Dear Family,
The end of June, Yikes! Where does the time go? We are getting into the summer months now with the humidity rising. Last week I was visiting with a lady in church who was here taking care of her grandchildren while her daughter and son-in-law went on Trek. She is from Houston having moved from the Bay Area. I asked her how she liked the weather and she said that they drink their weather. She went on further to explain that when she goes running, she cannot breathe in through her mouth or she chokes on the water that comes in! She has to breathe in through her nose. We are not that humid here, but we sometimes feel like we need to put out our hands and push aside the air in order to walk through it. In fact, last night when we were coming home from a baptism we felt like we were driving through the fog, but it was just the water on the road from a recent rainstorm that was evaporating and we could see it in the air. But I get ahead of myself.
Monday was the first day of having our recuperating missionary in the office with us. Another senior couple are keeping him with them in the evening this week and we will take our turn next week. We are all really hoping that by keeping him off his foot and having it elevated that it will heal. The hard part is trying to find something for him to do so he doesn’t get too bored. For some reason much of this has fallen on my shoulders. We did get the 2015 files shredded. Dad wants to have him help with being able to get on the portals, but that is going to take some hand holding to get him to know how to do it and I didn’t have that kind of time this past week. We also had another missionary in the office Monday and Tuesday while he was waiting for a flight home to get some medical help. With these two missionaries in addition to the regular staff and our office missionaries, we were pretty full. There is nothing so constant in the mission as change.
Tuesday, we had our weekly planning meeting to determine how we would handle the extra missionary situation, the carpet cleaning, and the mail delivery. There are no zone meetings or interviews this week to bring the mail so that it can dispersed. We need to make trips out to the zone leaders or go to district councils so that we can get the mail delivered and we needed to see who could do that. We also need to coordinate everyone’s coming and going so that we have an elder in the office to be with our recuperating elder. Dad and I were going to go to a district council as well as the housing couple (and the two missionaries), to another council meeting. But the nurse was leaving, and we couldn’t leave Sister Chesborough alone in the office with Elder Downs. I needed to stay and that worked out well—quiet time to get the missionary funding taken care of. Before deciding how much each missionary gets, I have to check each of their card balances to make sure that it isn’t too high. If it is, I don’t put quite so much on their card, but I have to get in touch with them to let them know what is happening. I also have to check to make sure that all incoming missionaries have a mission card and that it has/will be funded. I also have to manually put money on the visa waiters’ cards. In order not to forget anyone, I do better in an uninterrupted environment. With the quiet morning office I was able to get that job done. Later in the day I got an email from President Caplin telling me that the Church has decided to fund the missionaries’ cards twice a month instead of once. Yippee. I get to do this twice a month instead of just once.
We spent the late afternoon getting everything off the floor that we could so that more of the carpet could be cleaned. We also got rid of some things in the process.
Dad was able to get the elder’s travel changed from Thusday to Wednesday, so the senior couple who were hosting this elder at their home took him to the airport on Wednesday morning. We opened the office and worked while waiting for the carpet cleaners to arrive. The nurse and vehicle secretary and the recuperating elder stayed at their home and worked from there. Luckily, the housing and referral senior couple came back to the office to get some things they needed to do some house inspections and they were able to wait (the cleaners were now an hour late) so we could go to the district council we were planning to go to. The district council was wonderful. I stand in awe of their ability to conduct a meeting with such poise, teach pertinent doctrine and use the scriptures so skillfully to do so. They did some practice teaching of a pretend investigator (a missionary). The investigator would ask a question and the two missionaries would answer the question using scriptures and their gospel knowledge. They didn’t know the question before it was asked, but they were able to not miss a beat. I was really impressed with their answers, but even more impressed with the spirit they brought into the meeting.
Afterwards Dad and I went out to lunch with the other senior missionary couple that was also at the district council meeting. We really enjoy working with good people. They are the couple in charge of the self reliance program in the mission. They live in the area, but are full time missionaries. This is just another way that we can serve and still stay close to home. From here we went by the mission office to check on the carpet cleaning and make sure the office was all locked up. They were going to lock the bottom lock and we wanted to lock the dead bolt. The carpets looked SO much better and hopefully they will stay looking this good because they had gotten pretty stained. We had prepared things we could take with us to do at home, so went home to work leaving the carpets to dry without people tromping all over them.
Thursday we were back to work but it seemed more like a Monday because of having been away from the office yesterday. It doesn’t take much to get us out of our routine. I got an interesting phone call from one of the apartments that we have had problems with the checks getting delivered in a timely fashion. The man calling said that they had just received a check dated 7 months earlier with a note on it saying that they could not forward the letter. He wanted to know if I had cancelled the check and what I wanted him to do with it. He was sure that we had replaced this check because the balance was $0. I checked and it had been voided, so I told him to shred the check. So much for our postal system back here.
Friday our missionary was able to get the 2018 files out of the filing cabinets into boxes for the 4-year storage that is required by the Church. The filing cabinet seems really empty now and is much easier to do the filing. It won’t take long for them to get filled up. Now all I have to do is get one last filing cabinet sorted out by date and get the 2018 boxed up.
President Caplin asked Dad to do an baptismal interview for him that evening, so we went to the stake center so he could do that and then we stayed for a baptism for another lady. When we first got there the elders were refilling the font because the water had looked a bit brown probably something from the pipes. They didn’t have time to get to the level they usually have it. Both the lady being baptized and the one interviewed are originally from Sierra Leon. The lady that was baptized was very brave. In Sierra Leon they do not do anything in the water—probably because there isn’t much of it and because it could have things in it that could be dangerous. Because of that it is not easy to go into the water and go backwards to be immersed. This poor lady had to be baptized 4 times to get completely immersed. It was a good baptism and was wonderful to listen to her say the closing prayer at the end.
Saturday needed to go get the car. We had taken it in because the air conditioner was getting less than consistent in sending out cold air. With summer upon us, we didn’t want to get caught without a/c. We had taken it to the shop on Thursday, but they still hadn’t gotten to it and we needed it to get us where we needed to go. We came home and Dad worked on stuff for WES while I did laundry and grocery shopping. At 5:30 we left for another baptism. It was a mother and her and son and daughter. What a wonderful spirit was at the baptism. When we walked into the primary room it looked as if the whole primary was there. In fact it go so filled that we needed to move to the chapel. This ward had really wrapped their arms around this family and loved them. After they were baptized the mother bore her testimony and what a sweet, powerful testimony!
We were supposed to take our friend David to church, but at 5 a.m. Dad got a text saying that he needed to take a rain check on going to church. Little does he know that when Dad and Elder Larsen help him get moved tomorrow there will be missionaries waiting on the other end to help him get moved in there and to hopefully teach him the gospel.
Sacrament meeting was good. A brother who had just retired from the army talked about patriotism and brought in many scriptures about this being a chosen land. The choir then sang Battle Hymn of the Republic and we have some very talented singers. Even the youth sing in the choir and they really add to it—beautiful!! We were then reminded by our Bishop of the need to repent daily. He took his remarks from President Nelson’s conference talk. It must be something that I need because I had just listened to that talk this morning while getting ready for church. Our bishop said we need to figure out what sin we are having a hard time letting go of and figure out if it worth hanging on to at the expense of losing our eternal reward and then say “be dead to me” of that sin. We need to become new creatures each day as we were when we came up out of the baptismal waters a new creature. It was said much better than I can tell it, but the message was we need to daily repent and not hold onto our sin.
One of the primary teachers had asked us if we would be able to help with her primary lesson this week. She wanted us to talk about how we “feed my sheep” and how that applies to the children. It was fun to prepare for that and enjoyed doing it. We came away with a lot of admiration for these two ladies for being there each week for these children. There are 4 boys if all come with two of them having autism. It would be difficult to prepare a lesson that would help all of these children, but they did a very good job of “feeding my sheep” in their own corner of the world. What an example it was for us that we all can do our part. It doesn’t have to be big and flashy; we just need to lift where we stand.
It has been a good day and we have been feed well. We love you lots and lots and pray for you daily.
Love,
Mom
The end of June, Yikes! Where does the time go? We are getting into the summer months now with the humidity rising. Last week I was visiting with a lady in church who was here taking care of her grandchildren while her daughter and son-in-law went on Trek. She is from Houston having moved from the Bay Area. I asked her how she liked the weather and she said that they drink their weather. She went on further to explain that when she goes running, she cannot breathe in through her mouth or she chokes on the water that comes in! She has to breathe in through her nose. We are not that humid here, but we sometimes feel like we need to put out our hands and push aside the air in order to walk through it. In fact, last night when we were coming home from a baptism we felt like we were driving through the fog, but it was just the water on the road from a recent rainstorm that was evaporating and we could see it in the air. But I get ahead of myself.
Monday was the first day of having our recuperating missionary in the office with us. Another senior couple are keeping him with them in the evening this week and we will take our turn next week. We are all really hoping that by keeping him off his foot and having it elevated that it will heal. The hard part is trying to find something for him to do so he doesn’t get too bored. For some reason much of this has fallen on my shoulders. We did get the 2015 files shredded. Dad wants to have him help with being able to get on the portals, but that is going to take some hand holding to get him to know how to do it and I didn’t have that kind of time this past week. We also had another missionary in the office Monday and Tuesday while he was waiting for a flight home to get some medical help. With these two missionaries in addition to the regular staff and our office missionaries, we were pretty full. There is nothing so constant in the mission as change.
Tuesday, we had our weekly planning meeting to determine how we would handle the extra missionary situation, the carpet cleaning, and the mail delivery. There are no zone meetings or interviews this week to bring the mail so that it can dispersed. We need to make trips out to the zone leaders or go to district councils so that we can get the mail delivered and we needed to see who could do that. We also need to coordinate everyone’s coming and going so that we have an elder in the office to be with our recuperating elder. Dad and I were going to go to a district council as well as the housing couple (and the two missionaries), to another council meeting. But the nurse was leaving, and we couldn’t leave Sister Chesborough alone in the office with Elder Downs. I needed to stay and that worked out well—quiet time to get the missionary funding taken care of. Before deciding how much each missionary gets, I have to check each of their card balances to make sure that it isn’t too high. If it is, I don’t put quite so much on their card, but I have to get in touch with them to let them know what is happening. I also have to check to make sure that all incoming missionaries have a mission card and that it has/will be funded. I also have to manually put money on the visa waiters’ cards. In order not to forget anyone, I do better in an uninterrupted environment. With the quiet morning office I was able to get that job done. Later in the day I got an email from President Caplin telling me that the Church has decided to fund the missionaries’ cards twice a month instead of once. Yippee. I get to do this twice a month instead of just once.
We spent the late afternoon getting everything off the floor that we could so that more of the carpet could be cleaned. We also got rid of some things in the process.
Dad was able to get the elder’s travel changed from Thusday to Wednesday, so the senior couple who were hosting this elder at their home took him to the airport on Wednesday morning. We opened the office and worked while waiting for the carpet cleaners to arrive. The nurse and vehicle secretary and the recuperating elder stayed at their home and worked from there. Luckily, the housing and referral senior couple came back to the office to get some things they needed to do some house inspections and they were able to wait (the cleaners were now an hour late) so we could go to the district council we were planning to go to. The district council was wonderful. I stand in awe of their ability to conduct a meeting with such poise, teach pertinent doctrine and use the scriptures so skillfully to do so. They did some practice teaching of a pretend investigator (a missionary). The investigator would ask a question and the two missionaries would answer the question using scriptures and their gospel knowledge. They didn’t know the question before it was asked, but they were able to not miss a beat. I was really impressed with their answers, but even more impressed with the spirit they brought into the meeting.
Afterwards Dad and I went out to lunch with the other senior missionary couple that was also at the district council meeting. We really enjoy working with good people. They are the couple in charge of the self reliance program in the mission. They live in the area, but are full time missionaries. This is just another way that we can serve and still stay close to home. From here we went by the mission office to check on the carpet cleaning and make sure the office was all locked up. They were going to lock the bottom lock and we wanted to lock the dead bolt. The carpets looked SO much better and hopefully they will stay looking this good because they had gotten pretty stained. We had prepared things we could take with us to do at home, so went home to work leaving the carpets to dry without people tromping all over them.
Thursday we were back to work but it seemed more like a Monday because of having been away from the office yesterday. It doesn’t take much to get us out of our routine. I got an interesting phone call from one of the apartments that we have had problems with the checks getting delivered in a timely fashion. The man calling said that they had just received a check dated 7 months earlier with a note on it saying that they could not forward the letter. He wanted to know if I had cancelled the check and what I wanted him to do with it. He was sure that we had replaced this check because the balance was $0. I checked and it had been voided, so I told him to shred the check. So much for our postal system back here.
Friday our missionary was able to get the 2018 files out of the filing cabinets into boxes for the 4-year storage that is required by the Church. The filing cabinet seems really empty now and is much easier to do the filing. It won’t take long for them to get filled up. Now all I have to do is get one last filing cabinet sorted out by date and get the 2018 boxed up.
President Caplin asked Dad to do an baptismal interview for him that evening, so we went to the stake center so he could do that and then we stayed for a baptism for another lady. When we first got there the elders were refilling the font because the water had looked a bit brown probably something from the pipes. They didn’t have time to get to the level they usually have it. Both the lady being baptized and the one interviewed are originally from Sierra Leon. The lady that was baptized was very brave. In Sierra Leon they do not do anything in the water—probably because there isn’t much of it and because it could have things in it that could be dangerous. Because of that it is not easy to go into the water and go backwards to be immersed. This poor lady had to be baptized 4 times to get completely immersed. It was a good baptism and was wonderful to listen to her say the closing prayer at the end.
Saturday needed to go get the car. We had taken it in because the air conditioner was getting less than consistent in sending out cold air. With summer upon us, we didn’t want to get caught without a/c. We had taken it to the shop on Thursday, but they still hadn’t gotten to it and we needed it to get us where we needed to go. We came home and Dad worked on stuff for WES while I did laundry and grocery shopping. At 5:30 we left for another baptism. It was a mother and her and son and daughter. What a wonderful spirit was at the baptism. When we walked into the primary room it looked as if the whole primary was there. In fact it go so filled that we needed to move to the chapel. This ward had really wrapped their arms around this family and loved them. After they were baptized the mother bore her testimony and what a sweet, powerful testimony!
We were supposed to take our friend David to church, but at 5 a.m. Dad got a text saying that he needed to take a rain check on going to church. Little does he know that when Dad and Elder Larsen help him get moved tomorrow there will be missionaries waiting on the other end to help him get moved in there and to hopefully teach him the gospel.
Sacrament meeting was good. A brother who had just retired from the army talked about patriotism and brought in many scriptures about this being a chosen land. The choir then sang Battle Hymn of the Republic and we have some very talented singers. Even the youth sing in the choir and they really add to it—beautiful!! We were then reminded by our Bishop of the need to repent daily. He took his remarks from President Nelson’s conference talk. It must be something that I need because I had just listened to that talk this morning while getting ready for church. Our bishop said we need to figure out what sin we are having a hard time letting go of and figure out if it worth hanging on to at the expense of losing our eternal reward and then say “be dead to me” of that sin. We need to become new creatures each day as we were when we came up out of the baptismal waters a new creature. It was said much better than I can tell it, but the message was we need to daily repent and not hold onto our sin.
One of the primary teachers had asked us if we would be able to help with her primary lesson this week. She wanted us to talk about how we “feed my sheep” and how that applies to the children. It was fun to prepare for that and enjoyed doing it. We came away with a lot of admiration for these two ladies for being there each week for these children. There are 4 boys if all come with two of them having autism. It would be difficult to prepare a lesson that would help all of these children, but they did a very good job of “feeding my sheep” in their own corner of the world. What an example it was for us that we all can do our part. It doesn’t have to be big and flashy; we just need to lift where we stand.
It has been a good day and we have been feed well. We love you lots and lots and pray for you daily.
Love,
Mom
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