Back home

 We have now been home from our mission for 6 weeks, so it is beyond time to post a wrapup.

First, the dear sisters in Maribor (I think it was Sister King) posted this photo of a swan on the banks of the Drava River.  It is a gorgeous shot and worthy of posting.  Especially since the sun was setting on our mission.  I think the young people would say this is a meme?

And Liz wanted to keep a shot of this street just up the hill from Center in Maribor.

On the right is a LEKARNA, while on the other side of the street, just beyong the green sign, is a sign for a PEKARNA.  Lekarna is a drug store, and we used this one frequently.  Pekarna is a bakery, our favorite Pekarna for white bread.  When I wanted a seed bread, I went to a Pekarna closer to the riverside apartment where we lived at first.

Packing was a ton of work.  The apartment had to be cleaned out entirely, because the next senior couple will be assigned to Celje, instead of Maribor.  We took furniture belonging to the mission down to Celje and other useful things.  We bought an extra suitcase, and even so had to throw away many things we could have used at home, but were not critical

We spent our last night in the mission at a little AirBnB near the Ljubljana airport.  There had been snow on the ground for 5 days, and that last night fog rolled in.  It was still foggy when we took off the next morning at 7:05 am.  The sun was not yet up.  Once in the air, all we could see was a bank of fog below us, and that was the case almost the whole time home.   We occasional saw mountains poking up through the clouds.

Planes fly a little faster than the earth rotates, which leads to an interesting thing.  The sun came up on our first leg, but then we turned directly away from the sun and it set again.  A little while later we returned to flying north and the sun came up a second time.  That was cool.

We napped on the ride home, which seemed to keep us from getting jet lag.  We landed in Dallas at 2:15 pm, 14+ hours after we'd taken off at 7:05.  Liz's brother met us at the airport, along with all the Worth's who brought banners and signs to welcome us home.  Bill then took us to our new home and helped us unload our luggage,.  Then we drove our new Tesla (illegally, because the temporary tag expired months ago) down to Nancy's house for a celebration and dinner.  We were tired, but not severely.  We went back home reasonably early and had a good, long sleep.

Since then it has been non-stop trying to unpack and arrange our new house.  We didn't pack the boxes, so we had no idea where things were.  But, we are nearly settled in now, and the pressure isn't quite so great.

We spoke in our old Frisco ward, and next Sunday we will speak again in our new Little Elm 1st ward.  I am giving essentially the same talk again, with a few modifications.   I will just post the one I'm giving this Sunday.

Mission Report                              

Frisco 5^th Ward - January 9, 2022                Little Elm 1^st Ward – January 30, 2022

 Good morning.  My name is Earl Ashurst, and we want to report on our mission.

In July 2019, we became fully retired, and decided to spend August in Utah, where we attended BYU Education Week.  We had not firmly decided to go on a mission yet, but we attended the daily session presented by the missionary Department on serving as Senior Missionaries.  We found lots of reassuring answers to our questions.  We discovered that you can select your preferences on where and what duties from a list of hundreds of openings.  If you want to make a selection, you have to list at least 4 and no more than 8.

Sister Ashurst’s father was born in Croatia, and came to America with his mother as a baby.  Ever since I met Liz, we have adopted Croatian customs, such as roasting whole lambs at family reunions.  That led us to desire to do some genealogy work in Croatia.  We also wanted to see the countries that used to be Yugoslavia. 

But if we were to go, there were a lot of things to settle.  What to do with our car?  What to do with our house?  How would our children feel about it?  Would we be safe, able to afford it, etc.  These questions were overwhelming until we stopped to pray about whether we SHOULD go on a mission.  We received confirmation that it was the right thing for us to do, and after that everything seemed to simply fall into place.

Our first choice for a mission was an opening for an auditor and Member & Leader Support assignment in the Adriatic North Mission, which includes most of the countries that were formerly Yugoslavia.   We called the church auditing Department, who confirmed that we are qualified to be auditors.  They suggested we call the seniors in Osijek, Croatia currently holding that assignment.  They were helpful and encouraging.  They suggested we call the Mission President, President Melonakos.  Before we had a chance to call him, I mentioned to my sister-in-law we were looking at ANM.  She immediately contacted the Mission President’s wife, who had been her roommate at college, and told her we were “Golden”.   When we called the Melonakos’s they were anxious to have us.  And when our call came, we were assigned to that mission as Member and Leader Support missionaries, and as Assistant Area Auditors.  The support role had us stay in one place and get to know the people.  The auditor role let us travel and visit every branch in the mission.  Or so we thought.  COVID changed everything.  Only in our final few months did we have a chance to visit the 5 countries, and almost all the branches.

The Adriatic North Mission has 5 countries with 5 different banking systems.  There are 4 currencies; 3 languages; and 2 alphabets.  But it has some of the most interesting people and places to be found anywhere.  People from all over Europe, and many other countries go there to vacation for the wonderful beaches, islands, caves, waterfalls, castles, Alps and delicious Mediterranean food.  They love all the visitors and welcomed us freely.

We arrived in Zagreb, Croatia in mid-February, 2020, and were assigned to Osijek, as expected.  At that time, all we knew about COVID was that a strange new virus was affecting people in China.  Then we heard that it had exploded into Italy, which was scary because Italy is just across the water from Croatia.  In fact, I saw Venice twice – while standing on a tall building in our mission’s boundaries.

One thing happened during this time that is very similar to what recently happened here.  Elder Gary E. Stevenson was scheduled to visit the mission a month or so after our arrival.  All the members were very excited to have an apostle come, and the branches were gathering contributions for renting buses to get to Zagreb and meet him.  But as the date neared, all apostolic travel had to be curtailed due to COVID, and his visit was cancelled.  Everybody was extremely disappointed, just as we are that our recent scheduled apostolic visit was cancelled. 

We had Sacrament Meeting only 3 times in Osijek, and then all meetings were shut down in the first wave of quarantines.  It was almost a year before we attended a live Sacrament meeting again.  All over the World, missionaries were sent home due to the COVID expansion.  The European AREA made a special request that we be allowed to stay because missionaries held so many key leadership positions there.  So,  the young missionaries stayed, and we senior missionaries had the choice to go or stay.  We had just arrived, we knew health care is very good in Croatia and Slovenia, and our family supported us staying, so we decided to stay.

You know, The Lord is in charge!  The standard “finding” technique for the missionaries at that time was talking to everybody they met on the streets, and sometimes knocking on doors.  As COVID restrictions came into being, the Europe Area Presidency held a Zoom meeting to tell all their missionaries that Zoom and Facebook were going to be the new teaching and finding tools.  Here is the kicker.  Just the previous November a missionary rule went into effect that all missionaries in Europe were required to have an Android smart phone, some had them before then but at that point all had to have them.  Less than 4 months later, the new pandemic forced us to use those phones for almost all missionary finding and teaching.  We got new phone rules, but isolated, quarantined people all over Europe were also using their phones more than before.

Over the next few weeks, the missionaries took the basic direction they received from the Area, and found ways to contact people using Facebook.  They joined groups and tried to be “Normal and Natural”.  When they had a request from a Facebook friend to explain why they were living in Europe, the subject of the church naturally became part of the discussion.  The number of productive new contacts sky-rocketed, as did the number of lessons taught.  They were much more effective as quarantined missionaries than they had been before, and they remain so today.

Zoom  became our standard  tool for more than missionary meetings.  We had Country-wide Sunday services for about a year, with Sacrament only if there were priesthood holders in individual homes.  Sister Ashurst and I reportedly conducted the very first church Audit via Zoom in Europe, with two Area auditors listening in to monitor and to see if it was going to work.  We couldn’t go out of our apartment, so we video audited, which was revolutionary in the church.  My understanding is that they have now decided to continue video audits for remote locations, even after restrictions are lifted.

After only a few weeks in Osijek, we volunteered for a 3-5 day special assignment in the mission office, in Zagreb.  It stretched into about 3 months because the government shut down even internal travel and we couldn’t go home (to Osijek).  We lived in the Mission Home with President and Sister Melonakos, who quickly became best friends.  They are lovely people!  We lived in a bedroom tucked between their bedroom and the President’s office, so we heard almost everything that happened in there.  The rules imposed by the governments of the mission were changing daily.  Total chaos!   President Melonakos made the inspired decision to bring all his missionaries into the 5 capital cities.  This helped them avoid the stress of being isolated, but it also discouraged quite a few members in the small branches.  Sunday attendance remains lower than before. 

I want to tell you about three days in April 2020 to illustrate what it was like. At that time Quarantines in Croatia included a ban on travel between counties in Croatia, but they were to end that weekend and the government was scheduled to meet over the weekend to discuss renewing restrictions. 

 Day 1, Saturday, the county borders opened.  I woke with the feeling we should go back to Osijek to bring back our things.  When I went downstairs for breakfast, Sister Melonakos walked in and said she had a feeling we should make a mad  dash that day and get all our things back to Zagreb.  When President Melonakos joined us, first thing he said was that he wanted us to take the big van and go clean out our apartment in Osijek, and bring back the elders serving there too.  Clearly the spirit was speaking to us that morning, and it was a good thing.   We went to Osijek and back, about 8 hours of driving, that very day.  We had a delay as we entered the freeway, waiting while police escorted a monstrous caravan of semi trucks carrying goods across Croatia to other countries.  We also noticed that particular rest areas had police who only let the semis in and held them until the next convoy.

Day 2,  at 6:20 a.m. there was a major earthquake in Zagreb, a 7.2.  We were still in bed, but we were both awake.  We grabbed each other as it threw it us back and forth.   The Mission Home and the Mission Office were both severely damaged.  The home is still unoccupied and possibly condemned, and the office is still under construction. 

Day 3,  the county borders were closed again, except for  those convoys, emergency vehicles, and relief.

Fortunately, the early time of the earthquake meant there were few people out and about, so injuries were relatively low.  Most of Zagreb has buildings right against the sidewalks, and bricks and roof tiles rained directly onto the streets.  The church helped with aid, cranes, and volunteers, including as many elders as could be spared.  Earthquake damage to the buildings was extensive.

There came a time when we could travel within Croatia again and we were anxious to visit the village of Hreljin where Sister Ashurst’s father was born.   We made the trip after three months in the mission home.  We found the house where he was born and visited some relatives.  We also found the village graveyard and photographed every headstone in it, using the BillionGraves app.

Shortly after that, President Melonakos assigned us go to Maribor, Slovenia to support the branch there.  And he wanted us to look out for the missionaries, because they had been without any senior support since the senior missionaries went home, 3 months before.

We had been in quarantine so long we weren’t quite sure we could get into Slovenia, but when we got to the border crossing, the guard looked at our passports, stamped them and waved us through without ever saying a single word.  Two days later, that border was closed again.  We were in a new country, but restrictions remained for a long time after.

The sheer beauty of Slovenia is breathtaking.  We drove back and forth across Slovenia for the next year and a half, and we still marvel at it.  We’d cross the mountain ranges and each time we went over a pass, we’d look down at a little village nestled in the valley bottom, with a church spire rising above the roofs.  Beyond are fields on the slopes of the hills with cattle grazing, or vineyards, and almost every valley has either a castle or a monastery on top of one of the peaks.  It takes your breath away!

We mostly had sisters assigned to work in Maribor, elders in the town of Celje, and 4 companionships of Slovene missionaries were in Ljubljana.  We visited them regularly and became very close to all of them.  They are wonderful!

Shortly after we settled into Maribor, the sisters called and asked if they could teach a lesson to a young man, in our apartment.   The church building was still closed due to COVID rules, and gender rules required them to have somebody with them, but at that time they could teach face-to-face.  That was the day we met David.

David loved to read, instead of playing soccer or things like that.  When he was 12, he started reading the Bible every day.  When he was 20 he started actively searching for a church that taught what the Savior taught.  When he was 23, he found the Church of Jesus Christ website.  By the time he called Salt Lake to arrange to be taught, he had already read the Book of Mormon, knew the baptism worthiness questions, as well as the temple recommend questions.  And he was busy reading the Doctrine and Covenants.

We didn’t have to lead David into the church.  He pulled and tugged us along with him.  He was ready and anxious to be baptized, and politely let us teach him first.  He was in our home almost every week.  He didn’t know any of the elders, so he asked me to perform his baptism.  That surprised me, because the young elders normally do baptisms and I didn’t expect to baptize anybody - but I was thrilled to do it.  After that he wanted to go to the temple.  Sister Ashurst and I taught him the temple preparation classes, and counted the days with him until he could go.  Sadly the COVIDS kept us away from the temple and his temple recommend has not yet been used.  He is still waiting, and anxious to go.

Shortly before we came back, he was called as a counselor in the Branch Presidency.  He was also hired by the church as a translator – the only member who reads and speaks both English and Macedonian fluently, as well as Slovene.   We look at him and his dedication and spirituality and can’t help thinking he will soon be the Branch President, and an important leader.  We are still in contact with him and will continue to be.   Every missionary returns with tales of someone “special” they found and taught.  David is certainly ours.

Well, I am nearly out of time.  On our mission we learned some important things.  That Croatia and Slovenia are safe places to live, with great health care, and awesome food.  They are also beautiful places to visit.  We are planning to go back as tourists next summer, if the COVIDS don’t get us.

 Most of all, we truly learned to love the people.  And to love the young missionaries.  As the only seniors in Slovenia, we helped them and directed them, including conducting the dreaded apartment inspections.  But we also fed them, counseled them, and simply loved them.  We increasingly loved each other, too.  Truly, we got more out of our mission than we put into it.  It was a Grand Adventure!