170908 Weekly Lettter

8 September 2017

Dear Family, Missionaries and Friends,

Sometime around the beginning of 2016 - I do not remember exactly when - I started writing a letter each week to the missionaries in the California Long Beach Mission.  Since they were required to write to me every week, it seemed fair for me to write to them also.  With all of the benefits of hindsight, I wish now that I had started writing to them earlier in my three-year mission.  

Once Melanie and I returned home in July, 2016, I have sometimes considered writing again once a week to people who are important to me - including missionaries.  On two or three occasions I have even written a first weekly letter to get myself started.  But I never sent the letters.  With all of the benefits of hindsight, I now wish that I had begun sooner.

As President Dieter F. Uchtdorf has said, the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago; but the second best time to plant a tree is today.  I can’t go back and start writing weekly letters earlier.  But I can plant a tree today.

These letters will be brief - usually no more than one typewritten page.  I will post them on a blog that will be available to anyone who wants to go there.  At first I plan to send a weekly facebook notice to my “friends” notifying them that there is a letter available to be read.  After awhile I may stop sending the facebook notice and just post the letter on the blog.  Attached to the one-page letter will be a one-page musing on my scripture study for the week.

Last night I taught my first Institute of Religion class.  There were eight people in attendance.  They come from the eastern half of our stake.  We only meet one time per week, so our classes are twice as long (100 minutes) as the classes taught at BYU or BYUI or BYUH (50 minutes).  Our course of study this semester is “Jesus Christ and the Everlasting Gospel.”  I was directed to teach that class - that is, I did not choose it from the list of classes that are offered in the Institute program.  However, I think that if I had been allowed to choose, I likely would have chosen the same class.

I will not try to summarize our entire 100 minute lesson here, but I will tell you how we began the class and what the homework assignment was.  We began by reading Doctrine and Covenants 1:17-22 where Jesus tells the world why he performed the Restoration.  One of the reasons he gives for the Restoration is “that  every man might speak in the name of God the Lord, even the Savior of the world.”  Our homework assignment was to speak in the name of God the Lord at least once during the week - that is, to say what he would say and know that he would say the same thing in the same way if he were speaking himself instead of speaking through us..

Early this year I started volunteering one time per week in the food pantry for the Campbell County Council of Community Services.  I work there from !0 AM to noon on Tuesdays.. Within a month or two after I started working there, Melanie was called to be in charge of Just Serve in our stake.  She has already signed up several charitable organizations to accept volunteers.  If you are not familiar with Just Serve, go to justserve,com.

I see that I have already exceeded the one-page limit for weekly letters, so I will stop now.

Melanie and I love you.  We always have and we always will.