Sunday is a day of rest - well at least a change of pace

We never seem to run out of adventures each day.  This morning I opted to go walking and so I walked down to the intersection of Rte. 3 and Riverside Drive and back – a total of 3 miles according to my Iphone.  It was pretty warm already when I started out and by the time I got home I was dripping with perspiration.  The humidity was really high as well.  I love walking in the mornings because there are many birds calling to each other and I guess soon they will be gone for the winter.  It is not winter yet, but I saw that the Virginia creeper vine that is at one home here is already starting to turn orange – a sure sign of approaching Autumn.

After breakfast Bill decided to check his email and saw that his cousin Mason was on the Skype and so he clicked on Skype and they talked and talked and Bill was having a wonderful time talking to his cousin until he looked at the clock on the bottom of the screen and he realized that he was not dressed for church and that we had 35 minutes to get there to be on time.  So he did the only thing that a thinking husband would do, he handed the Skype connected computer to me and told Mason that I would talk to him for a while.  Well, I really did not have time to talk to him either so we chatted for a while and then I took my leave and we went off to Church. 

At church I watched a miracle happen.  We have a Spanish speaking couple who have joined our ward and when I met them last year they did not speak any English.  Today she started telling us in English how she liked the class we were in.  It was really a good thing to hear her use English instead of relying on the Spanish speaking members that we have in the ward to translate for her.

In my Sunday School class that I have been teaching for almost a year, we had a young man in attendance who took exception to the fact that we celebrate the Sabbath on Sunday and not on Saturday.  He said that we should change it to Saturday because that is the day Jesus worshipped when he was on the earth.  We had a hard time with that and I still do not think he is convinced.  The next thing he had a problem with was working on the Sabbath.  I noted that there are some jobs that require working on the Sabbath and he came back with ‘ Well, I think that the Lord will provide another job for you so that you do not have to work on the Sabbath.  It has happened to me many times and I have not worked on the Sabbath.”  The discussion that followed was really interesting when we pointed out to him that Doctors, Nurses, Ambulance Drivers, pharmacists to mention just a few have little choice as to whether they work or not work on the Sabbath.  Finally he could see out point, and I suspect that he has little better than a high school diploma and therefore is relegated to jobs that are lower pay and are not jobs that would require one to work on Sunday.

The quote on the back of the program was apropos to the above conversation.  President Thomas S. Monson in General conference April 2004 said “Life’s journey is not traveled on a freeway devoid of obstacles, pitfalls, and snares.  Rather, it is a pathway marked by forks, and burnings.  Decisions are constantly before us.  To make them wisely, courage is needed;  The courage to say, “No”, the courage to say, “Yes”.  Decisions do determine destiny.  It made me wonder what kind of pivotal decision this young man had made that brought him to this juncture in life.

After lunch we were visited by our Relief Society President.  She had been out picking black raspberries and she apologized for not having very many because she suspects that the chipmunk resident in her yard has been feasting to his heart’s content.  Probably so – and it shows that he has good taste.

My friend Gayla called to tell me of her visit to her son Merritt who is a youth missionary performer in the theatrical production that is held in Nauvoo each summer.  He will be finished in time for school but he is very happy to be in the performance group.  The summer before he went on his mission to Brazil, he was in the Nauvoo Brass Band as a different performing missionary.

I called my friend Vicky to see how she is doing after losing her husband so suddenly to cancer earlier this year.  She is doing fine but when she went to Pennsylvania for her nephew’s wedding, she ended up in hospital and after a number of surgeries she is now back on  her feet.  She says that God surely has a plan for her but the fun is in following the plan  because you do not know what twists and turns life can take and it’s much like playing blind mans bluff.  Good way to describe it because this mission we have been on has taken so many twists and turns that it was impossible to even predict one of them before we left Arizona.

Our supervisor called to tell us that his flight to Portland was cancelled for this evening so he will be arriving tomorrow around 1pm if all goes well for his trip.

So, this is day 64 before we finish this mission and each day offers an adventure and each adventure needs to be recorded as a way of savoring each and every moment that we have in the service of the Lord and the people of the United States who are researching in the state of Maine.