Good evening from beautiful “downtown” Laie! There isn’t really a downtown to this town, so I can claim the area where we live as being “downtown!” We’re having a somewhat breezy, delightful evening. The doors and windows are open so we can enjoy the trade winds. Sister Smith is in the kitchen baking brownies for the birthday treat tomorrow morning at the Visitors’ Center Training Meeting. Once a month after the training meeting we celebrate the birthdays in the month. We have several birthdays in March, including Sister Smith’s birthday on March 18th and mine on March 19th. Sister Smith bought some special baking pans that make up twelve little brownie loafs per pan. We have twenty-five sister missionaries and 6 seniors, almost all of whom like the brownie birthday treats. At the moment we don’t have any sisters who are gluten intolerant, but for those who aren’t really into brownies, she also makes up a fruit bowl. In reality, all of the sisters take a brownie and some of the fruit bowl….
Elder James Smith is wrapping up his first week in the Mission Training Center in Provo! I hope he’s really enjoying his experience there.
Jared and Tania have come over to visit us for a week! They arrived late Friday evening and are getting nicely acquainted with the Island of Oahu and spending a little time with us. We’ll be able to spend most of Tuesday through Saturday with them doing all kinds or touristy things that we haven’t taken the time to do so far.
Spring Break in Utah brings lots of families to Hawaii and this past week we’ve been the beneficiaries of those visits. Most are headed home today or tonight and life will settle down at the Visitors’ Center for another week or so before the colleges and universities have their spring break. Tonight we had a missionary musical fireside at the Visitors’ Center. Those are always very popular and the building was full to overflowing during the fireside. In two weeks we’ll do another fireside to rebroadcast the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s presentation of “The Messiah”. They’re performing it next Thursday and Friday, March 24 and 25th. The presentation on the 25th is being live-streamed and then will be available to be played on demand through April 4th. For information see their website: https://www.mormontabernaclechoir.org/messiah.html.
We get lots of questions about being senior missionaries from the Church-member visitors to the Visitors’ Center. Many are considering doing a mission and want to know how our experience is going. Of course, we’re quite interested in encouraging them to go on a mission! This afternoon as we were hurrying home to change clothes to have dinner with Jared and Tania and then go back to the Center for the fireside we both remarked how we’re probably busier now than we’ve been in a very long time! It’s a very enjoyable busy and well worth the time and cost. Even though we’ve just over ten months left, neither of us are ready to start thinking about life after this mission.
We had a nice visit the other day with a couple from what used to be East Germany. While they spoke pretty good English, they were very pleasantly surprised and pleased with our ability to speak to them in German. They aren’t members of our Church but are actively involved with their Lutheran Church back home. He remarked how nice it was to finally be able to openly practice their religion after the communist East German government collapsed. They expressed a lot of concern about the Syrian refugee crisis and how it is affecting every German and every German city. Sometimes it is nice to step back, take a broader view of the world, and understand that our problems are quite insignificant compared to what is happening in other parts of the world!
Life is good. We’re looking forward to hearing from you about how things are going in your part of the world! Keep those emails coming (hint, hint)!!
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