Nov 18

November 18, 2006

Today was a stay in Cibecue day. We spent most of the morning talking to Shawn and Heather on the phone, which was delightful. Then we did some visiting. At first no one was home then things kind of picked up, although we didn’t see everyone on our list. We did meet Alma’s sister who is not a member but will be moving to Cibecue in a couple of weeks and invited us to come and visit her. Gilbert said he and Alma would come to church with us tomorrow. We also went back to see the Richard and Carol, the two who came after a bit of imbibing 2 weeks ago and they said they’d come tomorrow. At their place there were a lot of people and we found out they were having memorial dinner. This is an Apache custom held 1 year after a person’s funeral to remember that person and repay all the people who attended the funeral and brought food and gifts. Two of Janet and Elroy’s children, Caitlin and Jonathan, were staying with relatives in a house in this area. They came running over and both gave me a big hug and talked for a while. I asked them if we should pick them up for church tomorrow and they said yes, they’ll come. This would be a big step because Janet said it was up to the kids to decide if they want to go to Assembly of God or to the Mormon Church. They came to Primary last week and we had fun so I’m hoping they’ll pick us again tomorrow. We also saw Joseph’s mother who said he gets to come home from jail on Thanksgiving Day so we told her to have him stop by. He might and he might not. Who knows.

We also stopped to see our neighbor Josephine, who is a member, and told her we hope to see her at church tomorrow. She said yes, which meant “go away and leave me alone” not “yes I’ll come to church. She openly admits she’s just lazy and doesn’t want to get up in the mornings.

We’ve decided we absolutely must have our companionship study, even though we really struggle to find time to do it. Nevertheless, it helps us when we do and we could see by the meeting yesterday that it’s critical that we come to understand the ARP program, which is what we study together. We read it aloud and read the scriptures associated with each step. It’s nice. We like doing it but just get interrupted a lot.

Now we’re home for the night preparing for tomorrow, and hoping for no visitors so we can do that.

It was 76 degrees here this afternoon. For the record St Anthony is currently 44 and feels like 41. We do love the weather here.