Lots of Changes

1 July 2017

I imagine most people have heard the same news we heard this week — that the Raleigh, NC Temple will be closing for renovations in Jan 2018, and, won’t reopen until sometime in 2019. That means when we get home from our mission next year, we'll have to travel a ways in order to attend the temple. We are spoiled here in the Salt Lake City area with so many temples within an easy distance.

I guess the closest temple, once the Raleigh temple closes, is in Columbia, South Carolina. It’s hard to think of having to drive 3 - 4 hours to attend the temple! (But, of course, we'll do it.)

This week we packed up our office, and all our stuff will be moved to a different building sometime today. Because of renovations scheduled in the Church Office Building (COB), everyone on our floor has to move. Some of us are going next door to the Joseph Smith Memorial Building (JSMB), and a few will move to other floors in the COB. People in our zone will then be located on three floors in the JSMB and on two floors in the COB. Crazy!

Wonderful news for us this week, though! We were assigned FOUR new Church-Service Missionaries on Friday and we are feeling beyond blessed!! As I’ve mentioned previously, our numbers have been shrinking, and it’s a real boost to get these part-time missionaries who will help out in several areas of our zone.

Our new mission president officially starts today and we’ll meet him on Monday. Later next week he’ll tour all 20 of the zones in the mission. We’ve been working on a presentation to help him understand the many and varied tasks performed in our zone. President Fenn previously served as a mission president in Chicago, but, it was a typical, proselyting mission, with about 200 missionaries. This mission has more than a thousand missionaries, and, the work we do is incredibly varied and multi-faceted, so it’s a bit of a learning curve for him.

  

In our morning devotionals, the past couple of weeks, we’ve had several missionaries who’ve shared some interesting and amazing stories of modern-day miracles that occurred at different times and places. Some were experienced by family members, some by friends, some were simply accounts they’d read. Some were small and some huge, but, each reflected the tender mercies our Heavenly Father shows us, and His awareness of and love for each of us. If we trust in Him and allow Him to guide us, life is a miracle! (Sometimes, because we’re not looking, we miss the little daily miracles that come our way, and fail to recognize His hand in our lives. I’m trying to do a better job of recognizing these things.)