October 11, 2015
Greetings from Laie, Hawaii … a little bit of paradise on Oahu’s north shore.
Since the last letter we’ve added three people to this mailing list: Grandson Spencer Lunnen in Medford, Oregon, Grandson Elder Steve Smith currently at the Mission Training Center in Provo, Utah, and Daughter-in-Law Maureen Hult out in Connecticut. Welcome! It’s as easy to stop getting these letters as it is to get them. Just send me an email!
Sister Smith and I have just gotten back home from our monthly Break the Fast event which is held each month on Fast Sunday. For some who aren’t familiar with this term, Fast Sunday is usually the first Sunday of each month where members of the LDS Church abstain from eating two consecutive meals in a 24 hour period and donate the money saved to help feed and cloth the unfortunate. Twice a year, because the Church’s General Conference is on the first Sundays in April and October, Fast Sunday is moved to a different Sunday, usually the second Sunday. At Break the Fast all of the senior missionaries bring potluck food over to one of the luau venues at the Polynesian Cultural Center (the PCC is closed on Sundays). We have a great visit with everyone. Each month some new senior couples come in and a few are going home.
We’ve had another great week at the Center. So far this year we’ve had more than 106,000 visitors at the Center. That’s just about the same as last year at this time, I’m told. This week we had visitors from Moldova (I had to look that up on Google Maps) and two couples from Israel. Visitors from Utah still lead the list, as one would expect. On the other hand, about half of the visitors are not members of the Church.
We’ve had family visitors this week! Granddaughter Stephanie along with her husband Randy and some of Randy’s family arrived on Thursday. We sent much of Friday afternoon with them at the Polynesian Cultural Center and went with them to the evening show (Ha: The Breath of Life). The evening show is a lot of fun with presentations from each of the Polynesian Islands … Aotearoa (New Zealand), Samoa, Tahiti, Fiji, Tonga, and Hawaii. The fire dance sequences at the end are quite spectacular.
Our Preparation Day was spent for the most part in Honolulu. I had a couple of doctor appointments at the VA Clinic that went very well. We had lunch at a very nice restaurant at Pier 36 down by the bay. Lots of very big fishing boats were docked! Honolulu is an interesting place … very busy, lots of homeless and an overwhelming number of very demanding tourists. We’re quite happy being up here in the country!
We’re starting to gear up for Christmas already. We put up a number of Christmas Trees, some of which we decorate and the rest are decorated by Wards in the area. Getting all of that coordinated takes a lot of time. We do the decorating the day after Thanksgiving and take everything down the day after New Years. During the month of December we have a number of concerts and firesides put on by people in the community, which brings lots of people into the Center as well. Consequently, a lot of planning, scheduling, cajoling, and organizing is underway.
The interesting event of the week was the six-year-old boy who saw the fountain pool, somehow escaped from his mother, and dove in! He was having a great time while both mother (in her going-to-the-Temple clothes) and the father climbed in and chased to boy around the pool. That’s a first for me, but I’m willing to bet it won’t be the last.
Of course, many of the people who come to the Visitors’ Center are interested in learning more about the Mormon Church and its doctrines and teachings. I’ve had a few people ask me about the three new apostles that were appointed last week in General Conference wanting to know more about Apostles since we’re the only Church since Jesus’ time to have that organizational structure. It’s always very satisfying and invigorating to have these discussions with people sincerely interested in knowing a bit more. Those discussions are, in large part, the reason we are here and the reason we wanted to serve a mission. We’re having a great time and a very good mission. Thank you all very much for your support, for your emails, phone calls, FaceTime and Skype chats, and text messages. They really mean a lot to us.
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