"Unto Whom Much is Given" . . . My Favorite Birthday Present

I have a picture next to my clock on my nightstand. It is a captured moment of my best birthday gift ever. It was October 2003 and the Peoria Pride Project was coming up and the date they picked to do this was on my birthday. Our ward was assigned 3 homes and I was made a captain of a home. We were asked to recruit folks from our ward to help us get the things done based on what the house needed. At the time I was in the Sundance ward and we were very small. As I tried to recruit folks I realized that the few folks that were going to be able to make it would be needed at the other homes assigned to our ward and so I went outside of the ward and recruited my 3 youngest sisters (the rest were married and not so available) to give me my birthday present by serving along my side on this project. My sisters were awesome and displayed an amazing ability to work (all of my Brown siblings have this ability) and we were able to get everything done but a couple of things without outside assistance. One item required a forklift to remove a solar water heater that had died many years earlier. The other item required moving a huge rock lodged in the front yard. As you can see from the picture I have some cute sisters so it didn't take much for them to flirt with enough young men from the surrounding projects to recruit them in moving this rock successfully. We scraped, painted, hammered and cut our way to successfully completing the project. I had the smallest team of all the projects but we were mighty. That day I grew much closer to my sisters. You can see how proud and happy I was to have them as my sisters in the picture. They gave me the picture in remembrance of this great gift. I sure do have some awesome sisters. Thanks Natalie, Kara, and Kensie for my best and favorite birthday gift ever - you guys are awesome workers and even better sisters.

Andrew "Spoiled Rotten" Brown