Friends, My Father, and a Few Facts

September 15, 2020

I am dragging!!!! I just kind of wander around this apartment all day wishing I could crawl back in bed. And actually, I seem to be doing that on a regular basis....daily I take advantage of the empty calendar and sleep soundly for about an hour. That afternoon sleep is so refreshing!

We had another visitor today. It was Veer, our young friend from last year. She was baptized on the same day as three other YSAs, and we have come to love her. Her entire family is Sikh, yet she met the missionaries, listened and prayed, and has embraced the gospel. She is delightful.

She came to the apartment and stayed outside and downstairs and we leaned out the windows and chatted with her for nearly half an hour. It is funny, because when we were in our friends' apartment in Gilbert during the 2-week isolation, we would open the door and look up a level of stairs at our visitors and visit. Now we are looking down from a third-floor apartment. It is quite charming really, although all the neighbors with open windows who have to listen to the whole conversation probably don't think so!

SK was up last night until 2 in the morning trying to get some banking details worked out with our bank in America. Derek T - bless his kind heart was up with him, each with two different phones in hand and trying to resolve issues. It looks as though he might have to do the same tonight. For now, he is snoozing peacefully in bed.

I "attended" our little zone zoom conference this evening. 16 young missionaries at 9 p.m. teaching each other the gospel. Once again I find that I am so very impressed with their maturity - both spiritual and otherwise. They know the scriptures and the gospel, and they are developing as leaders. I am sure there are some who are not as valiant as others, and I am sure that some of them are just biding their time until they return to their homes, but for the most part, they are good young people, trying hard under difficult circumstances to do what the Lord has asked of them.

I read an interesting statistic today from our YSA Leadership in Freiburg Germany. They said that in March at the beginning of the Corona pandemic, there were nearly 3,700 missionaries in Europe. Over the last six months that number has decreased to 2,250. Yet there is a 4% increase in the number of people the missionaries are teaching and baptizing. Amazing.

Tomorrow is the day! We step out of the apartment and into the light!!!! And we will begin in earnest to walk a few miles every morning. It felt so good while we did that in Gilbert - until the blistering heat put an end to that. It was blistering hot here today - 83 degrees! It is a heat wave. 95% humidity. According to the weather forecast, this is the last day with temperatures over 80....and the evenings are magnificent. In the 50s.

Today, my father would have been 101 years old. How I loved that man! SK wears a wedding ring inscribed with the words "unique in all the world" - and he indeed is. The phrase fits him so well.

My father was also unique. His life experiences shaped him, and many of those experiences were rough. He was of the generation that grew up in the depression and his family was miserably poor. Their father had a debilitating stroke at age 37 and the large family struggled. A very kindly and inspired principal stepped into Dad's life when he was in junior high and literally changed the trajectory of his life. A year at BYU, World War II and the Marine Corps, coming back to marry and have a family (how did he do that with the emotions that must have been roiling around in his head after seeing some of the most brutal battles of that war?), establishing a career....all combined to hone his character.

He was not perfect by any means, but he was the perfect father for me. His wisdom and compassion were qualities I relied on, and I will be forever grateful for him.