Week Ending November 17, 2012

Sunday we got up to find our pilot light was out on the furnace. Ted tried reaching the emergency number but weren’t successful in getting help. In the meantime we turned the oven on and left the door open to heat up the living room. While Ted was out cleaning off the car, our landlord came by on a walk and Ted told him about our situation. A few minutes after Ted came in there was a knock on the door and the landlord was there. He lit the pilot and told us how to handle it in the future.

Our outside thermometer, Sunday 11/11 about 9AM

 We thought the weather was cleared up so we were surprised that the roads were still quite icy when we headed out for church. We arrived in good time and visited with the elders for a bit. I think our talks went OK. I spoke a little longer than I’d planned, and Ted spoke a little shorter than he’d planned, but it all came out in the end. We stayed for Sunday School and enjoyed the lesson that was taught. It was the same one that had been taught at Ft. Wingate last week so it was interesting to see the different way it was presented. After Sunday School they told us there was no teacher for Relief Society so church was over. One of the sisters asked if we couldn’t just read together or have some discussion since we were there. The elders had prepared a lesson, so they presented that to some people that stayed.

When we arrived home we had a bite to eat then went to teach a discussion to a young lady. Her two younger sisters and her grandma were also there. We had a good discussion. I felt a very strong spiritual impression that the things we were teaching are true. In the end we asked the girl to pray and she offered a beautiful prayer. From there we went to a home to invite a couple to the temple prep class. The wife said her father lived with them and asked if he could attend as well. We then went to teach a makeup lesson for seminary. We taught the whole family the seminary lesson. I think it went well, but it was a little more challenging with the two younger children there.

Monday we went to see our grandma. She was not doing well. She looked like she was not eating or sleeping well. She is in a lot of pain. She sleeps on the couch in the living room by the wood stove so she can be warm. Everything is aggravated by her mourning for her father. We talked for a long time, mostly letting her talk and express her concerns and her pains. We tried to give her some comfort and read a couple of scriptures about where spirits are after they die. We talked about the good memories she has of her dad and her desire to be with him again. Ted gave her a blessing before we left. After the blessing it was clear she had been crying, but she had a different countenance. She seemed much happier and more herself. She said she felt much better.

Tuesday we spent most of the day studying. I had a call asking me to teach Relief Society on Sunday. We are also teaching the temple prep class. We have a lot of preparation to do this week. At institute we had three students. We had a new man there. I thought he was about 18 or 19, but he turned out to be 26. It turned out that he is being baptized on 12/11.

Wednesday we went walking in the morning and it was really cold. We decided not to walk in the early morning again—it’s too cold and it hurt our lungs. I studied most of the day, preparing my lessons for the week. In the evening Ted and I went through the temple prep book and reviewed what needed to be taught and split up the lesson. This will be our first attempt at team teaching.

Thursday we got up and did our joint study and got ready for the day before walking. We walked to the church and got our room set up for Sunday. We also made several copies. Mid-afternoon we went visiting here in Ft. Wingate. We introduced ourselves to a family that lives here. They were all sick so they suggested we come back after the holidays. I think at least one of the other two people have moved because there is a Baptist minister at one of the addresses. We went to Sundance to try to visit some people. We stopped at a member’s house and had a good visit with her. Her husband came home while we were there and we had an interesting conversation. He is really struggling with things in his life. He is a really nice man with some real concerns.

Our appointment in Toh-la-kai cancelled out so we decided to do more visiting. We drove down Roadrunner Road, a not-so-good dirt road. We had a couple of addresses to look for. A man drove by so we asked him where the people were we were looking for. One man was in a care center in Rehoboth. At the other home, we met the lady we were looking for but she was watching TV and said she was too busy to talk with us. We went to visit another home. The man’s name was not on our membership list, but he said he was a member “a long time ago”. There were a bunch of really aggressive dogs that made us a little nervous. We had a brief visit and left after inviting them to come to church and visit us.

Friday we did a few things around the house then in the early afternoon we went visiting to try to find some more people in the Sundance area. We were told one man lived exactly one mile from the turn off from the highway. The problem we had was that our odometer doesn’t have the tenth of a mile digit on it. We looked at the reading when we turned, then looked again when the last digit changed to see about how far we were from the tunnel, then when the last digit changed again we turned around and went back about as far as we thought we’d gone from the tunnel to the first change. We got to a place where there were two houses on the right and one a bit further on the left. The one on the right was the home we’d visited the day before so I knew it wasn’t that house. I ran to ask her where to go. It was the one on the left. When we got to the house the man we had gone to see wasn’t home, but his wife invited us in and we visited with her for a while.

After running a couple of errands in Gallup we drove to Toh-la-kai and set up for seminary and Ted’s adult education class. At about 6:00 one family came to drop their daughter off so she could go to Albuquerque to do baptisms the next day. At 6:30 there was no one there. We started calling people to see where they were. Two families actually came so I had three in my class and two in Ted’s.

Satuday morning we had seminary. All of my class was there. The differences between the two classes are very interesting. In the Ft. Wingate most of the kids come most of the time. We almost always have a devotional and we have a class president. In Toh-la-kai there are four students that have never come. I have yet to have a student-prepared devotional and we have no class president. Immediately after we dropped a few things at our house then left for the temple. The 1 PM session is designated as the Native American session but is now usually in English. A man came in just before the session was supposed to start to talk to a lady who spoke Spanish. He asked how many native speakers were in the session. A few ladies raised their hands and said the others had gone to the dressing room. He decided the session would be done in Navajo. He then told the lady helping him to get earphones for the English speakers. She told us she’d take care of that in a few minutes.