Counselor to President Tempest

Whereas we counselors in the Mission Presidency had been tasked until then primarily with coordinating and maintaining brotherly collegial relations between the two organizations, our assignment was now expanded to include ecclesiastical supervision in the forests and potato fields of the far north.

Dave Ingerson

I think it was Rich who called Dave Ingerson as his other counselor. If that happened before the Caribou news hit, it clearly evidenced prophetic insight on his part. Dave was a native of Aroostook County, Maine,* in the heart of our new field of labor, and it would have required much prayerful searching to find anybody more specifically knowledgeable about the new territory. Dave and I had worked together in the Seventies of the pioneering Merrimack Stake, nearly a decade earlier, and the three of us, with our lovely partners, made an effective and congenial team. We developed a pattern of gathering for dinner, every month or so, and we enjoyed both the diversity of our six personalities and what we had in common, in our experiences in the Lord’s work.

And it was also about this time that the continuing evolution of the Church’s organization chart blessed us with a new supervisor, in the genial, grandfatherly person of the first Area President for the Northeast, a General Authority Seventy named Elder Rex C Reeve. In our first exploratory visit as a Presidency to Caribou, we learned that nobody up there had knowledge or even cherished a rumor that any General Authority of the Church had ever set foot within our new District. When we reported that to Elder Reeve, he smiled and inquired whether we thought they’d mind if he came to their next District Conference. Would they MIND?

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