Week of February 21, 2016

Sunday when we attended the Choir Broadcast they sang “Lead, Kindly Light.” It was a very moving experience for me. I came to love this hymn while I was in Scotland, partly because of the words, which have a Scottish flavor, and partly because when we walked home at night we would sing it softly as a comfort and feeling of safety when it was so dark. I felt today like it was sung just for me and I really felt a sweet Spirit with me.

In the evening we went with another couple to a fireside where Ty Detmer was speaking. He was the quarterback at BYU many years ago before he joined the Church. He was the Heisman Trophy winner one year and played professional football for several years. He has just been hired to be the Offensive Coordinator at BYU. He shared his conversion story and testimony then answered questions for about half an hour. After he was finished, a member of the Seventy that was presiding spoke for a few minutes about the impact of LaVell Edwards as a coach and drew the analogy to Pres. Monson as our coach. It was really a very neat conclusion to the evening.

Ty Detmer and Elder Roeth

Our class this week was 18 full-time missionaries. They were very close as a group and very friendly. They were also mostly computer-literate, some slow but proficient. Ted does such a good job teaching and is totally calm with the class, even when they are boisterous. I really enjoyed teaching my classes. I was able to get a little bit more into one class on document editing so that was fun. I also felt like my Records module went well. Everyone was able to stay together and they had a look of understanding in their eyes. When I passed out the lab assignment and started to go over it, I discovered I had copied the old version. That concerned me because last week we had buried the class with it. It had been revised to simplify it, so I went through it with them and cut out the parts we’d eliminated. They got through it without the major tension we experienced last time and I think they actually enjoyed it.

We offer a help section at 7:40 am and we’ve had a good crowd all three days. We thought we had everyone signed up for the partner sites, and we checked most of the ones that had questions, but we still had several that were having troubles when it came time to use them. Some accounts didn’t appear to be linked to FamilySearch Accounts, many of which we had checked earlier but were malfunctioning for some reason. I helped one sister between classes to link up a source she had saved—it is a little tricky linking external sources and I was really glad I had practiced it a few times so I could help her. Another lady found a newspaper article during class about her grandmother that she said would resolve many of the questions their family has had for at least three generations. She was in tears and was so grateful she could hardly speak. It is these moments that make this so 

rewarding.

We had the opportunity to visit with my sister Jan and her husband Tom this week. They were in town for a couple of days. It was really good to see them. We also had the opportunity to go to Provo and attend the temple with my sister Sue and visit with her and Roger. It makes it not so lonely when we get to see some of the family occasionally.

Friday was our Temple and Research day so we spent it at the library. I was able to nearly finish the cleanup and review of one family—there were so many sources that weren’t attached and some real issues that needed to be cleaned up, but I think they are nearly finished. Ted was able to work with a couple of consultants and found some good documents on his family. He found the emigration record for his grandma’s sister when she left Sweden. He is still looking for the record for his grandma, but he has found several family records that are very helpful.

When we arrived at the library in the morning there were three men in black suits in front. They asked to inspect our bags, so we let them. I asked what was happening and the man told me there was a special meeting there today. As it turned out, Joe Biden, the US Vice President, was coming. He was presented with five volumes of family history. He was speaking somewhere in the vicinity around noon. We were joking that we were under siege because no one was able to function normally. The missionaries that came early were sent a different way to get to the door, but they weren’t inspected. Maybe because our badges were on the inside of our coats we got inspected. Very interesting!