The Church is a Growin' in Tucson

It has been awhile since I have written my two cents. So here goes. The church here in Tucson is growing leaps and bounds. As you will notice in the up coming Church News you will notice that they have created a new stake for the Tucson area. Last Sunday Elder Anderson of the Quorum of the Twelve was here creating the new Sahuarita Stake in the town of Sahuarita, AZ. It is only a 20 minute drive from downtown Tucson. He created this stake from the Tucson Stake. When we lived in our apartment we were members of that Stake. When we bought this house we moved two miles from the apartment and out of that stake into the Tucson East Stake. That is how I met Mark and the great Squires family. Mark then set me up with Carrie, and the rest is history as they say. I might add a GREAT history at that!!! But I digress, most of you already know that. Anyway to create the new stake they rearranged all of the boundaries in the 5 stakes. We had a meeting last Sunday at the Stake Center to find out our fate. Will we still be members of the East Stake or back in the Tucson Stake? Rumors were flying that we would end up in the Tucson Stake. To our joy we were left in the East Stake. However, they dissolved one ward, added 3 wards from another stake (Rincon Stake) and we lost 190 ward members to the Tucson Stake and into the Binghampton Ward. With the realignment of the boundaries we picked up 210 members from the dissolved ward. By the time all of the changes was made the Tucson Stake had over 8,000 members. Thus the needed new Stake could be created out of these fine members.

Because of the boundary change I lost all of my ward missionaries and the 9 new converts we had in the first half of the year. Being the Ward Mission Leader I get to see the joy and happiness that has come into the lives of all of these fine people. The Elders have been working so hard with these converts. I only hope the new ward will take them in with big wide open arms. Also, because of the change, Carrie is still the 2nd Counselor in the Primary. the Primary lost all but 3 of the teachers.