8 September 2016
Bishop Horsley,
Thank you for taking my call today.
I don’t want to dump too much on you. We appreciate so much any help your ward can give in making our sister, Duraye Lewis, feel welcomed in your ward. Our greatest hope, of course, is that your efforts and the family support will help her find her way back into the Church and the joy of living the gospel.
As I mentioned earlier, not only is she not a member of the Church, but she has a DUI on her record (she has an Interlock on her car), has had a hard time keeping a job and, for the first time in years, is on her own…and so quite lonely. We hope your ward can help fill the vacuum to a certain extent before she drifts back into old habits and/or old friends.
I don’t say that to place pressure on you, but just want you to feel a bit of the urgency we are feeling as a family inasmuch as she has allowed us, for the first time in a long time, to help her get on her own and make somewhat of a “fresh start.”
As I mentioned, she was raised in an extremely active LDS family (all 12 of us…now 10 living...were all born and raised in Arizona). Sadly, she got sideways with the Church, has struggled with addictions, has been mostly less-active after her divorce and excommunication at least 20 years ago, but has stayed in touch with the family.. Just recently she has begun to make some positive turns (such as allowing us to move her into her own apartment last weekend) and we’re anxious to work closely with you in helping those baby steps continue.
It was a joy to discover that we may have a number of established connections within your ward, especially Paul Gilbert and family.
Besides helping Duraye find a friend to help go with her to ward and stake activities and assigning home and/or visiting teachers, we would like to ask if, after meeting with her, you would consider helping her with welfare assistance. The other 9 children in our family…all active members, two are stake presidents…are working together to get her established in her new apartment in your ward ($2.8K so far and counting :) Because she’s unemployed, she’s pretty much penniless. She is actively looking for employment and we’re doing all that we can to help her with her resume and networking with friends. We hope your ward or stake can also help in this effort.
There are two reasons we hope you will consider helping her with welfare assistance, even though we recognize she’s not a member of the Church:
1) She’s pretty much destitute with ongoing bills (needed so she can look for work)…and the family resources are starting to get strained, though we’ve committed to support her apartment cost for up to a year @ $950 per month plus utilities; but even more importantly...
2) to put her in a position to be accountable to you or someone on your ward council. In other words, you’re so much closer to her geographically and contact-wise than any family member (her closest siblings live in the distant Arizona communities of Thatcher, Ajo and Kingman). We feel if she’s on your “welfare rolls” she’s not as likely to fall through the cracks (since you won’t have her on any membership rolls) and hopefully you can put her to work on a regular basis cleaning the chapel or working on Indexing…or something...so she receives assistance with dignity but is also accountable to someone for her service “payments."
So far the family has paid…$2,841 to get her into a home as per the following:
$2,150 for 2 payments @ $950 + $250 cleaning deposit
$100 for credit checks on Duraye and a sibling
$250 for utilities
$146 for cell phone bill
$195 for fuel, groceries, incidentals
Some of her current bills that need payment by Sept 20 or so are:
$300 car rental (through a friend, who buys-sells cars)
$34 car insurance (through the same friend)
$89 Interlock device mandated by the courts
$50 court fee
We’re hoping that the ward would consider helping with these four bills, if possible, but we’re committed as a family do whatever we can to help. We’ve encouraged her to seek government food assistance (food stamps), but maybe she would qualify to receive a storehouse order, too.
Please know we feel badly that we’re placing her on your “doorstep,” so to speak, but we have all seen the blessing a ward family can be in the lives of those, who are working their way back. Our prayers are that she will find employment soon, so as not to be a financial burden on the family or the church, yet appreciate the family and church’s efforts to help and thus soften her heart enough to desire re-baptism and the blessings of Heaven again.
We appreciate so much your willingness to consider this approach from our family. I’ll be happy to visit more when it’s good for you.
Gratefully,
Crismon & Vivienne Lewis
Gresham, OR
503-667-5843 H
503-914-8689 M
P.S. I give you permission to forward this email (or excerpts) to other ward leaders, as you see fit to help share the “load", asking only that this be kept confidential as much as possible. As you well know, people respond better when they don’t think they’re a “project."
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