The Lost and Found

The Lost and Found
Weather -- Bright and sunny this morning, now beginning to cloud over

Temp -- plus 20F Wing 5-7 mph

This morning I was cleaning up my computer desktop and came across this post I never completed. It was from April 2009 and I wanted to save it here rather than trashing it.

Tonight we had the Zone Leaders, Olga (office), President Chudinov, Lena (first branch), and President Gushchin for dinner to celebrate Jesus birthday and the birthday of the church. It was not a kosher meal, but it was worthy of the celebration with salad, pork chops, buttered noodles, asparagus, rolls, butter, and jam.

After dinner we had a lesson from the elders on Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection. I contributed some answers to two questions, “Why do we have Christmas on December 25^th”, and Is the evergreen tree a pagan symbol. The first, about the date was quite simple. Constantine tried to unite the Roman Empire with Christianity by meshing Christian holidays with the old pagan calendar of festivals. The end of the year celebrations were ideal for celebrating Jesus’ birthday and Christmas was born.

As for the evergreen tree, "yes" it was pagan at first as a symbol of life in mid winter at the winter solstice but was combined with Christmas as the symbol of Christ’s living and resurrection.

After the lesson we had dessert and while eating, the elders started on a discussion of how bad their apartment was and how they would like to move into the building where the Assistants and the Office Elders live, called “The Palace” because it is so large. After about 5 minutes of the virtues of the Palace and the shortcomings of their current apartment, Elder Bindrup said that they were going to look at it tomorrow and I said not to get too excited about it because both of you will someday be transferred and moving into better digs would not benefit them. Then Elder Bindrup made the fatal slip, saying, ” Well, I wouldn’t just go there and buy it”. I smiled and quietly interjected, “you are not going to buy anything”, meaning that I make those decisions. That caught him off guard and he was speechless for a few moments. Then we all laughed and had fun with that little play of words.

What a country.

DS