The Center is Very Busy on Sundays! We have a goodly number of tourists who stop in because it’s a site they want to see or they were driving past and decided to stop. That’s pretty normal every day. We also get a few tour buses, but not like on week days. The big difference is all the locals as well as visiting Church members who come over to the Center and spend much of their day there. On the earlier shift we weren’t very busy at the Center until about 11am. Now there are quite a few people at the Center when we get there at 11:30am and the number increases throughout the afternoon when we leave at 4pm. All of this is just background information, though.
The special part about today is that President Russell M. Nelson, President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles was here in Laie at BYU-Hawaii today for a worldwide devotional (it’s available here). Elder Priday, the Center Director felt that all the sister missionaries should be able to go over to the Cannon Activity Center at BYU-H to be at the devotional, so at about 2:15pm, all of the sister missionaries on duty left. Elder and Sister Priday came over to be with Nina and me to handle the crowds. But … there weren’t any crowds! From 2:30pm until 4:30pm we had a total of eight visitors to the Center. The Devotional was being streamed on the Internet, so we put it up on the screen in one of the theaters so we could also watch and hear an Apostle. His remarks were oriented towards young people, a group he classed as “millennials” (somewhat similar to the classification being used by sociologists already). He had very pertinent advice and counsel not only to the young people, but for everyone. Take the time to listen if you haven’t already.
Because of the Devotional, we were flooded with visitors when it was over. People from all over the Island had come to the Devotional and afterwards stopped at the Visitors’ Center before making the trek back home. I had a great time talking to lots of people from all over and exercising my talented point-and-shoot camera skills.
Around noon we also had another interesting and fun visitor. He is from Vienna, Austria and is in Honolulu taking an English class (he spoke very good English already, but was taking a two week class to improve his English). He’s an architectural Engineer by trade and loves to travel. He spent well over an hour at the Center visiting with Nina and me (giving us a great opportunity to exercise our German) and some of the other sister missionaries. He left with a Book of Mormon and some other literature and said that he’d be back next week to visit again. Definitely something to look forward to.
So, we’ve had a very nice Sunday. Sacrament Meeting was excellent, followed by outstanding Sunday School and Priesthood/Relief Society meetings. We had a great afternoon visiting with guests at the Center (including the fellow from Austria), got very valuable counsel from an Apostle of the Lord, all followed by a tasty dinner. It’s been another great day in this little corner of paradise!
Ta ta for now… .