We ended this week with General Conference and Mom blessed us with cinnamon rolls. The speakers blessed us with wonderful messages. And during this week we were blessed with some great experiences. Here is what we learned. (BTW I didn’t keep any notes this week of what we did, so all of this will be what stuck in my head from each day’s events.)
Monday we started with a mission devotional as usual. The presenters were from the Salt Lake Office of Family Services. They were preceded by a violin duet by a couple from our mission that was very well done. Sometimes I think I would like to learn to play a stringed instrument, they are very cool. The devotional presentation was about how to deal with stress. I guess the mission presidency has been busy helping quite a few missionaries that are stressed out. I must admit that I don’t feel it. Of course now and then I may be a bit worried that things won’t work out the way we hope, but I have a belief that in the long-run all will be well. That relieves me from the stress.
We spent the rest of the day helping in the library. It has become a little more busy in the library, I am pretty sure due to more visitors coming for conference. I helped just a few times, and they were both visitors from France. We seem to be getting a lot more French visitors lately. I am learning more and more how to help them find their ancestors. It’s fun. After coming to the end of the day and closing our floors, we went home to make some dinner and relax. I turned on the
Monday Night football game between Seahawks and the Lions. It was a pretty exciting game and I totally forgot to go to our family home evening. Oops, but the game was good.
Tuesday was Pday. I decided it was time for another mountain bike ride so I took off to my normal riding spot. But when I got to the trailhead I learned that it was closed for renovation. Ugh. So I contemplated just going home, but decided to see if I could find another trailhead entrance, so I pulled out my phone and found one that was further up in the avenues. Up the hills I went. As I got to one intersection I found this road…Aloha Rd. I wondered if someone from Hawaii had built their home up there and named the road? I like. I was able to find the trailhead and it was open, so off I went. I was able to connect to the upper part of the trail that I normally ride and go to the top where I usually turn and head back down. When I got there I noticed that some of the trees and brush were showing some Fall colors, so I took a picture before riding back down the downhill trail. Not a whole lot of Fall color, but just
enough to let us know that Fall is coming. My ride down was fun and I actually passed some of the workers on the trail. I guess they were also doing this upper part of the trail as well, but weren’t closing it down to work on it like they did with the lower part. When I got home I learned that Mom had gone to the store to get some items for her teaching Cordell Atkins, one of our missionaries, how to make
sourdough and white bread. He and his wife, Maude, came for lunch, which was grilled cheese sandwiches on sourdough, and then Mom taught him bread making while I chatted with Maude. We then showed them how to play a couple of our games and got to know them better. They left around 4pm and then John Campbell came around 6pm to play mahjong. Mom was hoping that Vaea could come as well so we could have 4 people, but he couldn’t make it. Sadness. So we played three-handed mahjong. Mom
was the big winner. John told us about his upcoming adventure. He has accepted a job with an engineering firm in Hilo and will be moving back there at the beginning of next year. Exciting times for him. He left about 8pm and Mom and I watched some episodes of
The Chosen. One of the episodes was about how one of Jesus’s followers was killed by a Roman military leader and how Jesus did not save her and how Thomas, who was planning to marry the girl who was killed, was confused as to why He wouldn’t heal her. The writer of
The Chosen adds a bunch of these “back stories” or “in-between-the-lines” stories to give his ideas of why other things happened in the scriptures. I think this one is setting up why perhaps Thomas may have doubted later on when Jesus was resurrected and visited His apostles, but Thomas wasn’t there, and he doubted. Interesting idea.
Wednesday we went into the library early because President and Sister Brown were coming to announce that the Stapps would be new assistant zone leaders in our zone. We then got to participate in a fire alarm test. Wahoo. It was loud!
It was our day for meetings. We did an orientation for new full time missionaries and then had our
Leadership Pattern Journey class. Immediately after that was our
FamilySearch Library leadership meeting, and then our
Mission Leadership Council meeting. Lots of meetings! In our FamilySearch meeting we learned that we had a negative experience by some people who came to our floor. Ugh. We always try to make the experience our guests have the best experience possible, but not everyone is as personable as they ought to be, and sometimes guests walk away feeling like they wanted something more. They have decided they want to create a
Guest Service Council to discuss how we can train our missionaries to be more accommodating and helpful. Hope it works. At our
Mission Leadership Council they took quite a long time to discuss a couple of different items and then they outlined the new LOA (Leave of Absence) policy. It was surprisingly lenient as previous discussions had made it sound like the policy would be much more restrictive. Thusly we learned that we will be able to come to Thanksgiving
in Vegas, and we will be able to be there when Zoë has her baby, but it will be “we”, as the new policy does not allow husbands and wives to be separated for leaves of absence. So Mom and I have purchased our tickets for Bellingham from November 7th to November 14th and we will be driving in for Thanksgiving late Wednesday night and leaving to come back here either late Friday night or early Saturday morning. We look forward to seeing you who live in those places at those times. After the meeting it was pretty late in the evening and we had started early, so we went home to get ready for dinner and mahjong with Sami and Sharon. We had soups and salad for dinner and four games of mahjong. I can’t remember who the big winner was, but we had fun.
Thursday I was planning to ride, but didn’t get myself up early enough. Ugh. So we went to the library at 10am and I got busy with some zone leader stuff. Then I saw an email that told us we were getting a new missionary, Sister Antoinette Guidi from Calgary, Canada. She is an 89 year old little ball of spitfire! She is originally from France and speaks French and Italian and a little Spanish. She loves to do family history, but really only knows how to do it the old fashioned way with papers and visiting records offices and talking to family members. We are going to have to teach her how to do it with computers. I then got a phone call from Kai Kubera. He told me that he and Kawena and their kids were upstairs. So I grabbed Mom and up we went. It was fun to see them. Their oldest, Helaman, was a bit scared of us and their youngest, Emalia, was wanting to do something, so we took them to the play area and just sat and chatted. They are such a great couple and it was so fun to see them. Kawena is now teaching early morning seminary and Kai is still a counselor in the ward bishopric. He is here for a barber
thing. He told us that he has expanded his barbershop and added two more chairs. He has one leased out and the other one will be soon. Wow, a businessman. Suddenly we realized it was almost 1pm and we needed to get to our LPJ class. So we gave them hugs and took a quick selfie and we were off to our class. We had our LPJ class and then left right away for the
Go Forth meeting. Luckily we were going to the temple at 4pm so I had brought my coat and tie in our car and was able to grab that before heading to the
meeting. The meeting ran late and we realized we would not have enough time to bring Sister Guidi to the library and do her orientation before it was time to leave for the temple, so we arranged to have her come to the library Friday morning and we would do it then. So we walked her over to the library and introduced her to some of the missionaries and then left for the temple with Teresa and Yoriko…Sharon forgot her skirt and decided to skip this week. We were able to complete a sealing session and endowment session and then went to Dairy Queen for dinner, Teresa’s choice. I got a pumpkin pie Blizzard. Yum! After getting them home and ourselves as well I checked to see who was playing in the Thursday night NFL game. I learned it was the Bucs and the Falcons and the game was close, so I decided to watch. Good decision. It was a great game. I like close games.
Friday we got up and needed to get in early to meet with Sister Guidi. It was then I realized it was supposed to be our full T/R day and we weren’t supposed to be going in at all. Oh well. Mom had called Sister Taliaferro and asked if she could walk with or give a ride to Sister Guidi, so she drove her into the library. We were able to introduce her in the prayer meeting and then do the orientation for her. She took lots of notes. Mom then took off for home and I finished getting some things done on the computer that I promised a couple of people I would do. I finally left and met Mom on the way to the COB for lunch. We got fish n chips and fajitas, which we were pretty sure would feed us for dinner two more times. I like this food situation. I am sure we will miss that come January. We came home and I planned to go for a ride, but it didn’t happen. I just vegged on the couch and Mom worked on cinnamon rolls and bread. Then Mom took off to play pickleball, but came home about 15 minutes later because the buildings they usually play in were being used for mission reunions. So we just hung out and went to bed. Pretty boring Friday.
Saturday morning we decided to go for a walk. We walked to City Creek Canyon and then up the stairs to the avenues so that we could go to Smith’s so Mom could get some powdered sugar to make frosting for her cinnamon rolls. On the way home we noticed that they had taken the scaffolding down from the last tower on the temple. We got home in time to make the frosting, frost the cinnamon rolls and walk to the library. Everyone there was excited to see cinnamon rolls. Then we learned that Sister Guidi was there. Apparently she told everyone she was there because she was a full time missionary and assumed she was supposed to be in the library to serve. We told her the day before that Saturday was her Pday and she could do whatever she wanted, but apparently she forgot that. Yikes, I hope she won’t be having memory problems. I was almost immediately asked to help a guest from France. It was a young couple who just wanted to see what we had. I was able to show them some sites and found some records and they were impressed. Then I was asked to help a
family from France. They were a couple with two kids and grandpa and grandma. They all got their own computer and I just ran between them all and showed each one something different. I showed the mom how to find records in
ANOM (d’Outre Mer) and we found her grandfather’s birth record in Algeria. They were so excited. I got a thumb drive for them and they started downloading records. I showed the dad how to search
Geneanet, and his daughter (maybe 10 yrs old) how to find records on the department website. She was so cute. We found a census record and she was writing down all of the information she could find on
the record. I then showed them all the microfilm and they thought it was cool. Grandpa took a picture with me. I was then asked to help a French guest up on the main floor, and that was a fun experience teaching him about all of the resources available. Then I came back to the B1 floor and was asked to help 3 ladies from the Netherlands. They were a lot of fun, but then one of the other missionaries was asked to take over for me so that I could go help another guest from France. Viva La France. Suddenly they were
announcing that the library was closing and I was surprised the day had gone by so fast. We got home and had some dinner, which included half of one of Mom’s cinnamon rolls, and we watched the evening session of conference. Some of the missionaries from our zone and from our apartments were part of the missionary choir which provided the music in that session. I took a bunch of pictures of people we know as they were singing. We noticed it was a majority of young missionaries in the choir and the cameras were mostly on them as well, but we did see some of our friends. After conference I watched football and then headed to bed.
Today we had tickets for the morning session of conference. We had to be in our seats before
Music & the Spoken Word which started at 9:30am. We were actually on about the 6th row, but t way over to the far left side. They, for the first time since COVID, filled the Conference Center to capacity. It was cool to see all of the seats occupied. No empty seats.
Music & the Spoken Word was great and of course all of the talks were marvelous. I was surprised to see Elder Holland there because I heard his health was not good. His talk was great. I especially liked his statement about the Savior…
“He is one who could administer grace and insist on truth at the same time. … His love allows an encouraging embrace when it is needed and a bitter cup when it has to be swallowed.” To me that is an amazing description of who the Savior is. I also loved what Elder Hale’s said about “Mortality Works.” It seems like an obvious statement because our Heavenly Father is the one that set it up this way, yet there are many people who don’t think mortality is fair, which it isn’t, and really messes people up, but it is set up exactly as it is needed to be to help people learn what they need to learn about themselves. Mortality works! I thought it was interesting that right at the end the “director “ guy for conference walked up to Brother Chad Webb, who was giving the closing prayer, and telling him something. I think it was about the fact they were running long and he would maybe worry about making his prayer shorter, but it was ok to just say what he was planning to say. After hearing his prayer I think he definitely did that. Conference ran a bit long, which they don’t like doing, but it happens. We took a last selfie at conference, our last conference of our mission, and walked across the street to our apartment. We got some lunch and then watched the afternoon session here on tv. One of the speakers was Elder Raymond Egbo, who was an area director for Seminaries and Institutes in the Africa South Area. I met him and visited with him a number of times at our area directors conferences. It was fun to see him after these many years. Pretty cool that President Nelson was there and announced 17 more temples. I also thought it was quite interesting that he spoke about the second coming of the Savior. With so many of the current events of the world being signs spoken of in the scriptures of Christ’s second coming, it seems more important than ever to get ready for it. With conference finished I went after getting this post done and now it is time to get some dinner and dessert.
Our week was great. Hope yours was too.
BE GOOD!
Love you all.
Elder and Sister Phillips
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