Temple Trip

Friday, November 08, 2013

It is hard to beat last week’s great news about Amy, but this week has had some high points as well. Wednesday, we attended our first Zone meeting. It was run completely by the young missionaries, the Zone Leaders and District Leaders. We have two districts in our zone. There are about 20 young elders, 4 young sisters, and two senior couples in our zone. They include Sierra Vista, Bisbee, and Douglas. Interestingly, there are 2 companionships of young elders and one senior couple in Douglas which has only one ward. We had lunch with the senior couple  the other day. They are from Payson Utah. They know RoLayne's brother and his wife.



Senior Missionaries from Douglas

 Apparently, there are lots of less active members in Douglas to search out. I never cease to be amazed at the talent of these young missionaries and their ability to teach. The sisters are really amazing and add so much to the group. The overall quality of the missionaries is very good in this zone, far superior to anything we had when I was a young missionary. We had some very good missionaries in my time, but we had a few goof balls too. There do not seem to be any goofballs in this group.

Zone missionaries at pizza lunch

 

We worked Tuesday at the Turn Around Point, (Picture included below), and then Thursday we worked in front of the PX at a table with a giving tree. They started with 400 gift cards on the tree and are already down to fewer than a hundred. The military folks are very generous.

Where we work on Tuesdays

Tomorrow morning at 6:00AM, we are meeting at the post chapel annex to take our soldiers to the Mesa Temple. We are really looking forward to this experience. It will be interesting to see how many are able to go. We have a 15 passenger van from the chaplain’s office and a soldier from the ward to drive us. 

 In our free time, RoLayne and I have again begun helping our home ward in Vancouver with the indexing effort. The bishop committed the ward to do 1 million names before the end of the year. I am not sure how the ward is progressing, but I am sure they will accept our help. I didn’t realize all these years how competitive RoLayne is. She is determined to do more names than me this month. She has been leading me so far, but, we shall see.

Saturday, November 09, 2013

 

Some of the soldiers at the Mesa Temple

We just returned from the temple in Mesa, Arizona. Our mission president gave us permission to take the soldiers from Ft Huachuca with us to the temple, which is outside of our mission boundaries. Although our numbers were small, it was a very spiritual and enjoyable experience. One of the young men that went with us is not a member. During the three hour ride each direction, much of the time was spent with a returned missionary on either side of him in the van telling him about their missions and what a great experience it was. The more I get to know this young man, the more curious I am that he is not a member. Above is a picture of part of our group. Our driver was a brother from the ward who is an instructor at the school and gave up his Saturday to drive the military van to and from the temple.