Our group of friends......

Two of the couples will be leaving in the next couple of weeks so we had a good bye dinner at "Bahama Breeze".

This is Sis Bean, Dalling, Call, Kynaston, Black and Holdstock along with "Flat Stanley". The Calls have been showing him around Florida before they leave.

The Beans, Blacks and Calls live in Salt Lake, Kaysville and Ogden so we should be seeing them after our mission. The Calls and Beans have only been married about 3 years each.

Tall and small......

Here are some of the Elders after working at the park on our Day of Service for the Southeast United States stakes and wards. We cleaned up a park in our area, made a new fire pit, built and repaired picnic tables and donated blood and food. Here is a picture of Elder Bachynski and Sister Holdstock. He is 7 ft 2 in. Louisiana Tech sends him at least 2-3 letters per week trying to get him to go there when he gets home from his mission.

Phone numbers coming out my ears.....

I found out today that I will be checking the cell phone bill each month to make sure that the Elders are not calling out of their area or home, etc. There are over 72,000 calls that I will have to monitor for the month of March. Please pray for me.

Another success....

I just received a post card today from a man in the Florida Keys saying thanks for the B of M I sent. He said the reading is very powerful and wants a Pearl of Great Price now and the missionaries to come. He had requested the B of M in October and it was never delivered. I found the request when I pulled up all of the old requests to check on them.

A colorful ward.........

The bishop announced today that the ward missionary effort yesterday (knocking on doors in a designated neighborhood for 2 hours) had resulted in 43 referrals. There were 16 ward members and missionaries involved in the effort. Next month he wants to double it. We have such a diversified ward. I was asking a Polynesian brother today if he knew where Brother Brown was. He said, “The black Brother Brown or the White Brother Brown or do you want the white Brother Black?” We both laughed.

Trip to Key West....

We went to Key West today with the Kynastons. It is a 4 hour ride down and 4 hour ride back. We had told them we would like to do things where we would not have to do a lot of walking because of my back. We bought city tour train ride tickets online before we left so we could get $3 off of each one. They were $30 tickets. We had 3 deliveries to other missionaries to make on the way and spent 3 hours in Marathon, another one of the Keys with the 1st set of Elders. We found them fishing when we arrived at the apartment. This apartment is about 12 ft x 12 ft including bathroom and kitchen.
We had a little fun while having lunch at the ocean side. One side of the road is the Atlantic Ocean and the other side is the Gulf of Mexico.
Outside the chapel at Marathon.

We spent so long at Marathon that by the time we got to Key West we missed our train ride and lost our $54. We still had fun. We waited around for 2 hours to watch the sunset on the ocean and just as it was going down, the clouds covered the sun and we didn’t get a very good picture. The missionaries didn’t think we were coming so they had ordered a pizza and eaten just before we got there. Then the missionaries had an 8 pm appointment so we didn’t have time to take them to dinner after the sunset. We arrived home about 12:35 a.m.

STILL IN LOVE!!!!!

Tender Mercy moment.......

We had one of those “tender mercy” moments today at the office. On Wednesday a gentleman from the deaf phone company came by to do maintenance on one of our phones that the American Sign Language missionaries uses. The Senior Elder that he needed to see wasn’t there and we suggested he come back on Thursday. I had a very difficult time communicating with him and couldn’t understand what he was trying to say so he would have to write everything down and I would write the answer back. H came back today just as the Elder had left again. Once again, the communication was very difficult and we were both becoming a little discouraged when Elder Holdstock came to see if he could be of any help. He helped a little but about that time 2 of our Elders who had just come back from going to a doctor appointment came into the office. They were looking for the Senior sister who does medical (she is only in the office about 15 minutes every 2 weeks). As they could see our frustration, one of them started signing to the visitor. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Not only was the visitor’s delay in coming in on Friday interesting, but the one Elder who spoke ASL was not even the companion of the one who went to the dr. They had switched companions so the ASL Elder could drive as neither of the original companionship could drive. The Elder who went to the Dr only spoke English. Then to have them come into the office the exact 10 minutes that the visitor was there was amazing. It is one of those moments when you see the hand of the Lord in our lives putting people in our paths as answer to our prayers – whether silent or spoken. Before he left, the elders gave him a deaf Book of Mormon and some of the pamphlets we have on the restoration of the gospel.
Then this morning I got a letter from Michael Himmel. It began “Dear angels in discise, thank u very much – I received the CD about our Savior. Jesus is Lord; He is the Mesiah-no man comes before Him-He is the truth, the light and the Life- Thank u again. Hope 2 here from u soon.” This was another response to all the DVDs that I sent out 2 weeks ago from as far back as May 1, 2008 that had not previously been sent. Another set of Elders said they were teaching another investigator I had sent a DVD to and she had set a baptism date and they are going tomorrow to meet two more – one of which they are sure will be baptized after talking on the phone to them. I am doing missionary in a very small way but it is very rewarding………

The spirit of missionary work.....

The lady that I talked about a couple of posts ago that I had sent a B of M to and she wondered why she had gotten it is now reading it and says "I love that book. " She is now allowing the missionaries to give her the discussions. The Elders who are teaching her said that they also picked up 2 other investigators from the old ones that I sent out. So...here I am sitting at my desk and the spirit whispers little thoughts into my head of things I can do to help bring others into the gospel......it's amazing. We, however as missionaries, can only head them in the right diretion....it will be the spirit that teaches and converts them.

Unwanted house guest.......

We came home for lunch today and found out that we had an unwanted house guest – a gecko. It was near our sliding glass door where our large fake plant is. I saw it crawl into the plant so I quickly moved it out onto the screened-in patio and thought I would deal with it when we got home. Then tonight I realized that we always have geckos on the patio and I would probably have 20 in the plant by now. So we had to take the plant out on the grass and take it all apart, tear the moss apart and look for it because I saw it crawl into the pot again on the patio. It was about 20 minutes after I saw it go into it that we looked for it but did not find it. Just as we started to take the plant apart, yep, you guessed it. The sprinklers turned on and we had to drag everything to another spot as it was getting wet. Hopefully it is REALLY gone because we brought the plant back into the house. As I came in the front door, there was one right up against the door waiting to run inside but I was smarter than it this time

Fun and games along with the work......

This was a very stressful week with transfers. Tim and I are responsible for getting the information switched around for all of the missionaries being moved to another area and companion. The meeting ends about noon on Wednesday and everyone wants the new list within an hour. Tim has to enter everything into the computer like the new companion and new apartment. That then creates a new address for me to use with the mail. I also do a telephone card showing each zone, companionships tied to their proselyting area, and telephone numbers. I have to call each companionship (about 61) to make sure they still have the right phone number.

We hold the mail for 3 days prior to transfers and then send it out as soon as Tim gets the info into the computer with the right new address. Because it was Easter this week, there was scads and scads of packages. They took up about 1/4 of our office space. I believe there were about 125 pieces of mail in all. It filled our entire trunk and all of the back seat of our car to get them to the post office.

We had a fun Easter get-to-gether with the other senior couples. Lots of visiting and eating.

The looks on the faces of the husbands in these pictures are unique - don't you love Tim's excitement?
This is our office building (Tim's office is on the bottom floor, the first window on the left.

It looks like fall over here. The leaves are dropping their leaves like they think it is October.

These funny looking trees are all over Florida.
These are pictures of our ward building - Fort Lauderdale Ward.

Parking lot in back of the church. We just park on the lawn or wherever.The house across the street from the church.

By small things.........

Last week I was caught up with my work so decided to go back to June 2008 and see if there were any requests for B of M, Bibles, and DVDs from TV ads that hadn't been sent out. I found about 100 that needed to go out from before we got here. It took me all day to get them in the mail.
Today a woman called and asked why she got the B of M when she didn't request it. She had never even heard of the Mormons but wanted to know who Nephi and Moroni were so she must have read at least the first page. Her husband is in Iraq and she said a couple of months ago she was feeling like she needed to get some religion so this past Sunday she went to a church at the mall (Like.....everyone finds their church at the mall!) She said she was so disgusted with the preacher. He was wearing levis and a T-shirt and preaching the Bible using street talk. She said she left saying to herself, "If this is what religion is about these days, I don't think I want a part of it" and then the next day this B of M comes in the mail from nowhere. Sister Dalling gave her the 1st discussion over the phone and she said she would let the missionaries call her but didn't want them to come over until she had thought about it. The Lord works in small ways to bring about great things. Who knows what will come of the B of M she received.

Do we have a new assignment?........

This morning I received an e-mail from an Elder at the Provo MTC saying that he had talked online at Mormon.org with a lady from Helsinki and she wanted someone to come and teach her about the gospel. I couldn’t figure out why he would be asking a Florida mission to give lessons to someone who lives in Helsinki. I asked the Assistants to the President if they would like to take this referral (joking of course) because I had to get permission last week from them for some Sisters to go slightly out of their area to teach a referral. It was actually in the Orland mission but they didn’t want to come that far down. We got a good laugh out of it. There was no address and the phone number didn’t have enough digits.
About 1 hour later Tim came into our office area and said he had just gotten an e-mail from the financial secretary in a Honduras Mission. It said, “Hey Tim. I got a quick question. What is the number for the front desk at the MTC?” Tim said, “What do people think we are….the directory assistance? And why is he calling me by my first name. How did he get our e-mail address?” Sis Dalling and I broke into uncontrollable laughter until our sides were hurting from laughing so hard. Later when I answered the phone for her, I would tell her it was someone from Hong Kong or Denmark, etc.
Tim found the phone number and e-mailed the man in Honduras and asked him “Have we met before? How did you get our e-mail address and why are you asking about phone numbers in Provo?” It turns out that I had sent a referral for Honduras to the MTC via our e-mail account. They forwarded it to the Honduras Mission. I guess they thought Tim worked at the MTC referral center. Funny set of circumstances!!! We laughed about it several times throughout the day and the man got the phone number he needed. We did not figure the Helsinki story out.
We celebrated by going out to a Chinese Buffet with the Dallings and laughed about our day while eating again. We have a lot of fun with them.

It's a lovely day in the neighborhood.........

Sad news!!! The sister missionaries dropped our investigator this week. He was not progressing but he said a seed was planted. He remembered the story of faith like a mustard seed from the B of M.

Corlyss asked for some pictures of the area we live in so here are some going from our apartment to the grocery store this morning. Going out of our apartment complex

Turning the corner and heading South.Traveling South on Pine Island Road (towards the office).The entrance to the grocery store