For the past year, we have been serving as Mentors to "Member and Leader Support" (MLS) senior missionaries. This was what is called a "SERVICE" mission: missions where you continue to live at home. We had 6, and later 4 more-concise lessons to teach each senior couple, via ZOOM, within about 6 weeks of their Mission Training Center (MTC) start date in Provo Utah. We really enjoyed working with those diligent, motivated, dedicated senior couples who were consecrating their time, talents, and energy to serving the people in their assigned mission. Our particular delight was to mentor couples who were going to the mission where we served in 2020 and 2021, the Adriatic North Mission (ANM). We had much better information about that mission than any of the others, so we felt we could share a more personal view for them. In one case, we even had photos of their apartment to share, because we had leased it while we were there.
For the past several months, we have gradually and casually spoken about the marvelous experiences we had. Then we began to talk about maybe going on another full-time mission, and gradually we began to think we should really do it, again. When we got to the point where we seriously sat down and discussed whether we wanted to go on another mission, and it became a conversation about WHERE would we like to go. We surprised each other a bit because we both wanted to go, and we both wanted to go back to the ANM. We looked on the church website that gives guidance for this kind of thing, seniormissionary.churchofjesuschrist.org. The website includes an option to "SEARCH OPPORTUNITIES", and I narrowed down the search to ANM. There were 3 or 4 slots in the mission, but there were two that were tagged "Critical Need". One was the same slot we had in 2020. I was OK doing the same thing again, but Liz said she wanted to be the Office Couple which was also critical need. I was OK with that, too, but last time we actually filled in for the office couple for about a month, and Liz was adamant that she didn't want to do that any longer. But her reticence was only because she had just retired and was tired of getting dressed up every morning to go into an office for the day. Now that she's been away from it for a while, she is anxious to do that kind of work again.
One of the things that made us think we'd enjoy doing another mission in ANM was that the current Mission President (Brian Cordray) used to be the Area Communication Specialist in Frankford, Germany back when COVID forced us to change the way the young missionaries were finding people to teach. He taught them how to use Facebook to find people to teach, and as we watched, we saw that he is a great teacher and leader. I can't say we are close friends, because we have yet to meet him face to face, but we had enough contact that we were comfortable calling him just before he went to Croatia to take on his new responsibilities. We asked if he would endorse our request to be the office couple. He was embarassingly excited to have us come and serve with him.
One of the things that happened in 2020 after COVID had reached its maximum impact on everything, was a major earthquake in Zagreb. President Cordray clearly remembered that. He kept asking us what he could do to get us to actually come and serve. We told him we were in, but he told us he was going to make sure we had a nice apartment in an earthquake-proof building, and that the mission home and the mission office would also be in earthquake-proof buildings. The mission home and office where we served in 2030 were condemned due to earthquake damage, so earthquake-proof is nice. We aren't afraid of another earthquake (they are actually quite rare in Zagreb) but we are happy to have a new-ish, modern apartment. A lot of the apartments we dealt with before were problematic for Americans who are used to plenty of room. Our first apartment had a shower that was round with a sliding glass door. It was about 3 feet wide, which would be OK, except that the water handle stuck out into the middle of the space, and a stray elbow could easily move it from warm to COLD, or to HOT! That's not so good. We feel confident that we will be happy as clams when they get us an apartment.
So, we applied to serve another mission. Senior missionaries can list missionary slots where they'd like to go, and prioritize them, but you have to list at least 4 and no more than 8. We put the ANM Office Couple as our first choice, and the other ANM critical-needs slot as our second. We had to list at least 4, so we also put in for office couple in Hungary and Austria, but really we expected to get the one in the ANM office. President Cordray called Salt Lake to request us for it, specifically.
And we got our mission call to ANM to be the office couple. YEAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We finished up our mentoring assignments for our service mission while we were preparing to go overseas, again, and now we are in our final week at home. We've done all the myriad things we have to do to live in a foreign country, and to take care of our home while we are gone. We are heading for Utah this Friday, and will enter the MTC the day after Labor Day.
We are absolutely delighted to be going on another mission for the church. It is pure service, and performing service gives people joy.
I will try to post to this BLOG at least once a week while we are on this mission.
