Sunday, October 4th

The elders are restricted to only appointments with people they know, so things have slowed way down for a while. We're hoping when the festival period is over things will get back to what we thought was normal missionary work. If they get any flack on the street now at all, the president has advised taking their badges and ties off. With an exchange, we now have Elder Godi and Elder Tamang working our area for a couple of days. The 2 Caucasian elders are in Mayur Vihar which is actually part of Delhi, but on the Noida side of the river.

Sunday President Jackson came to our branch and after a good testimony meeting we had a 2 hour combined session for Sunday School and Priesthood/Relief Society that he and President Smith conducted. It was great as they led the branch members and investigators there through developing a missionary plan. President Jackson shared a personal experience from Ethiopia where local "Christian" church leaders lobbied the government to get rid of the 2 LDS missionaries there (the only ones in the entire country) because they feared them taking away their members. Well, the elders were eventually kicked out, but the branch woke up to their responsibility to share the gospel and the branch grew, a second branch was opened, and now there is a district and many branches in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. We then went through an exercise of what the members needed to do to make something like that happen here. They even got commitments from investigators there to share the message with their friends and invite the elders. We left with a lot of hope for the future.

Sister Tanner did a combined District youth activity (see a previous post) then immediately began a crash 2 week preparation for youth conference. After a couple of weeks of stressful preparation for the youth conference, 2 very exhausting, long 17-18 hour conference days, Sister Tanner crashed Sunday evening. The elders were here and she was sitting visiting with us, but was barely with it and very quiet. When she turned to me and said I need a blessing, I could see something was seriously wrong. I had noticed she was fading and thought she was just exhausted, but when she faced me I was really shocked. We gave her a blessing and then I helped her into bed, and I was concerned. By now she was freezing, could not control her shaking, could barely walk, and was really out of it. I put a comforter and a doubled up wool blanket over her before she could begin to feel any warmth, but the shaking hadn't stopped. After tucking her in, I finally went out and closed the door. Three hours later, she was up, smiling, and my Cindy was back. I was absolutely amazed it was the same person. And I'm sure we all know how that happened.

Looking forward to our General Conference Weekend next Saturday-Sunday. The church sends out DVDs of the proceedings to those areas of the world where the time difference makes it impossible to view real time or on a delayed basis because of the lack of church satellite facilities to receive the broadcast. One nice thing though, Saturday we will watch the Saturday morning session at 10 AM, then eat lunch followed by the Priesthood session at 1 PM. Sunday we will watch the two Sunday sessions beginning at our normal church starting time, but no lunch. I really like the whole weekend arrangement.