It’s been about two weeks now since we learned of the death of Lennie’s brother, Rick. As the title implies, it was totally unexpected. He had 7 bypass surgery about 15 years ago, and he had a mild heart attack last year, so I guess you could say it wasn’t totally unexpected, but he went quietly in his sleep (which was so very nice for him) and left everyone reeling. At first we wondered if we should go- it’s so, so far away and we have our mission work to do. But we needed to go. That’s all there was to it. We needed to be there. Amazingly, all five of our children decided they needed to be there as well. That was unexpected also! But that was a good unexpected. We made very quick arrangements to fly home and within two days, found ourselves driving in a snowstorm, in the dark, 30 miles an hour on the freeway. It was so, so good to be with family and to reunite with cousins, aunts, uncles, siblings and close friends – some whom we haven’t seen for years. It was a sweet time, really. We know it will be so hard for his two boys and especially his sister, Linda. Our prayers are still with them as they grieve their fun-loving, kind-hearted, storytelling dad and brother. His house was FULL to the brim with people who were used to gathering at his house for parties, sports watching, and who knows what else. When we weren’t up in Layton, we were in Provo with our own kids and some of the grandkids, having a sweet time with them. It felt surreal to be in our own bed, in our huge kitchen with our huge fairly empty fridge, going for walks in beautiful surroundings and eating copious amounts of frozen berries and veggies. Despite the snowy beginning, the weather cooperated the rest of the time and we enjoyed some outdoor time, Easter hunt time, This is the Place Monument time and just plain old good time watching cousins running around together. Then, before you know it, we were back at the airport, ready for our 23 hour ordeal, heading back to tropical Philippines. We scarcely had time to unpack when we packed up again and flew off to Legazpi where we met with two different church districts with Kenneth Lee (our co-worker and champion for literacy projects). It was nice to be out in a province for our reintroduction to the Philippines. The pace is slower, the space is greener and traffic is so much better. We had two good meetings with the two districts, so we look forward to moving ahead with the member literacy projects there. We are still quite jet-lagged: Lennie has to take naps before he drives and he was quite comatose in the car going from one town to another (luckily we had a driver). We hope to recover one of these weeks!

Back to work!

After we finished with the two districts, we flew back to Manila early in the morning on Saturday and came home to prepare for a convert baptism of a woman from China. She is so sweet! She decided one morning a few months ago that she needed to find a church. She asked the taxi driver to take her to a church and he took her to our meetinghouse! The rest is history! I was asked to speak at her baptism, since I was one of the first members to befriend her. She is such a sweet, good person. She cried through the first part of her baptism, but then she just felt amazingly happy. So glad to be a part of it. This is also the first time I have ever had to speak at a convert baptism.