Happy Easter!

Dearest family,

Happy Easter!

I hope you have a fun day with your families, and that the kids got to go hunt Easter Eggs yesterday. I hope the weather was good for you, it was beautiful here. It got up to 47 degrees, the warmest day we’ve had so far.  Several people were out raking the thatch on their lawns. It is really nice to be able to go out without our heavy coats on, usually just wear a sweater or light jacket.

We drove over to Skagway again yesterday, took baptismal clothing over for Brandy Mayo who was able to get baptized finally. She is pretty excited, as she has waited a whole year. It was really a nice service, her parents attended and it was good to meet them. She will be confirmed today during Sacrament meeting, but we didn’t have a place to stay the night, so we came on back over. Skagway is a town of only about 800 people during the off-season, but the big cruise ships start coming in the first of May (I think the first one is May 5^th), and the town will swell to about 5000 for the summer. It’s a fun tourist town, there are lots of fun shops and things to see from the gold rush era, and it’s one of the major stops on the cruise lines. Reminds me a lot of Virginia City, Nevada or the gold towns of California. Some of the little shops were starting to open, and we thought we’d have time to look at some yesterday, but we got hung up at the US border crossing for about an hour, so we didn’t have time. A lot of people were on the road for the holiday, and they only had one border guy there, so it took a long time to process the 15 or 20 cars in front of us. We made it about 15 minutes before the baptism, and we had all the baptismal clothes. Skagway is such a small branch they don’t have many of their own, and they are almost all in kids sizes. They only have about 25 people who attend in the winter, but between 75-100 each week during the tourist season. They have quite a few young people from BYU and BYU-I that come to work here in the summer, kind of like Warren did in Juneau, I guess.

The work is a little slower this week, we ended up only teaching about 5 lessons this week, but we had some great visits with some of the less-active and part-member families in our branch. They are really good people, but many of them have just let the things they want most get in the way of the things that matter most. It’s so easy to get into the mindset of the world. The family we are living with is putting on an Easter dinner for anyone in the branch that doesn’t have family plans, with ham and turkey and all the trimmings. Mom is helping her with it, as she hasn’t done a feed for that many people yet. It should be a fun thing, though we have no idea how many are going to show up. Mom cooked an extra ham just in case the ones they have don’t end up being enough.

Well, I guess I’d better get ready for church. We didn’t have our early correlation meeting today because it’s Easter, which is kind of nice because it gives us extra time this morning. Sacrament meeting isn’t until 10:00 a.m. but that’s only an hour away, so I’d better get ready.

We sure love all of you, and hope you have a great day. Remember that our hearts are with you, and that we love and miss you all! Be sure to give the grand kids our hugs and loves.

Love, Dad and Mom

Journal April

Dear Family and Friends,

Here it is time to write again already. Last Saturday we drove over to Skagway to meet with a young 18 year-old lady that had the missionary lessons last year before they took the elders out for the winter. She wanted to join the church, but her parents told her she couldn’t join until she turned 18 because they weren’t sure it was the best thing for her. She turned 18 in February, and we have been trying to make contact with her. She is delightful, and excited to get baptized. She has already been accepted to BYU this fall. She and her debate partner are flying to Washington DC next month to participate in an international debate tournament, so you can tell she’s sharp! We have set her baptism for next Saturday, and she will be confirmed the next day, on Easter Sunday. They moved missionaries into Skagway this week, so they will be handling all of the arrangements, but we still need to go over because they don’t have any baptismal clothes, so we’ll take them ours. It’s about 2 ½ hours from here, and the drive is beautiful, much like driving over Jackson pass, only here it’s the White pass where most of the miners climbed in the winter of 1879 during the days of the Klondike Gold Rush. Of course it took them 2 ½ months to make the trip, and they had to carry 1000 lbs of supplies over on their backs just to be admitted into Canada! We’ll come back Saturday evening, as we will have investigators out to church Sunday and we need to be here to greet them.

We have been staying busy, wishing we had more time! We updated the branch list, and have been visiting less actives and part-member families. We have loved getting acquainted with them, and have had some delightful visits. We are going to try to visit everyone in the branch, then will try to be sensitive enough to the Spirit to know who we should try to work with first to help them get back to church. We have some returned missionaries that we’d like to get back, they are awesome people, mostly just kind of got out of the habit of coming for one reason or another. Some of them married outside of the church, and it’s hard to stay excited when there isn’t much support at home. We’ve also gotten to do some service for various people, both members and others. I helped one of the members put spark plugs and an oxygen sensor in his car last week, then this morning helped him get a stripped oil plug out so he could change his oil. This afternoon I helped a less-active troubleshoot and fix an electrical problem in his house. One of his switches was burned out, so his stairs light would only turn on from one switch, and then only if the other switch was in the other position. It wouldn’t work at all from the bottom switch. Was tricky to diagnose without a tester or meter, but we got it fixed and had a great visit while we worked on it. His wife isn’t a member, but we have been teaching her and the two kids, and it has been fun to get to know them. They are receptive, but want to progress slowly. We have been reading the Book of Mormon with them, as they have a hard time getting used to the “Old English.” We taught them about baptism and the Holy Ghost yesterday, and they were receptive. They had one of their friends sit in who is a Seventh Day Adventist, and he seemed really interested, but had missed the earlier discussions. We are going to see if he’d be interested in “catching up” next time we visit with him.

Day before yesterday we went with them out to Watson Lake to Swan Haven to see the migration of the trumpeter swans. There are thousands of them that move through here on their way north to the nesting grounds. We were really excited, and took our cameras so we could send pictures. Right! Turns out they are out in the middle of the lake where the ice has melted a channel through, and they look like little dots through spotting scopes they set up so you can see them. There were about 100 of them out there, though. There is about half a mile of slushy ice about a foot deep between them and us! Maybe in a couple of weeks if it warms up really fast enough of the ice will melt that they will move closer to the shore of the lake! Just when we think it’s going to warm up, it snows again. We got about 3” this morning, but it did warm up to 37, so most of it has melted off today. We did have a pretty stiff breeze that helped, but it made the wind chill about 15, so we didn’t stand around outside enjoying it much.

It’s been fun seeing the weather warm up, the ice on the Yukon River is breaking up with big slabs floating down the river. They are still about a foot thick, and often 20 or 30 feet across. When they float to where the river hasn’t melted they turn up on edge and make big ice dams. There aren’t enough to block the river, though, so we’re not in danger of any flooding. I guess some years they get Chinook winds that melt things really fast and then they get dams that bock the river and get floods. Not much danger of that this year, though.

We picked up another couple this week, will start teaching them next week. We had some other good lessons this week, we have three couples that we are teaching, but they have small children and are easily distracted, so the wives of all three families have stopped sitting in on the lessons. I think they are embarrassed that their kids interrupt us. We have tried to schedule later, but the kids still get up and interrupt. The husbands seem receptive; guess we’ll see what we can work out. We discussed it a Branch Council Sunday, and some of the members said they might invite them to their houses so they can help with the kids. We’ll see if they are receptive to that when we teach them this week.

Well, not a lot to write about this week. Our weeks are pretty “same,” we are enjoying the study time we get each morning. I finished reading the Book of Mormon again, amazing how much more there is to it when you study it and don’t just read it. I’m going to start again and make notes of scriptures I want to memorize to use in teaching. We use it so much more in our teaching than we did when I was a young missionary, and it’s so much more effective. We loved watching general conference two weeks ago, and I was really excited to hear Pres. Monson announce the temple in Winnipeg! I served four months there on my mission, and there were four wards in one stake at that time, and that included all of Manitoba! Of course, when I served in St. Paul, Minnesota for 8 months there were two branches, with two wards in Minneapolis. Now they have a temple too! Guess some of the seeds sprouted after all! I served in the North Central States mission, and now there are 5 missions that cover that area. When I went out there were 12,000 missionaries, 1.5 million members of the church, 36 general authorities, and 12 temples in the world. The president of the church was David O. McKay, the newest “junior” apostle was Boyd K. Packer, and I reported for 5 days to the old “Mission Home” at 50 N. Temple in Salt Lake City. Guess that tells you how old I am. Wonder what changes we’ll see in the next 48 years!

I hope you are all doing well, we love you and appreciate your prayers and thoughts in our behalf. We definitely feel your support and love. We love getting your letters and hearing what is going on in your lives.

Love, Mom & Dad (Elder & Sister Powell)

April 4 journal

Dear Family and Friends,
How the time flies! We are enjoying being in our apartment, although Mom is still moving things around and getting everything more to her liking. We have been pretty busy with stuff, so haven’t had time to spend as much time “moving in” as we would like. I’m not sure what’s keeping us so busy, but it seems like we just get started and something comes up and we’re gone for several hours.
We started teaching two new families this last week, both young couples with two or three kids. As is normal here, they’re not married to each other, but have been living together for several years. Then they start having marital problems and look for solutions. We are happy to help! We taught one couple the first discussion last week, and are going to teach them the second one tonight. The other couple we have met with twice, and will teach them again tomorrow night. We’ll probably review the 1st discussion, since the “wife” wasn’t there the first night. She was really friendly last time, though. We invited them to general conference Sunday, but they didn’t come. One of our families that we have been working with for a few weeks did come to the Sunday morning session, stayed for the luncheon afterwards, then left before the second session. We’ll meet with them again on Wednesday, so will see how they liked it. They are the ones we challenged to get married and begin living the word of wisdom a couple of weeks ago. When we met with them on Saturday night after conference, they still weren’t ready to get married yet (They’ve only been together for 22 years), and haven’t quit smoking yet. But they’re still learning, and hopefully soon their hearts will be touched and they will be ready to make changes. We taught them about faith in Christ again this last week, and talked about how important it is for us to form a personal relationship with our Heavenly Father and our Savior. They seemed very receptive to it. The Gospel is really a giant step for someone with little religious background, but the potential is so great!
We started teaching a lady from Nigeria on Friday, she runs a day-care center here in town. She seems very receptive, but when we went to teach her she had a visitor from Germany that sat in on the lesson. He was older, about our age, but very negative. He stressed that he doesn’t believe in God, that there is no such person as Jesus Christ, and that all religion is a waste of time. We tried to tell him of our beliefs, but he said he didn’t want to hear it, and that religion is just a crutch, and that he didn’t want to hear our message. But he didn’t leave. We gave what message we could to Lillian and made an appointment to teach her again this weekend, but don’t know what kind of reception we’ll have. Guess we’ll see this Saturday.
We are going to Skagway on Thursday to meet with a girl named Brandy who had the missionary lessons last summer, but her parents wouldn’t let her get baptized until she turned 18, which was in February. She wants to get baptized, so we’re going to go over and review the discussions and the baptismal interview questions to see if she’s ready. If she is, we’ll set a baptismal date and initiate the interview process and set up a program. I visited with her on the phone last night, and she seems really sharp and excited that we called. I talked to her branch mission leader a couple of times, but they don’t seem to know what the process is, so we’ll meet with him Thursday too. It’s a three-hour drive to Skagway, but we’re ready for a road-trip. There is still quite a bit of snow, but the weather has warmed up into the high 30’s and lower 40s, so it’s starting to melt and we’re beginning to see some bare ground here and there. It is going to be just beautiful when the snow melts and all of the deciduous trees begin to leaf out and the wildflowers bloom. It’s staying light until after 9:00 p.m. now, so will drive back Thursday night.
It’s fun to be here in the spring (late winter?). The ice on the Yukon is beginning to break up and there are starting to be huge chunks of ice beginning to form ice dams on the river. Mom took some pictures this morning, but I don’t have them downloaded yet. Some of the ice is a foot thick, slabs 15’ across sticking up out of the water with whirlpools swirling around them. Last Friday on the way home from Seminary (I got to teach Friday and Monday while the regular teacher was out of town) we saw a bald eagle fishing from the ice at the edge of the river right here in town. It was as big as a large turkey! We watched it for awhile from just across the river and it didn’t seem to care. We mentioned it to someone after conference on Saturday and people said, “Yeah, we see them all the time.” Well, we thought it was cool! :-} It is really nice to be able to go outside without long-johns on and two pairs of socks. When we’re going to be out for awhile we still dress warmer, because it’s pretty windy most of the time and even though it’s in the 30s it doesn’t take long to cool off with the wind chill. We are liking the extra sunlight, though. It gets light about 6:00 a.m., and stays late longer every day. The day stays lighter for about 10 minutes more each day, and you can see the difference from the beginning of the week to the end of the week. I guess it has to do that if it’s going to stay light all night within another month or two.
I think the local townspeople are enjoying the warmer weather and extra light too. When we go to town there are lots of people out walking and moving about, and a lot more traffic on the streets. Whitehorse is a fairly large town of about 30,000 people, but feels like a small town until people get out and start moving about. There is a lot of dust in the air from all of the dirt they put on the icy roads all winter, and that doesn’t help my allergies much. We’ve had to wash our car every two or three days because it gets so dirty from the mud and the water running down the roads we can hardly tell what color it’s supposed to be! They have a car wash here like the ones we used to use years ago, where you put in a quarter for 5 minutes spray. Except here they charge a dollar for one minute. Usually takes about $4 just to wash off the main layer of mud and dirt. We’ll do the extra special zippy waxie wash when the water stops running across all of the roads and the dust has time to settle. We wouldn’t mind a good rainstorm to wash everything off, but guess that doesn’t come for awhile yet. Still comes down as snow when it storms, though it doesn’t stay as long as it used to.
It was really great to watch conference! We got to watch it all except for Pres. Eyring’s talk on Saturday morning. We had made arrangements to watch one of our contacts play in his little-league hockey tournament, and the Saturday morning game is the only one that wasn’t during a full session of conference. It’s the first time Mom has seen a real ice hockey game, and it was pretty exciting, even though our team lost 12 to 1. Hockey is really a fast-moving game, and it’s really rough and physical. They won their game on Saturday night, lost Sunday morning, and played again yesterday afternoon. I don’t know how they did in that one yet, but they were behind by one point in the second period. Last year in October we missed most of conference because we were on the road to Troys in Texas and couldn’t get it on the radio. We read it in the Ensign, but somehow it’s just not the same! I can hardly wait for next month’s Ensign to come, as I want to read each of the talks again after having heard them. There is so much wonderful information that I just couldn’t absorb it that fast! How blessed we are to be able to listen to modern-day prophets and apostles! Maybe it’s just that we’re more in tune by the nature of where we are and what we’re doing. If so, I hope to be more in tune for the rest of my life. We watched it at the church, since it’s not televised on any station here, but it was much easier to stay awake, and we had a “linger-longer” luncheon between sessions on both Saturday and Sunday, which gave us a great chance to visit and talk about the talks. After the priesthood session we guys had apple pie and ice cream. Since there were only about 10 who showed up, there was plenty to go around!
Well, I guess there isn’t much more to report, except that we are enjoying our experience. We are making a lot of great new friends, and it’s fun to be in a small branch with all of its struggles and challenges. We just studied section 121 of the Doctrine and Covenants where it says, “…These things shall give the experience, and shall be for thy good.” We’re getting lots of really good experience! It’s fun to be able to teach the gospel, but hard when people choose not to live it because it’s difficult, and we can see the joys and blessings in their lives that they are forfeiting because of those decisions. I’m sure our Father in Heaven feels the same way as he sees us make unwise decisions that rob us of the blessings associated with those laws upon which those blessings are predicated.
I hope you are all well, and that you had the opportunity to participate in conference. We love you, and miss you, and think of you often. We love to hear from you, and pray that you will feel the blessings of our Father in Heaven in your lives daily.
Love, Elder and Sister Powell (Mom and Dad).