This week we learned about tons of things that needed to be fixed, and thankfully we were able to do just that for most things.
The first thing that needed fixing Monday morning was our access badges. We got a text from the Atkins, who are asst. zone leaders, saying that their access badges were not working. They sneaked into the library following a construction worker whose access worked. By the time we got to the building we had received several more texts from other missionaries telling us the same thing. We got into the building because Debbie Gurtler got there and her badge worked and she propped the back door open with a chair. I learned this after talking with Debbie inside the library. Apparently since it was a holiday someone in the Church Security Office
turned off access to most people’s badges, except for top management and construction personnel. So we had to prop a bunch of doors that usually you have to
badge through until finally they turned us all back on. Luckily that wasn’t something we had to fix. Crazy times.
We had a pretty large group of BYU students who had a day off and decided to come to library come down to our floor. I was able to help one of them, Cade, who wanted to know how to add sources to a bunch of his Norwegian ancestors. They had dates, but no record sources and he wanted to fix that. Wahoo Cade! It was fun showing him
all of the places he could search, and how to search, to find records to verify births and marriages and deaths, and then how to attach them to individuals in his family tree. We were pretty busy in the library and I also got to help Shaun find a Norway farm book that she had seen over a decade ago when she came to the library, but didn’t have time to record information found there in. I showed her how to scan the pages onto a thumb drive and unfortunately we were closing an hour earlier than normal so she had to hustle to try to scan a bunch of the pages that she wanted. We closed an hour early and had no FHE that night so the rest of our day was pretty laid back.
Tuesday was Pday. Mom thought she was supposed to go in and do the prayer meeting for one of the assistant zone leader sisters who had an appointment, so off she went a little after 8am. She was back in about 15 minutes because when she got there she found out it was for a different day. So we got ready for our paleography class at 11am. That class ran long, so we were late meeting John for lunch at the COB. We learned that he is going to have to work in the office 5 days a week, starting in March, so he got an apartment up here in Salt Lake. While we were eating he got a text from Vaea Enos who was there in the cafeteria as well. He came and joined us. We learned he had just got a job working for the Church’s vending services and it was his first day on the job. He drives around the city delivering stuff. He also got an apartment here in Salt Lake, so it looks like we will be able to see a lot more of both of them. Fun times! (BTW I totally failed at getting a picture with Vaea and John so I just added this picture of Vaea that I swiped from FB). After lunch Mom worked on an apron for Sister Decker and I caught up on some emails and stuff like that. But the rest of the day eludes my memory.
Wednesday we had our
New Missionary Orientation first thing after we got into the library. That went well. Mom then had to fix a list that was sent to the RootsTech people, for it seems like the 11th time. They keep asking for different lists of our missionaries…shirt sizes, food allergies, working during the RootsTech week or not…lots of lists. Mom has been taking care of all of that stuff and she will be happy when it is over! We then went to lunch and over to the NOB to pick up some invitations to an appreciation lunch they do for departing missionaries and we ended up with one for an Elder Massa. We had no idea who that was. We came back to the library just long enough to meet with a few of the new missionaries who shared their desire to work in our zone. We learned that one of them, Elder Evertsen, has
been serving in the Layton FamilySearch Library for the last year and has already completed his Tier 2 training. He has Dutch ancestry and would love to train on and teach that. We would love to have him! Then it was back to the NOB for our weekly Zone Leaders meeting. It went well. Afterwards we hung around to discuss with the other FamilySearch zone leaders about tours we have been asked to help with at the library during RootsTech week. Luckily we have the Ngs working on that and they have it all organized. As you can see our time is very much taken up with RootsTech stuff at the moment. We then headed home and I got an email explaining what has happened with the Elder Massa invitation. We have a sister missionary, Sister Emilienne Pete Massa, who usually drops the Massa part of her name and just goes by Sister Emilienne Pete (pronounced Pe tay) but the new sister in the mission office thought it was an Elder Pete Massa who was ending his mission. So she fixed that invitation and it was now in our box in the NOB to pick up. We’ll get it tomorrow.
Thursday morning we learned that the RootsTech shirts for all of our missionaries had arrived. So after prayer meeting we went to our office cubicle to find a big tub of shirts and a list sitting on top. We decided we ought to sort them by sizes, and then learned that the RootsTech crew had already put labels on each shirt of who it belonged to. Wow, what a great surprise. So we took all of the shirts downstairs to our floor and laid them all out alphabetically in our empty cubicles and began passing them out. Mom learned right away that they ran large size wise, so we are going to have to get a bunch of those sizes fixed. Mom collected quite a few shirts that she plans to take up to the 3rd floor on Monday morning to exchange. We then went to lunch at the COB with some of the missionaries from our floor and took our turn to floor lead in the afternoon. The days seem to fly by pretty quick. We have learned that that happens more frequently now. Lots going on! We then finished up the day and headed off to the temple with our three single sister missionaries. We had a nice
endowment session where I took a name of an ancestor of one of our church service missionaries because he had been somehow overlooked when her family had previously done the temple work and they are planning a family sealing and wanted him to be able to be a part of it, so I was happy to help her out. After the session we went to Walmart because all of the sisters, including Mom, needed to do some shopping. Mom needed an onion because when she went to get onions in the COB cafeteria to bring home for the baked beans she had planned to make with the brisket and burnt ends and red peepers she got the day before. So we finished that and dropped the sisters and their groceries off and called it a night.
Friday we got to go to the
Go Forth meeting at the NOB at 9:30am because we got word Thursday night that we were getting two new missionaries in our zone. Wahoo! One of them was Elder Evertsen and the other was Elder Higgins..they both live a little north of here. So we attended that meeting and ate a little brunch with them there then took them over to the library to give them a little orientation. They are both excited to serve and I think will be great additions to our zone.
We ended our orientation just in time to meet with the Boyacks, who are a couple that serve remotely in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They came to tell us about the
WWI Heroes Project that they supervise. It is pretty amazing. We learned that they have 4 volumes of obituaries that were compiled by a guy named De Ruvigny of UK soldiers and sailors that died during the war. They are taking the information and adding to memories of individuals if they already have a PID (personal identification number) in FamilySearch, or they will create a new individual PID if they don’t and add the obituary to that. They also search for any immediate family members to add to FamilySearch. It is a lot of work and they are dedicated to getting it all finished, even thought they are only a little more than halfway through the first volume and have added a little more than 12,000 names to FamilySearch. This is an example of what one page looks like. Some have long obituaries and some just say something like “Lost at sea”.
After speaking with them and fixing a couple of RootsTech registration problems and shirts, we finally headed home. It was suppose to be our T/R day, where we only have half a day of work and get the other half for going to the temple or doing our own family history research, but we didn’t get home until after 4pm, so it was really a whole day. We were so tried that we just crashed and totally forgot that we had tickets to see the BYU Contemporary Dance team perform. Ugh.
Saturday we went in at 8:30am and got to work helping some folks fix problems with RootsTech shirts and emails and family history records. We took over at 11am as floor leads and did that the rest of the afternoon. Part of that time I was also trying to fix one of the Tier 2 training lessons. I learned from one of our lesson reviewers that a new missionary was a little lost in a lesson. It is a lesson that teaches about our Wiki pages, which we love, but they have just made some recent changes to the formatting of those pages so they don’t look the same as we show in our training. So in I went to get some updated shots of the pages as well as update some of the explanations about those pages. I was able to get that finished and we got to head home on time. That gave us plenty of time to rest a bit before heading over to see the
BYU Ballroom Dance Company perform.
When I bought the tickets I thought I was getting tickets about 6 or 7 rows back on Row A, but I learned after I bought them that they were in a different section…Orchestra Front- Row A…so we were on the front row right next to the stage, as you can see in the picture to the right. I was worried that that would make it so that the dancers would be too close and it would be hard to see the whole group effect, but they stayed more to the back and middle of the stage, never right up front, so it was a great place to be. No one in front of us to block any view. Fun fun! One funny thing that happened was that for one of their numbers where they were doing the swing they had acted like there was a car crash and they rolled a car wheel across the stage. At the end of the number they rolled it back across, but the person who pushed it pushed it crooked and didn’t give it enough umph and it turned and headed towards the audience…right at Mom. When it got to her she just calmly stood up and pushed it back towards the side curtains and someone there grabbed it. Mom got an ovation from the crowd!
Sunday. This morning in my scripture study I read a couple of things that made me ponder a bit on how well I connect to and use the Holy Ghost in my life. In the conference talk I read by President Henry B. Eyring he said, “If you felt the influence of the Holy Ghost today, you may take it as a sweet evidence that the Atonement is working in your life.” And then later in that same talk he said, “Of all the things of which the Holy Ghost testifies, the most precious for us is that Jesus is the Christ, the living Son of God.” I learned as I pondered those statements that I have experienced those types of interactions with the Holy Ghost. Small moments mostly where I have felt closer to the Savior and believed in Him more and especially felt of His love and care for me. I am grateful for the Holy Ghost.
Today was church of course and about a half hour before we were ready to go Mom got a message from her co-teacher in primary that her daughter was sick and she would not be able to teach the lesson today. Mom hadn’t prepped for it so I asked if she wanted me to help. She said yes! So I thought about how I could teach some 6 year olds about Jacob’s conference talk in 2 Nephi 6-10. That might be tough. I decided I would narrow it down to just chapter 9 where Jacob does all his what I call “O’s” and “Wo’s”. I just wanted to focus on the O’s, so I wore my Mickey Mouse tie and asked what they would say if their parents told them they were going to Disneyland this week? I was surprised by their reactions. I thought I would get a bunch of yays! or wahoos! but they were more thoughtful about it. Anyway I told them that Jacob’s way to say wahoo was “O!”. So we looked at his O’s and I then pointed out his “O how great the plan of our God!” We then discussed different parts of Heavenly Father’s plan for us…families, learning, this earth etc…and it turned out pretty good. Mom ended the lesson by discussing the plan for a Savior to save us from sin, like if we fell into a pit. Mom said she thought the kids were a bit rambunctious, but I thought they were pretty normal kids. It was fun teaching.
After church we went by Mom’s co-teacher’s house to drop off some sourdough bread and had a lovely walk home in 60° weather. What a beautiful day…although we learned that a storm front is approaching and they actually have sent out a winter storm warning from 5am tomorrow morning to 5pm Tuesday evening. I think they were just teasing us that winter might be over.
Well that was our week. Hope you had a great one.
Love you all.
BE GOOD!
Sister and Elder Phillips
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