Dear Grandchildren,
Each Sunday brings its own surprises in a small branch. For example, the attendance of one or two persons can really change the look and composition of the gathering, unlike in a large congregation where the presence of one person can go largely unnoticed except by friends and close associates. This observation about a different feel to a meeting also applies to those who join us by Skype. From where I sit, I look directly at the laptop screen where the people’s images appear who have joined us from afar. If one of the windows, which was open the prior week because a person or persons had joined us, is not there, I am sensing that we are somehow less complete. I have found myself sitting with five or six others as we begin our meeting, with a few others connected by Skype, and feeling somehow that we are rather small. Then one person will walk into our meeting room and my feeling about what is taking place will change for the better. I don’t want to call my feelings strange or misshapen, but in this place my senses are tuned differently from how they are in a large ward. I must admit, of course, that when I served as high priest group leader, I was paying attention to all of the high priests and single sisters who would show up for church meetings.
Today our Fast and Testimony meeting had the potential to go in several different directions, with people joining us from six Skype stations. For two who had joined us before, the connecting process was old hat. But for four, it was the first time and the electronic challenges mounted. I began to worry that the electronic struggles faced by the YVs would take over the meeting. But they worked heroically to keep everyone connected so that they could hear testimonies borne in the meeting room itself and those from the four persons who bore testimonies from afar. In the end, all worked out. The most poignant part of the meeting came when our Farsi-speaking sister, who comes from Iran, wanted to bear her testimony from a distant city. It happened that a young couple, non-members whom Grandma and I had invited to our services, was sitting among us and they are from Iran. The fellow speaks good English. So at the invitation of one of our YVs, he translated for the Farsi-speaking sister as she bore her testimony, repeating her testimony in English. The only contact with the Church that this non-member fellow had enjoyed to that point was the little that Grandma and I had offered to him and his wife since meeting them three weeks ago, an event that came about when a former SV sister, who knows the fellow’s member sister, contacted us with the new phone number that he had acquired after moving to Turkey from Iran. I am hoping that something he repeated during the translation process sticks in his heart and in his wife’s heart.
For about three weeks, Grandma and I have been giving a better, more focused effort to studying Turkish. I am proud of how she has approached it. She is biting off huge chunks of vocabulary while I am trying to thoroughly review my notes from my class last October. In some ways, it is as if I had not taken the class. I have notebook pages filled with words and phrases that I do not remember writing down. I am sure that we were moving so fast that I did not have time to review what we had covered because I would bring home a load of homework each day. Now I am going through my notes, writing many of them again, and wondering whether I can ever remember even one-tenth. I try to listen to people talking, including the YVs when they give a lesson, and I understand almost nothing. The YVs are working with a tutor and he has suggested that they read long swaths of the Book of Mormon in Turkish. I try to read the first verse of the book in Turkish and little makes sense. Ah well.
Your mother and I go off to Kiev tomorrow very early. Our flight is just before six o'clock in the morning. We shall receive the second installment of her training in church history as it is occurring in the modern Church. Of course, I pick up on the training too. Of course. In light of my tangential training, this past week I sat down one afternoon and wrote up the history of our branch for 2015. It was either the branch clerk or I. I chose me because he writes in Russian and I alone have access to the information.
I went off last Monday to the southern city of Antalya. We flew over a number of snow-capped peaks in the Taurus mountain range. I met a colleague whom I had met earlier. He specializes in the archaeology of Turkey and the book of Revelation. He and his wife have lived in Turkey for a number of years, trekking back to the States a couple of months a year for visits to family and to the university where he has been a part time faculty member. Recently, his status has been changed to adjunct and he no longer receives the modest salary that was part of the earlier arrangement. The bigger event was that I also met two Turkish fellows who live in Antalya, one of whom was baptized more than a month ago and will soon receive the Aaronic priesthood, and the other of whom is to be baptized next weekend. The former works for an airline company and he flies to Istanbul to attend meetings. The other fellow is an unemployed bicycle mechanic and occasionally attends meetings in Istanbul after an eleven-hour bus ride. One way. I am hoping that they will begin to come to us on occasion. They were both part of the Skype session today in our meeting. I was really happy that they joined us.
I love you and pray for all of you.
Grandpa Brown
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