Happy Halloween

Hey, family.  How is everyone? What fun things are you all doing for Halloween?  Will we get to see any pictures of your celebrations?  We sure hope so!  It has always been one of my favorite holidays to celebrate with grandkids.  We are staying in our apartment Halloween night, to avoid any scariness (hehe), but did go to the Ward's Trunk-or-treat.  Here are some of the goblins that showed up for that:

I took pictures of adults because none of the kids knew me and wouldn't hold still long enough!  But they were all excited and had a good time.  The YSA ward provided games for them, and we had a chili supper.  But I'll still be thinking of you all Friday night. 

We have been keeping busy.  We've met some great people the last few weeks.  One fellow, Paul, is a 30 something dad who lost his wife to cancer a few months ago.  He has a very positive outlook on life, and is very grateful for his 2 kids.  We met the little girl, and she is so sweet.  She's 4, and has a 6 year old brother.  They live up the canyon on the way to Santa Cruz, in a little fixer-upper.  It's like living full time in a cabin.  I would love it!  And its only 15 minutes from the ocean.  He is able to stay strong for his kids, and talked a lot about his wife.  He is a great guy.

Then we met Sara, who just moved here from New Mexico.  She works for Google, in a very high stress job, and is homesick.  She said she loves to bake, and sugar cookies are her specialty.  I challenged her to a sugar cookie bake-off!  She can't bake in her little apartment, because the oven doesn't maintain a consistent temperature, so she is going to come over here and use our oven sometime.  She said I could borrow some of her cookie cutters to make Christmas cookies.  She's very homesick, and we feel like we can be her Mom and Dad for a while.  Which works for us 'cause we miss our daughters!

We met another lady, Tovi, who is a single mom of a 13 year old boy.  She has been trying to get back to church for a while, but it's hard.  She has had lots of challenges, and her son told her if they would just go to church and pray, everything would be okay.  Amazing, huh?  So we encouraged her and assured her that he's right, and Heavenly Father knows her and will help her, and she made it!  They were at church Sunday.  It's a start.

We had an MSA Fireside on Sunday, where a family relationship counselor came and talked to the singles about how to be a "Marital Magnet".  He told some very funny stories and had some good advice, but when he opened it up to questions it got a little weird.  We ended up leaving early (it was 9:00, our bedtime!) and didn't get to stay for the TONS of goodies they had ready for everyone.  I baked some lemon bars to take to it, and they turned out pretty bad.  They got over-cooked, and the crust was too thick and hard.  If anyone has a good lemon bar recipe, I'd love a copy.  People are always giving us fresh lemons from their trees, and I'd like to be able to use them up before they go bad. 

We went to Santa Cruz to Sunset Beach Monday, and it was nice.  We didn't see any whales this time, but the seagulls were entertaining.  Dad threw one his apple core, and they had quiet a tussle over it.  It doesn't take much to entertain us!

Well, that's about it for us.  Time is flying, and the holidays will be here before we know it.  The Staley's are coming for Thanksgiving, which is very exciting.  If anyone else is planning on coming out in the next few months, please let us know.  We welcome you, and know it will help us not be too homesick.  It's a great way for you to get out of the cold! 

Hope to hear from you all (hint, hint).  We love you lots!

Pop Quiz

Here's a little test to give you a few hints about how our last week and a half have gone.
Ready?  The answers are below, so don't peek!

1.  Who are the only people who attend General Conference in a Stake Center outside of Utah?

2.  What should you take with you when you visit a park on a hot day?

3.  What is the one part of a Toyota Rav4 that they have to remove the entire engine to replace?

4.  What is the best thing about serving a Senior Couple mission?

5.  What happens when you go shoe shopping as a missionary?


Okay, here's the answers:

1.  The only people who attend General Conference in a Stake Center are missionaries and people who speak a different language.  In our mission, it is Chinese, Japanese and Spanish.  So we sat in the large chapel of our Stake Center with about 20 missionaries, and the people from other cultures sat in other rooms so they could hear the speakers in their own languages.  On Sunday, they have a 20+ year tradition of having a pot luck dinner between sessions, that started when they had a large contingent of Japanese members in the area.  It is now mostly Chinese, but they continue to have their luncheon.  We didn't know about it, but when they came to the stake center on Saturday and saw all the missionaries, they started calling around telling everyone to bring LOTS of food on Sunday so they could feed us.  So we didn't have anything with us to eat, and it's too far to return to our apartment between sessions, and we were just going to sit around and feel sorry for ourselves (hehe) when we got invited to their pot luck.  It was so great!  We got to know some new people, try new foods, (fried tofu, for one) and have a great meal.  People are wonderful here.

2.  When you visit a park on a very hot day, be sure to wear comfortable shoes, a hat, and cool clothing.  Ties and long skirts are not advised.  Also, take water!  We decided to visit a local park on Monday last, and failed in all those respects!  Most of the things we went to see were closed on Monday (California's Monday is Utah's Sunday), but were able to walk around a Japanese Friendship Garden.  We didn't last very long, but here are some of the pretty things we saw.

Dad under some incredibly large redwoods.  The picture doesn't do them justice!

The park had lots of wildlife; geese, fish, cranes, etc.  And Japanese sculpture.

 

It was nice to see, but too hot (around 90).  Don't know what we were thinking!

 

 

3. At the beginning of last week, Dad started to hear a funny noise in the engine of our car.  He asked another senior missionary who knows cars what he thought.  He said it didn't sound good, and to take it to a Toyota dealership.  We did.  It was the water pump.  They had to take the engine out to replace it, which was pretty pricey, but told us that most people don't realize its going out until it burns up the entire engine, which we would have had to sell our firstborn to pay for (sorry, Tracy!).  So we were blessed.  And the car is working great.  And the dealership was nice.  And Dad got to share a Gospel message with a lady he met at the shop.  So all is well.

 

 

4.  Young Elders and Sister missionaries are the greatest thing about our mission!  They are so sweet and funny and dedicated and full of life!  We got to spend time with them at Conference, take a pair of Elders to the Oakland Temple last Friday, and see the Meet the Mormons film with them last Thursday.  It was all very fun.  The film is amazing.  We hope you all get a chance to see it.  It was #10 in the country on opening night last Friday, and #1 in lots of big cities besides SLC, like New York, Detroit, Miami, Las Vegas, Dallas and Phoenix.  Isn't that great?  If you have any friends that you would like to give a good impression of the church to, take them to see it. 

 

 

5.  I needed a new pair of walking shoes, so we went to a "comfort shoe store" in the local mall.  The guy who helped me was super nice, and very helpful in getting me a pair of shoes that are comfortable for my persnickety feet.  He asked us about our name tags, and we told him what we do as missionaries.  He started to tell us about his faith as a Pentecostal from Texas, his father being a minister, and some of his beliefs.  They were remarkable similar to ours.  He said as a youth, he asked his dad why there were so many religions.  Shouldn't there be one God and one faith?  Of course, this opened the way to talk about the Joseph Smith story, and I was able to tell him about the Gospel and bear my testimony.  It was very cool!  He listened with intent, said he would go see "Meet the Mormons" with his family, and gave us his business card and asked for ours.  It was a pretty special experience. 

 

So that's our week.  We got to Skype with Bruce and Cailee on Sunday, and he seemed very excited about his baptism.  Lots of people have promised to send us pictures, so we hope that happens.  It was very hard not to be there, but we know we are where we are supposed to be.  We are learning so much, and it is a wonderful experience.  We appreciate all of your support.  We pray for you and your families, and know you are all going through hard times, but we know the Lord is aware of you and will help you through it.

 

Give all our grandkids/dogs a hug from us.  Love you lots. 

A couple of cool stories

We've had some fun experiences this last week and a half.  On Sept. 25th we had dinner with the Calls.  They have some friends from Vietnam, Alex and Jeanette Tam, who had lost a daughter to suicide a few years back, and the Calls thought they would like to meet us.  Bro. Call felt like they had never really recovered from the loss, and they see us as a couple who have gone on with their lives successfully and managed to find happiness, so wanted us to talk to them. 

It was a great dinner, and the Tams were the ones who helped us!  They have an amazing story to tell, and I'd like to share part of it with all of you. 

Bro. Tam was born in Vietnam in the early 50s, just before the Geneva Treaty divided Vietnam in two countries, the North and the South.  Most of the people he knew worshipped their ancestors, and none had heard of Jesus Christ, but Bro. Tam said he always believed in a Supreme Being, "A God of all things I have yet to know".  He escaped death many times, the first when he was a boy, and the Communist soldiers were raiding the South, looking for boys to kidnap and force into the North Vietnamese Army.  He was riding his bike to school when he met two men.  He greeted the men and then heard a voice behind him say, "Freeze!  Hands above your heads and don't move".  He looked back and saw a group of men in uniforms with guns pointed towards him and the men.  He panicked, jumped on his bike and fled.  The guerrillas tried to gun him down, but he was too fast.

The second escape was a few years later when he was celebrating the Vietnamese New year with his family.  Just past midnight, guerrillas knocked on their door and asked them to leave their house to join other families in the village.  It was totally dark and the soldiers guarded them with guns as they walked.  There was suddenly a streak of light, followed by the sound of machine guns.  He and his family were being used as human shields!  They dove into the mud, where they laid while they heard bullets streaking overhead.  They stayed there for hours, waiting for the day to break.  His baby sister had stopped crying, and he thought she was asleep, but as day broke, they found she had been shot in the arm and had passed out from loss of blood.  Her injury was not life threatening, and they went on, hiding for 27 days as the fighting raged.  Thousands of people were killed and millions were left homeless during that battle.  Never a day went by that he didn't say a silent prayer to a God he had yet to know.

At 18, he joined the Vietnamese Air Force.  In February 1975, the communist forces were getting stronger, and invaded his village.  His base was attacked, and they were forced to evacuate.  As they were preparing a last meal, and gathering ammunition, a fellow soldier pointed a gun at him and fired.  He didn't know the gun was loaded, and barely missed hitting Bro. Tam.  Meanwhile, their base was being bombed, and as he looked up, he saw North Vietnamese planes.  They thought they were being rescued, but it was these planes that were bombing them!  They were trying to defect to the other side, and were doing it to prove they were on the communists side.  He narrowly escaped, and eventually made it onto a plane that was headed to Thailand.

After many months, he ended up on an Air Force Base in Florida, where he met an Air Force Captain who was a Latter Day Saint.  He helped him find a sponsor in the USA.
 These people lived in Provo, so that's where he ended up.  When he heard about the church, and learned of Jesus Christ, he recognized the truth, and felt he finally found the God he had been searching for.  He later met Jeanette, who had been one of the many boat people who escaped Vietnam.  The boat she was on saw much hardship, with many people dying as they drifted on the ocean, looking for safe harbor.

So these people shared their story with us, and we realized how blessed we have been.  They didn't talk much about their daughter, but did say that they had taken a young Vietnamese girl under their wing the last couple of years, and she had become like a daughter to them.  They sponsored her, and helped her finish her schooling, bringing her into their home and into their hearts.  We could see that this had been a very healing experience for them.  The told us that they had been interrupters for the Church when they would invite officials from Vietnam to General Conference to help them get to know what the church is about.  They had many great experiences with this, and informed us that the Church has just been recognized in Vietnam, opening the way for missionaries to be sent there to preach.

So a second cool story is about this missionary on the right, Elder Babcock:

He and Elder Harrison, from North Carolina, work in the ward we attend, the Saratoga Ward, and he is from Lehi.
We have been meaning to ask him if he knows Lavonne and her family, but hadn't done it yet.  So Tuesday night we took them out to dinner, and asked him if he knew the Secretan family from Lehi.  He about fell off his chair!  He said he and Kjeisten (their middle son), are best friends!  He practically lived at their home before he came on his mission.  When we told him how we know Lavonne, he was stunned!  He just couldn't believe it.  We couldn't either!  What are the chances?  He gave us some sad news, however.  Kjeisten went to Florida on his mission a few months ago, but his diabetes got out of control and he had to come home.  So we are going to write to Lavonne and tell her we met Elder Babcock, and ask how their boy is doing.

In between all this, I was bored one day, so decided to bake some rolls.  I haven't done that for a long time, and haven't baked any kind of bread for the last 38 years without a bread mixer to help me out.  I wasn't sure I remembered how to do it!  But I tried.  Voila!  I guess I haven't lost my touch:

Then this morning we got to help transport the outgoing missionaries (well, their luggage) to the airport.  We have 26 leaving today.  That is a huge group!  Here are half of them:

They're pretty excited to be going home.  The mission is picking up over 20 today to replace them.  How fun!  Always new people to meet!

So that is our week.  Hope your week has been good.  We hope the flu has flown, and that everyone is doing well.  We really love to hear from all of you on the blog.  The bear story was hilarious!  All your comments were vastly appreciated.  We hope you have a great weekend, and enjoy being together.  Those of us who can't be there miss you!  Right, T? 

Hope to hear from you all again.  Love you much.