Feb 15 07

February 15, 2007

Our telephone rang at 8:00 and Irene informed us that she was sick and couldn’t go to the temple today. Since we were all dressed and ready to go we decided to go ahead without her. As usual the temple experience was very uplifting. We are always spiritually fed when we attend the temple. Snowflake is one of the small temples and the session we attended was very crowded. We felt a bit claustrophobic as times because everything is so much smaller than we’re used to in the Idaho Falls Temple. In the Ladies’ dressing room there were 6 women waiting for one locker. We never saw that much of a wait in IF.

We mailed our taxes in Snowflake, then stopped at Wal-Mart in Show Low, after eating a sandwich in the truck. Seems the truck has become our favorite restaurant. At Wal-Mart we bought quilting supplies for our upcoming Relief Society activity. On the way out of town we stopped at Circle K to get our drinks and met Gilbert and Alma there. They were with his mother, no doubt making one of the daily runs to Show Low to support the family business.

As soon as we returned to Cibecue we started visiting. We had a selfish motive. We figured if we did all our visits today we could have Saturday free to pack for Arkansas. So we taught 3 temple prep lessons (Afred and Thelma, Cheryl, Dion and Verbena), and visited Fernando Thompson, Myrna and Gilbert and Alma. We had a family counseling session with Gilbert and Alma and we also gave her some materials to make some tissue paper flowers. She has been asking for some craft projects she could do at home. Myrna is a sad, sad story. She’s the Young Women’s president who is pregnant and found out this week that her baby has Edwards Syndrome. We had never heard of this, but it’s like Down’s Syndrome except that the baby only has 18 chromosomes. The baby has multiple defects and no chance of survival. Most babies don’t survive full term but if they do they would expect her to live a few hours up to maybe 12 days at the most. Of course she had the option of terminating the pregnancy, but she chose not to do that. She just wants to let nature take its course. She’s certainly had more than her fair share of sorrow. It hasn’t even been a year yet since her son committed suicide.

Fernando is another interesting story. He’s the 1st counselor in the branch presidency, has had a temple recommend for 2 years, but has never gone. We’ve tried multiple times to get him to commit to going with us on March 10 but just can’t get him to do it. We hoped to find his wife home last night, but she was gone. We think she’s the key to getting this to happen. When we drove up, Fernando came outside in a pair of shorts and a shirt and stood on the front walk talking to us. It was very cold and windy, but it was quite apparent he had not intention of inviting us in. We were pretty frustrated, when someone who is in a leadership position and we would expect support from won’t even let us in. Maybe we should have gone home and taken a shower.

The best meeting of the day was Alfred and Thelma. They’re a very sweet couple and seem genuinely excited about the temple. The spirit was strong there.

As we went into our last meeting, which was Dion and Verbena, I told Robert I was going to say something that would make him laugh very hard, so be careful you don’t drive right off the road. I said, “Let’s keep this meeting short.” Now you readers might not see the humor in that statement, but it’s there. Verbena loves to talk. We always meet with her at 8:00 at night and have a hard time getting out before 10:00. In spite of our best efforts, tonight was no different. We really like this couple and enjoyed the meeting, but still found ourselves stumbling home after ten and very grateful to finally get in bed.