February – March 2016 blog

One last Christmas comment: WE LOVE OUR BOOKS FROM OUR KIDS!

We called the time between Christmas and Spring “the Dark Ages” when I was a student at the Naval Academy almost 50 years ago.  Even though we’ve been busy preparing for and teaching classes on Sunday and some individuals other days, visiting members, 10+ hour days in the Mission Office Monday through Friday, shopping for and preparing meals for visitors and missionaries, working on projects for upcoming classes (you’re right; that’s a mom thing), inspecting missionary apartments, supporting the branches in their activities and trying to accomplish other mission-related tasks it still seems like the Dark Ages.  

We’ve had Spring-like weather the past few days so maybe that feeling will change.

Mom and I are determined not to think too much ahead (in other words 5 months from now) but it’s hard when senior couples that came out about the same time or after we did are going home and sister missionaries who came out after we did are going home.  Outside of the Mission President and his wife we are the “oldies (but goodies)” here.

One of the mission's greatest “meeting” strategies is to provide free English classes to the people of Romania and Moldova.  Many of our investigators come from these classes even though the focus of the classes is English; yes, a spiritual thought is included but is not the centerpiece of the instruction.  The lessons have been planned by the young missionaries.  The Mission President’s wife is a Language Arts teacher (one that actually talks about grammar and not just fiction books) and she hopes to bring these classes up a few notches.  We have discussed incorporating “Daily Dose”, an English learning program Krisy and I taught before our mission.  We are kind of excited because we so much enjoyed working with the Hispanic people.  We will likely end up supervising some of this in our mission and are looking forward to working with even more Romanians.

We have been assigned by our Branch President to work with a number of families in the branch; they are new members and part-member families.  Our assignment is to try and help them progress in the Gospel.  We visited our first family last week, have another family scheduled for tomorrow and hope to fill our evenings (and some days if the opportunities present themselves) with these visits.  We hope we can help and encourage these wonderful people.