Elder Palmer

There are three kids in Justin’s family, Jared is the oldest, and then Justin and the baby is Chelsey. Jared ended up marrying a girl from Temecula and we were quite excited to have some of Justin’s family with roots near us.  As it turned out they ended up divorced and Jared’s wife (Amanda) moved home with all the kids. Justin and Kira have remained in touch with them all but I have had little to do with them.

A month or two ago I was assigned to work with a young man who was going through the temple for the first time and as I was going through the schedule I found it interesting that the kids last name was Palmer. That was cool but there are a lot of Palmers in this world. What I found more interesting is that his escort was his bishop Cameron Riches who grew up in our ward.

I showed the schedule to Lisa during our preparation meeting and she nearly started crying. The Palmer kids name was Logan Palmer and he was Justin and Kira’s nephew. He had been called on a mission and was getting ready to ship out to Honduras. He was rather excited when I told him that I was his Aunt Kira’s dad and the whole temple experience was quite special. While he didn’t really know us we were the closest thing to family that he had there and Lisa was able to tell him all kinds of stories about his great grandpa Asael Delbert Palmer who actually has some pretty interesting ties to the San Diego Temple.

Lisa and I walked out the temple with them and they invited us to his farewell talk. The farewell talk was yesterday (Feb 27).

We listened to our wards talks on Zoom as we were driving up there and then we had a wonderful sacrament meeting with them. Logan gave a great talk most about service but he tied in his Palmer heritage and talked a lot about Delbert and a fourth great grandfather who also had some amazing missionary experiences. Apparently he was able to convert and entire mob who was bent on killing him.

It was also quite funny at one point in the talk where he suddenly stopped, stuck his finger in his mouth and started wiggling his finger around. He then stopped for a moment and said, “I think I just swallowed a mosquito”. After a moment or two he then said, “got him”.  He then carried on with his talk and the first thing he said, “…my summer job was selling pest control”. It was hilarious, after the mosquito incident he went right into pest control and the entire chapel burst into laughter.

The guy sitting next to Logan spoke last and he had an incredible story. He grew up in the LA slums among gangs. His story about he stayed active in the church while his brother ended up in and out of jail was incredible. His brother came to him once and asked for a blessing. After the blessing he got his act together and was able to stay clean until he died a couple of years ago. I really want to know what he died from.

The middle speaker was the Bishops’ wife. It was interesting to see the bishop sitting with his wife. That doesn’t happen often.

Last week we drove to Hemet for a baby blessing and the flowers were beautiful due to all the rain. They were still beautiful this week but not as nice as last week.