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)