General Conference Saturday

Saturday was a morning and afternoon mostly at home. I walked down to the farmer's market for some bread, then to Conad and the Chinese store for a few things. It rained on and off but was fairly warm, which is good because our apartment heat is now off until next fall. As you may recall, the radiators get turned on by the management under a fixed-price heating contract. We can adjust the temperature, but not whether it is on or off. Fortunately we have our overhead electric units if it turns cold. I also read the gas meters and our odometer and sent in the monthly reports to the mission office.

About noon I installed the new keyboard with the Italian layout onto my Thinkpad laptop. It was fairly easy, though a tad more complicated than shown on YouTube. So now I guess I am fully Italian, though I still mistype a bunch. Dee had a scary moment when the screw in her implant fell out. She left a message for the dentist, but in the meantime she was able to just screw it back in. It uses a pentalobe screwdriver bit, which I fortunately happened to have in the very nice 60-bit set I bought here for computer use. For now she will just carry the bit with her; hopefully it won't come loose while she is eating! Dee writes: I'm pretty awesome!

Just before 4pm we headed out to the Metro store to get sour cream, which was out of stock last time. There are still no jalapenos available, but Dee bought extra before, so we're okay for Taco Tuesday. From there we drove in the rain downtown to the Institute, where we watched the first session of General Conference live at 6pm local time, with the library big screen streaming in Italian and the main classroom in English. Fortunately we have enough internet bandwidth there to support two video streams. We expected just a small handful of kids, but Ugo promised lasagna, so we had probably 15 total, slightly more than half of whom watched with us in Italian. It was nice to have an event that I didn't cook for :) It was interesting to both of us how much easier it was this time around to listen in Italian; six months ago, right after arriving in Italy, it was exhausting and not as easy to follow. I love to watch Conference and knit at the same time, so it was doubly great.

It hadn't quite dawned on us that there would be a solemn assembly first thing, with all of us sustaining the new First Presidency. We had a new member and an investigator with us, plus very few of the member kids would have remembered the last time this happened: 10 years ago with President Monson. So we tried to explain briefly what was going on. It was a very nice session, and it was cool to see and sustain the two new apostles. I have enjoyed their talks over the years, so they should be great additions. After the session we had a wonderful meal, with lasagna and some Easter cakes, shaped like a lamb and a dove. The place was pretty full.

 

 

 

 

As a followup to my Friday lesson, I sent out a couple of favorite quotes on the resurrection to the class members on WhatsApp, one of which I had tried to remember and translate on the fly during class (but didn't do a good job :-).  Here is the first one, by Steven Davis, a protestant scholar, from his book Risen Indeed -- Making Sense of the Resurrection:

"People who reject the resurrection of Jesus Christ typically do so on the grounds that the very idea of a dead man living again is absurd. Despite the fact that I have been arguing on behalf of belief in the resurrection … there is a sense in which I agree with this sentiment. I believe that Christians need to recover a sense of the shocking absurdity of the very idea of resurrection."

And here is the other one, from a book entitled The Resurrection of the Son of God by Tom Wright, an Anglican bishop and well known New Testament scholar:

"The biblical language of resurrection ... involves, not a reconstruction of life after death, but the reversal of death itself. It is not about discovering that the grave is not such a bad place after all. It is not a way of saying that the dust will learn to be happy about being dust. The language of awakening is not a new, exciting way of talking about sleep. It is a way of saying that a time will come when sleepers will sleep no more."

Happy Easter. He is risen!