The Blacks' Mission Report

Hermana Black's mother, Donna Maxine Gardner, passed away on November 12, 2019.  I was asked to write and present her eulogy at her funeral.  Here is the written copy: Eulogy for Donna Maxine Garner Millions of years ago, I don’t know exactly how many and I’m not sure any human knows either, a man and a woman were born, met one another, fell in love and married in the new and everlasting covenant by one who had authority to do so.   These two lived on a planet much like this one.   They breathed the same kind of oxygen rich air mixture that we breath.   They had children.   They left their physical life and were judged just as we will be judged.   They were pronounced clean and were rewarded their Celestial glory.   And then they commenced to create their own kingdom.   They found intelligences and formed them into living spirits.   They taught those spirits all the things they would need in order to survive on this earth upon ...

Last week on Thursday we took our Chrysler Town & Country to a most favored shop in Kingwood, Texas.  It was making an unusual sound that I thought should be checked out.  I thought perhaps a pulley bearing was going out. I was wrong. It was much more serious than that.  The "flex-plate" was cracked all the way around.  It wasn't dangerous yet, but it could have caused a lot of trouble.  In order to do the repair they had to remove transmission, remove and replace the flex-plate with a new one,  and then replace the transmission.  I asked the mechanic what might have caused such a failure.  He responded that nothing I could have done could have caused the problem.  He sees that kind of parts failure pretty regularly.  It isn't just with Chrysler, but all the makes with front wheel drive have similar problems.  Usually it happens at about the 90,000 mile neighborhood.  While our van has substantially less miles it was a ...

Houston is interesting with a diverse populace from many parts of the world.  We are told there are people here from over 90 different countries.  Therefore, there are many different languages spoken here, but most folks speak at least some Spanish and some English. There are wealthy parts of town and there are extremely poor parts of town.  Somewhere in between there are families who are getting along, but are not overly wealthy. In these parts of town there are many many homeless folks.  We can see them nearly at every major intersection.  We have learned that giving money to these folks generally contributes to their drug/alcoholic tendencies.  So we have taken a different tact.  We prepare what we call "Buddy Bags".  We purchase heavier plastic open top containers (with handles) from the 99 cent store. Inside that container we put a can of pop-top chili, a can of pop-top fruit cocktail, a pop-top can of Vienna Sausages, plastic spoons and ...