Learning Our Role Better

We have enjoyed having Bro. Beames with us again yesterday.  He watched the Malins teach their Sophomore Seminary class.  Afterwards he gave them observations, kudos and a few suggestions. 

Diane and I came back to the apartment for our breakfast and nap to catch up on our lost sleep.  The 5:00 a.m. thing is physically trying.  After catching up we went to the Health Center to try and get our heart rates up for a bit.  I have been staying away from the weights so as not to aggravate my right shoulder further.  I have noticed the pain lessening because of that the past two weeks. 

We picked up Scott Beames.  He has been staying at Jenny Schlecter's home while visiting in Juneau.  We picked him up with the intent of taking him to lunch.  But when we got to the cash register he insisted on having CES pay for the lunch because we were talking shop so much. 

A cute couple was in the Broiler the same time as we.  I struck up a conversation with the man.  He is 86 years old and a WWII veteran.  He lied about his age and joined the marines at the age of 16.  He had on a Civil Air Patrol jacket.  He told me he and his wife were both Lt. Colonels in the CAP.  They both fly, still.  After we and they had finished eating our hamburgers or salads, they approached us and spent quite a bit of time telling us who they were.  They asked who we were.  "Well," she said, "If you are LDS you must know a Brother Bingham."  We haven't met him yet, but evidently he has invited them to church with him a few times.  They did go.  We really don't know many of the members from the other two wards very well.  They each have a set of missionaries and we spend our time with the YSA branch.

After our lunch we brought Bro. Beames to our apartment and we talked about his new role as coordinator of CES throughout Alaska.  He has all but Anchorage.  We talked about the cut in financing.  And he told us he is in charge of all training of teachers.  That takes away from one of our assignments we were told we would be doing when we received our call.  However, he does want us to visit and help still in the outlying wards and branches when needed.  The Stake will still have us go as often as we can to the outlying branches and stakes as well, at least up to twice a year if that's possible financially.  We also worked on learning the churches vydio conferencing system.  It really is very well put together.  We had fun learning how to toggle our screens and show each other what we were looking at while seeing each other very much like Skype.  However the picture quality seemed to be much better in spite of the signal going from here to Salt Lake City and back up here to us.

We received approval from Seattle to make our trip to Yakutat.  We will do that for four days the second week of November.  I purchased the Alaska Air tickets yesterday as well.  Bro. Beames wants us to go to Wrangell and Ketchikan the first of the year.