May 10, 2015
We’re coming up on 6:30 pm on this Sunday evening in Hawaii. The sun will set in a half hour. Hawaii is far enough south that the difference in the length of the day only varies by about an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. Dawn and dusk are very short as well. That’s quite a difference from Pocatello where the length of daylight varied from 4:30 pm in December to 9 pm in June and dusk took anywhere from forty-five minutes to ninety minutes. There are a lot of other weather differences as well … like, no snow. But we do get hail storms occasionally. When it hails, the locals say the hail stones are big. Since it rains sometime every day here I can believe that about the hail. At least the rain isn’t cold and sometime it actually gets hotter after a rain shower because the humidity goes way up.
Mission life continues to agree with your mother and me. The routine is pretty much the same every week, meaning that there isn’t much to say that would be new in that arena, except about the past couple of days. The young missionaries are allowed to call home on Mother’s Day and Christmas. Almost half of the sister missionaries here are from foreign (to the US) countries, so they can make the call home anytime during the week or weekend as arrangements can be made. Almost all of the sister missionaries use Skype so they can make a video call and see everyone back home. So your mother and I took our computers down and set them up for these calls home. The benefit of using a laptop is that the missionaries can walk around the Visitors’ Center and show their family where they are spending their time each day. For almost all of the missionaries this is a very uplifting and invigorating opportunity. One of the sisters, however, hasn’t been able to make a good enough connection to talk with her mother. Your mother wrote about it in her blog: https://seashellsandseaglass.wordpress.com/2015/05/10/sister-missionary-calls-tears-and-hugs/. We just love these missionaries. They are so reminiscent of Heather, Dawnmarie, and Jaelene back when they were 19 years old and all of the drama and trauma that went along with that age. Because you all got through it very nicely and are outstanding women and mothers, we can help these young women know that they can do it as well. Two of the sister missionaries just stopped by the apartment to deliver a thank you card to your mother for helping make their calls home work so smoothly.
As for me, life is going along very nicely. I’m enjoying our time here and find it rather distressing that we’ve only got twenty months left! It’s going to be over all too soon. Thank you for all your phone calls and notes for Mother’s Day. It means a lot! We were able to connect with my mother this evening. She is still hanging tough and doing OK given her age and health.
We both spoke in Sacrament Meeting today to introduce ourselves. The Ward is very friendly and welcoming. There are a lot of children and teenagers in the Ward, very much a family ward. They sang a song for mothers in Sacrament Meeting and filled the front of the chapel.
We get lots of questions about our family, particularly from other older members of the Church who are thinking about the possibility of maybe going on a mission. It’s fun to talk about how our family is spread out from coast to coast and across the ocean, how many grandchildren we have, and how all of you are dealing with us being away from you while we’re on a mission. In our case, it isn’t much of a change since none of you lived close by us. But, we do appreciate your support on this endeavor. I know that what we’re doing is the right thing to be doing with our lives and that we are able to have an impact on a lot of other people while we are here.
I love you all dearly!
Love,
father!
<--Previous Entry | Next Entry -->