Scrambled Eggs

"Good Morning Everyone! Welcome to the 121st Class of Gilead!"

An exciting experience like this can hardly begin with a list of statistics and averages yet eventually these are going to have to get into the story, so if you find a statistic sitting in the middle of a sentence you'll know that it was just misplaced and had nowhere else to go.

Of the 28 couples that are attending, many hailing from the Heights of Bethel (blatant use of a pun) my favorite experience happened to be of a brother and sister from Texas, U.S.A. -Benito & Sally Parra. Ben started out telling his story of how he found the truth. When he was in the world he had been engaged to a woman who started to learn the truth, but when Ben didn't want to learn either, their engagement was broken off. A few weeks later, Ben's fiance sent him two brochures, the Trinity brochure and The Divine Name brochure. After reading these Ben was convinced this was the truth, started to study, and progressed quickly in the truth-even reaching out to pioneer. So he said without his ex-fiance, he would never have learned the truth.

Next Sally started to tell how she had been raised around the truth but when she was a late teenager she was engaged to a worldly man. When Sally picked up her study again, she knew she'd have to do something about the relationship she had with her fiance. Sadly they too ended up breaking off the engagement, but this allowed Sally to continue to make fine progress and help as a pioneer in a Spanish-speaking congregation.

Ben continues, in 1995, he was attending a District Convention in Waco, TX. There he ran into his ex-fiance -who was still beautiful and still single as was he. They began to talk and one thing lead to another and Sally and Ben were once again engaged to be married, and now they are eagerly looking forward to their missionary assignment. :-)

There were a total of 9 countries represented: Britain, U.S., Germany,Japan, France, Ireland, South Africa, Portugal, Martinique. Each held a charm unto themselves but a favorite quote from the introduction was from Jim Rotherock who served in Walkill,NY Bethel in the Dairy for a number of years. "However that was before the cows got reassigned to work in the field!"

Second favorite quote is from Wayne &Leoni Wridgway from South Africa. They served in South Africa before being sent to Patterson,NY where they served for 2 years and then down to Brooklyn Bethel for 10 years. "After being here for so long," says Wayne," we now consider ourselves 'African Americans'. " Which I suppose is only funny because they're White as White can be (which is pretty white).

More to follow...