild goose chase.  I've never known of anyone that makes it so hard to find them to give them money. We drove to his home, his daughter's home, and an employee's home trying to get a phone number for him.  We finally got his wife's phone number and didn't get any answer.  We finally told the sister to tell him to call us and let us know where we could meet him to pay him and left to come home.  He showed up at her house about ten minutes after we left and nobody ever called us.  I just decided if he wanted the money he would call us and I wasn't going to worry about it until we heard from him.

Friday we picked up the sisters and went to Tuscaloosa to District Council.  We have been planning to take Timothy to the temple to do baptisms but as yet he did not have his recommend.  President James was going to be in Linden for work and said he would come over to the church if we could get him there for an interview.  So we picked him up in Forkland on the way home from Tuscaloosa and brought him to the church.  We thought we would probably have to stop in Greensboro to deliver the check but nobody called us so we didn't worry about it.  Timothy had his interview  and we took him and the sisters home and then we got a call from Greensboro.  They said the landlord would be there at 4:00 for us to give him the check.  Since it was 3:45 we told them that wouldn't work but we could be there by 5:00.  Then we only had to wait about twenty minutes for him to show up and we finally got that done.  We had one more appointment at 6:30.  President James wanted us to go visit a recent convert who had sent a letter to the church asking to have her name removed from the records.  Her cousin and his wife live with her and are very hateful toward the church.  They have been pressuring her to remove her name.  We were supposed to find out if that was really what she wanted of if she had changed her mind.  We had to meet with her outside on the porch and his cousin was hanging around us the whole time listening.  Finally a lady that was living there came over and interrupted our conversation and accused her of lying to us and not telling us what she had been telling everyone else.  Everything went down hill from there pretty fast.  Her cousin called the Landlord and asked if it was private property, which it was, and he said those dang Mormons are here again and he wanted to call the police and have us removed from the premises.  He was being extremely rude and had the landlord on speaker.  It kind of backfired on him.  The landlord said, "Man, you don't want to call the police on a Mormon.  If you want them to leave just go out in the front yard and start yelling obscenities and they will leave."  Then the cousin said, "Yey, I have you on speaker, they're hearing everything you say."  We asked the member to give it some thought and address a letter to President James and let him know what she had decided and excused ourselves. It was definitely not a fun way to end the day.

The next morning we left about 7:30 to pick up the sisters and Timothy to take him to the temple in Birmingham (see attachment).  After stopping on the way to get gas, we arrived at the temple and drove into the parking lot and just happened to pass a group of people walking from their cars to the temple.  Sister Owens said, "That is our son-in-law's parents."  I thought that was crazy.  It might have been someone that looked like them but it couldn't have been them.  They live in Pocatello.  I hurried and followed them to the side of the temple were they were going to have some pictures taken and sure enough, it was them.  They were there for a niece's sealing.  Had we not driven into the parking lot at that precise time neither of us would have known the other was there.  It was such a perfect tender mercy from the Lord that just seemed to give us such a boost and made us so happy after the experience we had just had the night before.  Then we got to top it off with the opportunity to see Timothy baptized for the dead.  It has been two weeks since he was baptized.

Today we had an awesome testimony meeting.  Sister Weaver bore a beautiful testimony.  We and she knows she is leaving this transfer, but no one else in the branch does (except her companion).  She will be going a week from this Wednesday.  We are really going to miss her.  She is an awesome missionary. After we got everyone home following the Self Reliance class the sisters texted us that they had an appointment with a single male tonight and wondered if we could go with them.  We were pretty tired but told them we would go.  They had met his neighbor and had been invited to her home but had gone three times to see her and she was never there.  Marquise lived next door and opened his door every time they knocked on the neighbor's door.  Finally the third time they told him they were missionaries and they gave him a Book of Mormon and set an appointment to meet with him tonight.  It was a really good discussion.  He seems very sincere and says he has been thinking lately that he wants to get closer to God and find a church that is right for him.  He hadn't started reading the Book of Mormon but he said he was going to start reading it tonight before he goes to bed and he said the closing prayer.  We are excited to meet with him again this Wednesday night.

It is so neat to know the gospel is true and see the Lord's hand in the work.

Keep the commandments and read your Book of Mormon everyday.

We love y'all,

Elder and Sister Owens

Week 27: A tree for Christmas (already), a trip to the Temple, and the Sacrament

Dear Family and Friends,

It has been another busy week.  We started with apartment inspections in Thomasville and Demopolis on Monday.  We always enjoy doing inspections because we get to visit with the missionaries and hear how the work is going.  Elder Waltman just transferred in to Thomasville.  He is from Middleton, Idaho.  They told us about the Smith family they found and started teaching.  After their first lesson the family said they had some relatives and wondered if they might be able to sit in on the next lesson (duh).  Everybody on the street they live on is related and they all seem to be interested.  The elders told us there are about thirty of them.  About a month ago President Sainsbury asked all the missionaries to start praying everyday for more converts and more baptisms in the mission.  It's exciting to see how our prayers are being answered.

We didn't schedule anything for Tuesday since we had to have our car in the shop in the morning. It was supposed to be ready about 11:00 AM and we got a call about 10:00 to let us know they found a couple parts that have to be replaced and they had to order them so the car wouldn't be ready until around 4:00 PM.  At 3:30 they called again to tell us the mechanic punctured something putting it back together and they couldn't get the replacement part until the next day.  We ended up getting the car back at 11:30 the next morning.  It's neat to see how the Lord takes care of the details in this work.  We had the Selma and Greenville inspections scheduled for Friday morning and afternoon.  We got a call from the Sisters in Greenville telling us they had to reschedule so Wednesday at 2:00 PM was the only time that would work out.  We felt bad because Selma is right on the way to Greenville, but we really didn't think we would be able to reschedule the Selma inspection on such short notice so we would just have to go back Friday for their inspection.  We just picked up the car and were getting ready to go to Greenville when we got a text from the Selma Elders telling us they had to go to a meeting at the mission office Friday and wondered if we could do the inspection on Saturday.  We responded and told them we could do that unless they would be around in about an hour and we could stop on the way to Greenville and take care of it then.  They were available so we got both the inspections done on Wednesday and were only fifteen minutes late for Greenville.  What about that tree?  On our way from Selma to Greenville we saw a cotton field being harvested.  It was very interesting to see.  We stopped to take a short video of the harvester doing its work.  There were some workers there so we asked one of them if we might get a piece of cotton from one of the plants that had been harvested.  He said that would be fine and asked if we wanted a whole plant that hadn't been harvested.  I told him that would be great and would make my wife very happy.  He went out and uprooted a plant and brought it to us (attachment #1).  Sister Owens got out of the car and came to thank him.  He said it was no problem, they have about 23,000 others so it wouldn't be missed.

Thursday was another really good day.  We had our interviews with the President.  He and his wife are always so inspiring.  Sister Owens asked the President about reading a book that is not on the approved list for missionaries.  He informed us that senior couples can do "anything they want" reinforcing the fact that senior missionaries really do "get away with murder."  He said he really did mean that.  He said we should tell the young missionaries to go home and get married and convince their spouses to go on a mission with them and then they can do anything they want.  After interviews we had our district council.  The missionaries always split up and conduct phone audits as part of the meeting where they check the history of each other's phones for the past week.  The seniors don't participate in that and now that we have another senior couple in the district we had some one to visit with.  He is an engineer from silicon valley and he monopolized the conversation wondering what kind of physics God uses to accomplish his work.  It was really quite an interesting conversation.  When we were through the district leader mentioned to me that it sounded like a very interesting conversation we were having.  He started to ask a question and said he better wait until later.  He never did ask the question.  I was curious what it might have been.

Friday we got to take Cedric and Tasha and their two girls to the temple (attachment #2).  The Raybons (attachment #3)  that the sisters have been meeting with (they came to church last week) drove and took the sisters with them.  When we got there Cedric and Tasha went in to do baptisms and their girls stayed outside and toured the grounds with the Raybons and Sister Shreeve and Sister Owens.  Elias Smith is one of the youth in the ward that was just ordained a priest about a month ago.  He baptized Cedric and Tasha.  They were baptized for ancestors of the Owens and the Smiths.  Cedric served as witness when Tasha was baptized.  Brother Smith and I got to perform the confirmations.  Cedric is going in for hip replacement surgery tomorrow.  They told him he will probably miss about six weeks of work during recuperation.

We definitely have more apartment to clean on Saturday than we used to.  I'm having to help now (darn).  We are really starting to miss the senior couple outings.  We haven't had one now for several weeks.  None of us wanted to do anything outside during the summer anyway.  As a matter of fact we drove over to our walking path Saturday morning with the windows down.  The first time they have been down since we arrived in Alabama.  It was only 69 degrees when we left.  It's the first time the temperature has been that low since we left Utah in March.  Of course it was approaching 80 degrees by the time we were driving home.  It was almost 9:00 AM.

So Sunday when I came out of Branch Presidency meeting and went in to the chapel I saw Brother White at the Sacrament table.  I think it had to be the highlight of my week.  It was so good to hear him bless the sacrament again with Brother Borden.  President James bore his testimony today and said how much he loves and appreciates Brother White.  He said if Brother White can get out of bed, he knows he will be there on Sunday to bless the sacrament.  Brother White bore his testimony also.  He told about he and his sister having surgery the same day and finding out while he was still in the hospital that his sister had passed away.  He told Sister Owens, before he went home, that he is rounding up his herd next week.  Before his surgery he always brought two or three brethren with him to church.  None of them have been there since his surgery.  The stake clerk visited the branch today.  I got to spend time with him during third hour.  He went over some things with me and then I thought of a couple questions that I had been wanting answers to, so I asked him.  He said he would really like to know about that himself.  He asked me to call Salt Lake this week and then to call him and let him know what I found out.  That makes it sound like he doesn't know his job, but he really is a very good clerk and a spiritual man.  When he left he told President James that I had asked him a couple questions that he had never really considered.  That is just the branch.  We just have really weird situations that take some complicated clerk work in order to get the records correct.

We had an interesting "South" thing happen again today.  In Branch Presidency meeting we were talking about different things we can do to encourage reverence as we start our sacrament meeting.  President James suggested that we might turn   the volume up on the prelude music about five minutes to the hour.  Thinking they would just start talking louder so they could be heard, I suggested that he might consider turning the volume down.  When I went in to the chapel and sat down by Sister Owens I wondered why there was no prelude music playing.  It was really strange (and uncomfortable).  The organist was just sitting there at the organ and not playing.  It was very quite, though.  No one was saying a word.  Then when President James bore his testimony he related what we had discussed in Branch Presidency meeting and that he had suggested turning up the volume.  Then he said Brother Owens suggested we just "turn it off" (excuse me) so that is what we did this morning and he thanked everyone for their reverence and said it was really easy to feel the spirit. Also when Brother White was bearing his testimony there were a couple people in the congregation that were having a really hard time stifling their hallelujahs and amens.

We will be driving to transfers this Wednesday.  President Sainsbury confirmed during interviews that we will be losing Sister Snarr. She started her mission here eighteen weeks ago Wednesday.  We will miss her but know that she will have some great experiences as she moves on to other areas and other companions.  We will probably see her from time to time at conferences or transfers. It will be exciting, too, to have another sister come to Demopolis.

Keep the commandments and read your Book of Mormon

And listen to the Prophets next weekend

We love y'all,

Elder and Sister Owens