Challis Power

Tis the season of feasting and we started our week with a spiritual feast.   Monday morning devotionals are always inspiring, but this week especially so.   It was presented by the Support Services Zone where well over a hundred missionaries support paid employees with such tasks as creating security cards, organizing interpreters, answering questions from prospective senior couples, supporting humanitarian missionaries, maintaining mineral and water rights on church property, overseeing Church farms and ranches, reaching out to those who in correctional facilities, establishing indexing programs in prisons…to name a few!     Listening, I was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the job--and magnitude of the blessings.   Especially touching, were the thoughts expressed by the elder who oversees the outreach to correctional facilities.   Blessing broken lives.               Monday evening, our MTC gr...

The past two weeks we’ve put a lot of miles on the Escape, driving back and forth to Utah Valley. Our daughter, Megan, flew in from Anchorage for a week to tend her daughter Challis after ACL surgery.   Rough for Challis and for Megan, but nice for us to have some time with Megan. It was a hard farewell at the end of the week, Megan wondering if Challis could manage on her own—and Challis wondering the same thing.   We’ve seen Challis since and she is doing it!               With Lindsey and Brent, we went to the Timpview musical, “The Drowsy Chaperone,” which Lindsey choreographed.   My cousin, Grant, and his wife, Tessa, met us there.   It was nice to connect with them and applaud Lindsey’s success.   Even though she’s not teaching fulltime, she still has her toe in the dance world.             More miles on the car were added w...

Some highlights of the week: A veteran missionary at the Library requested that the topic of 10-minute training be about using source linker. Of course, I had to find a record hint in my own family to create the training.      I “randomly” chose a hint which eventually, with some homework (which I try not to do), led to finding a “missing person,” Annie Fullard.   I and others had assumed that Annie and her sister Nellie were the same person.     Once I created Annie in the tree and attached sources, the search engine gave me more about her husband and children.   Maybe not random? Christopher and Melissa joined us at the Mount Timpanogos Temple on Friday evening for a sealing session.   The sealer had a sense of humor:   “You don’t have to have brains to be a sealer—just good hair.”   Even though the other couples in the room were strangers, it didn’t feel like it.   And there were likely other “familiar spirits” with us. ...