Last week Facebook let me know that I should look into ‘friending’ someone with whom I shared a “mutual friend”. It was an old Brazilian mission buddy who I not seen since I left Brazil 30 years ago last month.

I quickly invited him and he accepted with a very nice note indicating that he was so excited to catch up with me after all of these years — and that if I were ever in São Paulo, to look him up.

I wrote back, “Coincidentally, I find myself in São Paulo right now….”

While not able to physically see each other, we did ultimately catch up via an hour-long phone call that he made to my hotel room on the other side of the city.

“…heavily urbanized São Paulo metropolitan area, with an estimated 19,889,559 people in 2009 over 7,944 square kilometers (3,067.2 sq mi), is the largest metropolitan area in the nation.”.
wikipedia:

He caught me up with his life, career and family and then asked what I had been up to the preceding 30 years. I referred him to my Facebook profile, which clearly lays out my life, relationship and career. I figured I would let technology do the vetting so I didn’t have to deal with the uncomfortable “so, what is your church calling”-type questions).

He is a really great guy with lots of enthusiasm still. He currently works for the church’s real estate arm and was literally on his way the next morning to “close on the large, beautiful piece of land for the temple in Fortaleza”.

That said, he barely spoke of the church, except in the context of his job, and did not make me feel uncomfortable in the least.

Welcome back into my life, Elder Rocha.

For some time I have noted that the much-touted world relief efforts the LDS church trots out via press release and general conference’s self-congratulatory notifications every six months is not that extraordinary — or generous. This letter below from the Salt Lake Tribune puts it into perspective.

LDS relief efforts
Public Forum Letter
Updated: 10/07/2009 05:03:03 PM MDT

Peggy Fletcher Stack’s story “This mission’s focus: save lives, not souls” ( Tribune , Oct. 3) reports that since 1985, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has “provided $1.1 billion in cash and goods to 167 countries.”

Let’s take a closer look at these numbers: $1.1 billion divided by 24 years comes out to an average of $45.8 million per year. By the LDS Church’s own numbers, it had approximately 6.2 million members in 1985 and 13.6 million in 2008, for an average membership of 9.9 million members over the last 24 years. Therefore, the church has donated, on average, $4.63 per member per year to its relief efforts.
Instead of being proud of this accomplishment, Latter-day Saints should be ashamed.

Michael Mirabile
West Jordan

In that same 25-year time period (1984-2009), the LDS church dedicated some 110 new temples at a minimal cost of $40 million per instance (my estimate — and I suspect that it is conservative). That total comes to $4.4 billion, for an average annual expenditure of $176 million — or four times what was spent on relief efforts worldwide.

I can’t be the only one who is laughing at the symbology of this natural occurrence. If look really close, you can see that even his face is now black.

Lightning blasts Angel Moroni at new temple

June 16 (Salt Lake Tribune) – Lightning has struck the Angel Moroni statue atop the LDS Church’s new Oquirrh Mountain Temple in South Jordan.

“A work crew will re-gild the statue as soon as possible,” church spokesman Scott Trotter said Monday.

The gold-leaf sculpture, 10-feet 6-inches tall, was singed Saturday.

But such acts of nature are not unheard of. Lightning hit the Moroni on American Fork’s Timpanogos Temple and on the Dallas Temple. The angel-less spire of the Provo Temple once set off a fire alarm after drawing a lightning bolt.

The Oquirrh Mountain Temple is open to public tours until Aug. 1 and will be formally dedicated Aug. 21-23.

(Rick Egan/The Salt Lake Tribune )