Feb 15 08

February 15, 2008

Today was our final Family Services Staff Meeting. Now that we’re apparently fully trained it’s time to go home. We both bore our testimonies and then said goodbye to some of our favorite people. We have really enjoyed everyone in this office (Ken Brown, Michelle Reidhead and Chris Frazier). They gave us a beautiful card signed by all the missionaries there today and a book with stories of many Native Americans, some of whom we have met. We also had a nice lunch at Eva’s.

On our way up this morning we went through Whiteriver and stopped at the hospital. Robert gave a blessing to Rhonda Lupe then we visited with Irene Murphy. Maxine’s grandmother is Irene’s sister. Irene said that today Rose has a temperature and sounds like she’s getting a cold. Sounds more like pneumonia to us.

Last night there was a winter storm warning issued for the Mogollon Rim, which is us. We really wanted to go to this final meeting at Family Services and we also were very anxious to give Rhonda a blessing. She’s been in the hospital for two weeks without one and we felt very strongly that she needed the help and encouragement a blessing could give. So in our prayers this morning we asked that the weather might be tempered enough that we could travel safely and do these things. When we left it was snowing steadily in Cibecue. By the time we reached Cibecue Mountain there was no snow at all, no rain and the road was dry. We had only a little rain between there and Whiteriver. When we came out of the hospital it was snowing again, but only snowed off and on all day. Now we’re in the canyon on the way home and it’s raining hard. The roads are wet but not snow-covered. We feel that we were blessed to be able to accomplish the things we needed and wanted to do.

We also stopped in Pinetop and mailed ourselves 4 boxes of stuff that we had packed. We mailed a little surprise to the grandkids, too. Sorry adult children. When we get to where there’s decent shopping maybe we’ll send you a surprise, too.

We’ve counted how many trainings we have left, how many Sundays we have left, everything we could think of to count for a long time. Now we’re starting to check off some “lasts”…or we’re down to some “one mores”. Robert is getting so homesick for his kids he’s ready to reward comments on the Blog again. Unfortunately if we do that we’d owe Andi a small fortune. Cheaper just to come and visit soon.