Since events in our mission are broken up into six-week
cycles, I could pretty much copy from a six weeks old letter as far as many of
our activities for each week. The past
week was once again filled with restocking shelves for zone conferences next
week. One order was over $700. It’s really better to spend half that in two
trips.
You can see part of our supply closets in the photos: Len orders, unpacks and gets lots of teaching
supplies to the missionaries. He has
recently had requests for Nepali materials (there are pamphlets, but the Book
of Mormon has not been translated into that language yet), Chinese scriptures,
and a Braille Book of Mormon, which we had on hand. One copy in braille requires a very large
box.
I (Kit) have a ton of household
supplies. You can see a box to the right
of the picture. We save up all empty
boxes and bags for packaging up the various zone conference orders. Next week, the closets will go from really
crowded to rather slim pickins in two days time.
Our teacher in Relief Society told a good personal story.
The lesson was on being charitable and she told about being treated charitably
in an unexpected way. Her son was
preparing to go to BYU. Just before he
left, he went out for the evening during which he discovered he’d lost his
wallet. When he got home, he and his
parents remembered back over his day and the conclusion was that he’d set his
wallet on the roof of his car and driven off.
They spent hours looking for it with no result. He left for school without a number of
documents he needed to complete his enrollment, not to mention being sans his
drivers’ license.
The next day our teacher received a phone call from a man
who’d found the wallet along the highway.
Our teacher was ecstatic and wanted to come and pick it up right
away. As she and the finder talked, it
became apparent that he had no address.
He asked her to meet him outside a particular store the next morning.
She understood the reason for the delay when the homeless
man showed up – freshly clean, shaved, and carefully dressed. He gave her the wallet, showing that the
hundred dollars in it was all there.
They spoke for a few minutes. He
had been a local policeman who developed an addiction that cost him his job,
his marriage, and his home. She told him
how important it was to her son to have his papers back and how much she knew
he would want the man to keep the money.
The homeless man agreed that he had pressing needs for the money and gratefully
accepted it.
Our teacher felt humbled by the honesty of a man down on his
luck who still did the right thing. She
felt her past notions about homeless people (who are commonly seen in Fresno)
had undergone a great change and left her with far more compassion than she’d
felt in the past.
One doesn’t have to look far to find people who have real
need here. I loved a couple of
missionaries who knew just what to do when there were quite a few leftovers
from a lunch and it was food that would not keep well. They asked if they could have it all and took
the boxes to the streets to give it to the hungry homeless people they see and
talk to daily. They couldn’t stand to see waste, knowing hungry people!
Wishing you a meaningful and wonderful Thanksgiving!
With love from Len and Kit
