We Arrived!

We arrived at our mission Thursday evening, February 16, 2012, to a beautiful all set up apartment. The Mission President was there with four young missionaries and the senior couple from the mission office. They even went grocery shopping for us! We have been very well taken care of. We love our apartment. It is a 2 bedroom, 1 ½ bath apartment with a nice size living room/dining room/kitchen that is all open. We have an attached garage and the people are so nice to work with. It is very quiet and I have seen mostly seniors so far.

We had Stake Conference with a General Authority, Elder Golden, last weekend. We got to meet a few people and Stake Conference was wonderful. Elder Golden touched on just about everything and is a very inspired  leader. Our Mission President and his wife are wonderful. They sure love their callings and the missionaries. They will be going home soon and a new Mission President has been called to begin July 1^st. We love them already and will miss them but I know the next one is fabulous too. You can tell the missionaries love them very much.

We had dinner with the Mission Leader and his wife who also invited the young missionaries to eat with us. We had a very productive meeting. Neil and I are sending out invitations to the Valentine Dance with a “Return Service Requested” notice on the postcards so we can get addresses updated by the Post Office before we start home visits. The young missionaries have been working very hard in our area to prepare for the Mission President’s rescue challenge of 15 families. They brought us a whole box of supplies and an area book and etc. to get started with the rescue work. We are very excited to meet the families in our Ward this weekend.

We love our work. We are working with our Regional Supervisor this week to train on focusing, lighting, leveling, and etc. to take the best photos of our very sacred records we are working with. Since we both like to index, we can see the importance of taking very good photos of these records so the indexers can read them clearly. There is so much to learn and we are so grateful for the opportunity. We had a wonderful experience yesterday. We got to meet the Records Manager of the County we are working with and she took us on a tour of the Archive and Microfilming Department. She took us to this back room that was full of old ledgers that no one knew were there. We feel our paths have prepared us for this special time in our lives to experience the everyday miracles that happen in the mission field. The church is true. We are so happy and excited to be called to the Ohio Cleveland Mission. Love to all!