Dear Grandchildren,
News comes in small doses on this anniversary of the restoration of the Aaronic Priesthood 187 years ago in the little burg of Harmony, Pennsylvania. The first, big item is Grandma’s successful venture yesterday into baking cookies for the first time. Before she began, we went to a number of stores looking for cream of tartar. No luck. So she made do. On one website, the suggested substitute was lemon juice. Lemon juice? That is a real fine attempt to hoodwink me. But it didn’t work. And it didn’t work with Grandma either.
While Grandma was in our apartment tending to sweet matters, I went off with my first counselor and the YVs to a distant city. A brother there had recently suffered a mild heart attack and is temporarily out of work. The YVs had made contact with a potential investigator who lives there. And we all wanted to see our recent convert. According to the YVs, their convert has been making wonderful progress during the almost six weeks since his baptism. That progress brought me to think of ordaining him to be a priest. So off we went, with the threat of rain hanging in the air.
As usual, some things take longer than we expect. Our meeting with the recent convert took about two hours, a meeting that I judged would be no longer than an hour and a half. But we got him ordained to the Aaronic Priesthood. For me, that was the main event. Because we were now a little short of time, we rushed off to a Burger King for a very quick lunch while the rain poured. Then we rushed off to see the ailing brother and his wife and son. I took enough money from our branch account to pay for their rent. Evidently, three days after he had experienced his illness he tried to go back to work (they very much need the income). While at work, he experienced pain in his back and an elevated heart rate. So the doctor has banned him from work for the time being. I also packed a bag of rice, some spaghetti noodles, and tomato sauce. They were very grateful for the help. Grandma had selected a couple of children’s books for the little boy. He seemed to enjoy them. Then he climbed on top of the coffee table where a container of trail mix sat. He began to put pieces from the container into a small bowl. Then he began to throw them all over the room. His father intervened and lifted him off the table. But the show was fun for as long as it lasted.
I arrived at our apartment a few minutes after eight o’clock and found two of our YSAs in the living room waiting for an institute class that I had scheduled. So we held an institute class for twenty-five minutes (it had taken some effort on their part to reach our apartment), focusing on Jesus’ calling of his first disciples as retold in Luke 5:1–11. It worked out.
Today we were nineteen in our Sacrament Meeting. Ten were in our rented hotel room and nine joined us by Skype. A brother who has been in the Ukraine for three months brought his two children to join us. For some reason, the wifi in the hotel was acting a bit "crazy," as one of the YVs said, and kept dropping willy-nilly those who were joining us by Skype. Unfortunately, we did not have the usual crowd of Farsi speakers nor our Farsi translator. I felt bad that we had made an effort last week to include them in a meaningful way and then fell flat this week. I can only hope that next week we get a good response from our efforts to bring them inside our meeting. For me, one main event was my talk. My first counselor was to give the talk, but he came up hurting this morning. So I talked off the cuff about the restoration of the Aaronic Priesthood, doing my best to paint the picture of the valley through which the Susquehanna River runs.
It's about time to move a fan into the kitchen. The outside temperatures have been creeping up and up. That means that the kitchen temperature has also been creeping and creeping. Hence, some action is required. Grandma had the bright idea that, instead of muscling a big box onto the Metro and then onto a city bus, we could just take a taxi home (here they spell that term taksi). So we shall go to IKEA tomorrow and see what we can see. While we are at it, I intend to purchase some nice food items that can also ride in the taksi with us. I like the granola a lot. And so forth. Besides, IKEA offers a nice lunch for not a lot of money. What more incentive do we need?
I love you and pray for you all.
Grandpa Brown
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