"My Missionary Commission"

I love this quote by Bruce R. McConkie entitled "My Missionary Commission".  I read it often and it really affects me every time I read it.  Glen will often say to me, "We are full time missionaries!  Can you believe it?"  This is what it says:

        "I am called of God.  My authority is above that of kings of the earth.  By revelation I have been selected as a personal representative of the Lord Jesus Christ.  He is my master and He has chosen me to represent Him--to stand in His place, to say and do what He Himself would say and do if He personally were ministering to the very people to whom He has sent me.  My voice is His voice, and my acts are His acts; my doctrine is His doctrine.  My Commission is to do what He wants done; to say what He wants said; to be a living modern witness in word and in deed of the divinity of His great and marvelous Latter-day work.  How great is my calling!"

How great is our calling!  Now that things have calmed down a bit and we know a lot more than we used to and we are settling into more of a routine, we want to do more with our commission as missionaries than to work in the office every day.  At the office we do things for the missionaries and see them a lot--and we would also like to be missionaries by being able to be with people more.  Today we are going to meet with the missionaries assigned to our ward and with the bishop to discuss what can be done in our ward with missionary work.  We're pretty excited to do this.

Also, Glen, as the district leader of the office missionaries,  is really encouraging our district to memorize things together.  First, he asked us to memorize the names of the nine zones in our mission in alphabetical order.  He kind of makes a game of it.  Then he asked us to memorize the zone leaders of each zone.  Only Glen and I can do this so far, but we practice it in our devotional with everyone each morning.  Next he is going to ask them to memorize my purpose as a missionary, and then the few verses of Joseph Smith's first vision as presented in Preach My Gospel.  I love that we're doing this!  It's fun to do it together.

And here's some of what happened during the week in a nutshell:

On Sunday night, Elder Weekes (left) and Elder Vieira came over to celebrate Elder Vieira's 21st birthday.  He told us at church that it was his birthday and he loved chocolate cake, so we invited them over to celebrate.  He is from Portugal and is an excellent missionary, as is Elder Weekes.  They're the zone leaders of the Redrock Zone!  (which we memorized!)  We also have missionaries from Scotland, Tonga, Mexico, Guatemala, Canada, Africa, Chile, and Germany.  Pretty cool, huh?  

On Monday, we got a new missionary with only three days notice--we were notified on Friday that he was coming, so we needed to all the preparations for him to come and Glen and I had to stay at the office until 6:30 on Friday to get ready.  He also was told on Friday that he would be coming, so he had to make lots of preparations too!  He had been at the MTC months before but had an injury there and went home.  He was told on Friday that he was being reassigned to our mission.  We have learned that the mission field changes very frequently!!  Another elder also left early again this week.  So so sad.

 On Monday evening we went out to dinner with Pres. and Sis. Black and the rest of our district for FHE.  We were laughing so hard at some of the things being said that as we left, a couple who was also at the restaurant said to Sis. Black and I, "Hey, you're having way too much fun on your missions!  I should tell the mission president!"  (They were members.)  I said, "There's the mission president right there!"  It was a fun evening, and I can't believe I forgot to take a picture!

Glen wanted to make homemade tortillas one night, following Danny's example.  They were good, but oh, too much work!   

The ward party at our new ward--the Buffalo ward of the Redrock Stake.  See Elders Weekes and Vieira? It was supposed to be held outside, but lo and behold we had a rare huge rainstorm and we had to go inside.    Our building is the exact same design as our building in Layton--crazy, huh?

When we moved into our condo, we found that the fridge was leaking quite badly.  Glen finally had some time to fix it, and it was a lot of work, taking a few hours.  But hurray for Glen!  Our fridge is fixed!!  Thank heaven for his many skills.

On Friday night, two couples from our ward came over to our condo for game night.  They're so nice!  They had invited us to play games with them and said, "Which house should we play at?"  It got quiet, so I just volunteered to have them come here, but knowing that we generally don't get home on Fridays until 6:30 or so and they were coming at 7:00.  But we had so much fun and we hope we get to do it again!

On Saturday, our p-day, we again went shopping, did the laundry and cleaning, and Glen went to deliver furniture to some elders' apartments with a member of our ward.  Then we went to Redrock Canyon, just west of Las Vegas and it was a pretty cool canyon.  The red rock looks kind of like the Lake Powell area, and is quite a contrast to the desert landscape that surrounds most of Las Vegas.  Pictured above are petroglyphs on the rocks but they're hard to see in the picture.  Sometimes you can see burros on the road leading up to the canyon, as Glen did as he was making deliveries a few weeks ago, but there were none to see yesterday when I was with him! :(   This canyon is what our stake is named after.  

It felt so good to have a calmer week and to feel more organized.  We were even able to pick up our newly framed picture of our family and hang it up!  It feels heavenly to have it here.  I had another episode of homesickness this week, so it's good to be able to see our family in the picture.