Posts

One Final Thought

Image
One final thought. By now, the temple theme to our mission is clear, so bear with me for a wrap up and one more story.  As members of the church we often hear our apostles and prophets talk about "the gathering of Israel" and  the purpose of temples in that pursuit. I believe all that to be true and important, but I have come to believe that regular attendance at the temple also offers another kind of gathering. I have come to believe that temples are also sacred gathering places for those of us on this side of the veil. Scattered through this last 18 months of letters has been stories of our "random" and unexpected temple meetings with beloved missionaries and meeting Cindy without a plan. Remember our story on January 14th titled "The Dream that I Hadn't Even Thought Of? when against all odds we "bumped" into Sister Thi at the crowded mall food court?  A month or two after that meeting I found this post on her Facebook page: Returning home nearl...
Post a Comment
Read more

Not to be Forgotten

Image
 December 2025 It's now been over a year since we completed our mission. I came to this blog to print it up for Dad's Christmas gift this year and realized that the last week was never written about. After moving out of our apartment and office we piled our suitcases into a corner in the office building and headed off to Thailand for one last Seminar. Just for fun seminar started with these scraped knees when I went down on a gravely dirty sidewalk no our   early morning walk the first day. They literally oozed and dripped all week, giving me greater compassion for my grandkids who sport scraped knees all the time! The seminar its self was another big experience full of all the chaos and pressure and joy of the previous seminars. For starters, after months of complex and challenging issues, visas for Pakistani missionaries were finally obtained and we welcomed our first Pakistani returned missionaries. Like the other groups, many of these missionaries were unendowed. In P...
Post a Comment
Read more

Second to Last Week

Image
 Dear Family, We moved out of our office Friday night, packed and cleaned yesterday and just took all of our suit cases over to the office to wait for our return from Bangkok. We leave for Bangkok early tomorrow morning for Mom's last temple seminar. She has fifty kids coming this time she is pretty stressed with all the work it takes to put this together and then execute next week. We have to get up early to catch our plane to Bangkok so this will be pretty brief. A week ago we got a tremendous surprise. I've been working on getting a meeting with the Cambodian Ministry of Cult and Religion in connection with our offer to help the Ministry draft their new Freedom of Religion law. I delivered a model of the law to the Ministry a year ago and have been requesting a meeting ever since. Well, out of the blue last week I got a call (on Tuesday afternoon) that they would like to meet with me on Friday. So we quickly got a flight scheduled and left Thursday morning. The meeting was v...
Post a Comment
Read more

Diquattro Time

Image
Dear Family, It has been another whirlwind of a week. Or more acurately, two weeks. We met up with the Carli, Jeremy, Miles, and Penny almost two weeks ago in Thailand for just a day, after which they took off for Phuket and we stayed in Bangkok for Char's temple seminar with 30 return missionaries. (That week is covered in detail in Char's letter.)  We returned home a week ago, Sunday night, at the same time that the Diquattros arrived from Thailand. So we met each other at the baggage claim in the airport Sunday night around 11pm and took two taxis home and moved in (all of us) into our apartment. These first two pictures are from our day in Bangkok together. We visited a market, did some elephant riding and toured the canal markets by boat. I included just a couple of pictures from that day.  Here, Miles is making friends with the local snake. And here we have Jeremy and Carli aboard an elephant. Monday morning, we were happy to hit the streets with Penny. First stop was ou...
Post a Comment
Read more