So you all know by now that the deal went through.  YAAY!!  We signed the loan papers today.  We will get a $60,000 loan that we will pay off when the condo sells.  Then we will be totally debt free and able to live monthly on our income. We will have to save lots every month to pay off the taxes at the end of the year and there will be utilities and HOA fee, etc, but we should be able to handle them monthly.  A good thing to look forward to!!  Tomorrow we will go see it again while the inspector is doing his work and the termite inspection guy comes.  We can look all around again and cement in our minds what we may want to do and if it will be possible.  The official closing date is April 22.

I want to tell you about Sunday.  We had the best meeting ever.  The Pine Trails ward is a struggling ward with new members and a fairly low income member base.  The bishop is a young, soft spoken black man with braces on his teeth.  The meeting started with members just around the edges and a big empty middle of the chapel.  He got up and said, "Well, we're really packed today. (we all laugh)  I hope it's not maybe my body odor.  I hope we'll get more people shortly."  He had asked a middle aged black sister to give the opening prayer and she was nervous as she bowed her head and started paraphrasing the sacrament prayers.  When she was done the bishop got up and whispered in her ear and she started again and said, "I pray for the people who are not here.  I pray for the people who have problems.  I pray for everyone that needs the Lord's help and that's everybody.  Amen" 

The first speaker was a sister who has been a member about 2 months.  She spoke on Charity, telling how her mother borrowed her old truck to go somewhere and a man stopped and helped her change a busted tire.  And at the end she said, "and now I'm supposed to tell you the Book of Mormon is real.  I'm not gonna do that.  Duh!  That's like saying sunshine is real.  God told me it's real and y'all are all here so I guess he's told you too.  Amen" 

The second speaker was a hispanic lady that was supposed to speak in Spanish with a member of the bishopric translating.  She said a paragraph and he said maybe 3 words.  That went on for maybe 5 minutes and then she turned to him, smiled, and said, "You're not a good translator.  You can sit down."  And she went on in pretty good English to give her talk on Faith.  And the last speaker told about fasting.  How to do it and why and how to pray during it and how to pay fast offering.  All wonderful talks.  All inspiring and uplifting.  What a great meeting!  I love this ward and will be sorry to leave it. 

We will be in the Kingwood First ward which is the ward Barneys attend.  It will be good to finally settle in a single place again.  Pine Trails knew we were leaving as soon as we got there so it wasn't like a home ward.  I hope there will be some of the mission field feeling in Kingwood First too.  Listening to Lara talk about some of her experiences, I think maybe that can be the case once in a while.