We started our mission exactly one year ago this coming Tuesday. Wow, we have finished a year. Amazing. Here is what we learned this week… Monday’s mission devotional got moved to the Church History Museum Auditorium  apparently because the COB auditorium was needed for someone else’s group that was more important than us. We don’t fit in the CHM auditorium so they made all the zone leaders sit up on the stand. I didn’t mind that too much, but I was worried we were on camera for those viewing the devotional remotely and I have learned when I view online meetings that those in the background can be distracting if they are moving around a lot or talking to their neighbor. So I tried to just stay focused on looking at the speaker the whole time. We went into the library after that and had meeting after meeting, including our first led by us  zone council meeting. Then we headed over to the COB for lunch. We go there much more often now since it is so inexpensive. The rest of the ...

This week’s post might be a bit shorter than others, because we were made zone leaders and now have more things going on to keep us on the run. Here’s what we learned… Monday started off with no morning devotional because it was a holiday. So we headed into the library and got to work. The day started off slow then it started to grow. I was asked to help a man who was looking for his ancestor from Slovakia. We went to the Wiki  page for Slovakia and found some records for the town that his grandmother told him that her father and mother came from. So we went searching in there, looking especially for the mother, because he had a birth record of one of her sons stating her name…Emilie von S….. (I can’t remember the actual name, but it started with an S)…von meaning she was from that town. So we searched and found birth records from that town about the time that she was born. We started browsing through them, stopping at every Emilie or Emilia or Amalia. He was moving pretty quickly ...

Here are some of our learnings for this week… This was the forecast for our week. We learned that there was a winter storm warning issued and geared up for a snowy week. Well as I have learned from prior experience, weather forecasts are not to be thought of as  absolutes.  Those in the business are doing their best to watch patterns and developments and to then predict what they think is coming. Many times those predictions are very wrong. Either it is far worse than predicted and the timing isn’t correct, or nothing actually happens at all. In our case this week it was mostly the latter. On Tuesday while we were at the library we had a squall come through town that had high winds, but didn’t drop a lot of snow. That night it snowed some, maybe a couple of inches, but enough to make roads a bit slushy. Throughout the day on Wednesday it snowed a little, on and off, and I’ll tell you later about our drive to and from Hale Center Theater on Wednesday night, but the rest of the ...