Its Christmas eve and we have just gotten home from delivering some gifts to a few people.  We are getting ready to nestle down on the couch with our little Christmas tree, a littel nativity both loaned to us by a Branch member, a door covered with cards from family and friends that reminds us of all those we love back home, and a really cool wood carving made by lady in the Branch.  I bought it from her.  I have been telling her that she needs to sell them and that I want to be her first paying customer so she said she was going to do that.

Although we miss Y'all, especially at this time of year, we are happy to know that you our family is all getting together and we will be there in spirit

 

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL - WE LOVE YOU.

We have been quite busy the past couple of weeks.  There have been several Christmas parties plus our regular district and zone meetings.  Sharyn has been busy mending clothing for missionaries, both male and female and we have continued to try to refine our efforts in tracking down members.

The Christmas party for the Senior missionaries consisted of stuffing gift bags for the young missionaries, having dinner at the mission home, then going to St. Augustine for a rainy ride around the city on an open tram to see the Christmas lights.  It rained so hard on the way down there that we considered turning around and going home, but we persevered and the rain slowed down by the time we got there.  We are planning to go back on a P day in the daytime when the weather is better.  It looks like a good place to visit.  There is a lot of history there that would be fun to see.

The Christmas party for the Elders and Sisters was on the 16th.  I believe all 162 missionaries were there.  We got there at 11:30 AM and finally left to go home after the devotional somewhere around 8:00 PM so it was a long day but it all went well.  It was good to meet an Elder Feliz from my sister's ward in Salt lake and to see how happy they all were to get their letters from home and renew acquaintances with past companions etc.  The Elders from our Branch rode down with us along with one of their investigators.










The weather here has been cooler and cloudy but we were able to take our bikes out to Big Talbot Island and ride for an hour or so on our last Pday.  There were tornado warnings north of here in Georgia last Thursday night that resulted in our missionary coordination meeting being cancelled but there was no threat where we are.

We also had our Branch Christmas party and Primary program.  There were 99 people there on the day of the Primary program.  We should have one once or twice a month!

We went to a care facility for the mentally ill last week.  We sang Christmas carols with them, gave them some gifts and some refreshments.  They were happy to see us and we had a good time.



Joshua Thompson is a 17 year old young man who is a gamer on the internet.  He met a returned missionary in Salt Lake on line who was able to interest him in our church.  He gave him a couple of discussions on line then called our Branch Pres. who notified our Elders. Josh was baptized yesterday and confirmed in sacrament meeting today.  This all happened within the last 5 weeks or so.  His mother is also interested so that is really great.  We have what are called "Facebook" missionaries in our mission.  I don't know all they do but they say they go on line and post things about the church and make friends with those who respond.  It is a pilot program for the church and it seems to have some success.  It was great the way Josh was found.

Tomorrow is P day again and since we have bought no presents for each other we are going to JAX in the morning to get a little something.  We are then coming home to take some gifts to some members and spread some Christmas cheer before settling down in our little abode to watch a Christmas movie.  On Christmas we are having the Elders for dinner and letting them use our computer to skype their families.  Wednesday will be a work day but we have permission to leave on Thursday and go to Washington DC to attend Cade and Erica's wedding in the DC Temple.  We are excited about that and looking forward to seeing some family there.

We wish you all a very Merry Christmas and hope you are all well and happy, and that you will have the spirit of Christ in your Christmas this year and always.

Pictures taken on a recent walk (except for the church)

Street view of our church  It was built in sections as the congregation grows.

North end of church where the chapel will be added

Great garden where he raises turnips, greens and rutabagas.   

There are horse ranches close by also

Some areas look a lot like Hawaii!

 A stream and forested area not far from our apartment.  It is pretty but we don't dare walk into it because of snakes and who knows what else!

Could be a scene for a calendar

These are some pictures we took on a recent morning walk.  They are within a mile of our apartment.  We walk or ride our bicycles for 45 minutes to an hour three to four mornings a week after studying.  Then we decide what area we are going to attempt to locate members.

It's hard to believe that it is near the middle of December.  The temperature is usually in the 70's but is often overcast and sometimes foggy but all in all it is quite comfortable.

This will be a busy week. Today we are driving to Jacksonville for a Christmas party for the Senior missionaries where we will have dinner at the mission home then board a train for a ride to St. Augustine to see the lights etc.  It will be fun.

Yesterday we had 99 people at Sacrament meeting!  Usually we have about 70.  It was the Primary Sacrament Meeting Presentation.  We should have a Primary program every week.  We were excited to see several members that we have recently been working with.

We spend most days looking for people on the branch membership list.  Many on the list can't be found but the ones we do locate are always friendly and welcoming.  Friday we went to about six locations in a row without finding any members but other days more fortunate.

Wednesday we attended our first Zone Conference.  There were about 20 Elders and 2 Sister Missionaries and us.  We were extremely impressed with the spirituality and maturity of the zone leaders and how well prepared they were.  It was three hours well spent.  Afterwards we took the Sisters out to lunch and home to their apartment.  

We have had some great experiences the last few days, today being best of all as you will see later in this post.  Our apartment is the one on the right.  The next picture is our street.  The picture on the bottom is out our back window.  The drive through at McDonalds is open 24/7.

We are the middle of three duplexes 

St Mary's River

Our back yard MickeyDees

There are lots of woods and water here and it is beautiful even though it is winter.  We did scrape frost on the windshield on Sunday morning so it does get pretty cool overnight but the days warm up to the 60-70's.  The people here are polite, respectful, friendly and easy to talk to and we really appreciate that so we are settling into our role and enjoying it.  We had a great Thanksgiving.  We went for a nice bicycle ride around the area early in the afternoon and Sharyn cooked a turkey breast for the missionaries in the afternoon so it was just us and the missionaries and much different than our usual celebration but we enjoyed it.

We had our first "P" day on Monday.  We did some errands and got caught up on some things in the morning and then we drove out to Fernandina Island to Fort Clinch.  It is a great place to ride bikes, walk on the beach and hike.  that is where the pictures were taken with the tree lined roads and the beach etc.  In the evening we went into historic downtown Fernandina.  It is a quaint little town with narrow streets, quaint shops, and some good restaurants.  We ate at a great little restaurant down by the wharf that was built in the 1850's.  The food was very good and the decor was warm and inviting.  We took the pictures of the sunset over the harbor just across the street from there.

First cute little Armadillo we've seen

Beach area at Fort Clinch State Park

Riding in Fort Clinch State Park

Elder Brown up a tree

Sunset at Fernandina Harbor

 

We had our most productive day finding potential prospects today.  We were able to contact two men who indicated that they would be willing to hear more about the church.  We found another woman who would like for her daughter to be baptized and have her baby blessed.  We also found a man whose wife was baptized a few years ago that also gave me his contact information and said they would be receptive to perhaps going to church and having us stop by.  They are raising 4 grandchildren ages 4-5-6 and 7.  I would love to get them involved in the church.

 Our cute apartment to Callahan.  We really are enjoying it!

Well, we have technically been on our mission for nearly 3 weeks now.  We entered the MTC on Oct. 29, 2012 where we spent a week involved in a crash course to teach us how to be missionaries.  Since neither of us have ever been a missionary before it was a little intimidating at first but within a day or two we decided that maybe we could actually do it.

Our MTC experience was very good.  I heard once that there were about 45 couples in our class.  We were divided up into districts, each district  consisting of 4 couples.  Our district leader was a Bro. Williams and his wife from Washington state.  He is an attorney, fairly young, probably in his 50's and his wife is a bit younger than that.  They are going to Colorado Springs on a Spanish speaking mission. Another couple, the Johnson's are from Elk Ridge in the south end of Utah county.  They are both educators and are going to Tahiti to help teachers in the church education system in that area become certified as teachers.  The Claytons are from one of my old hometowns, Idaho Falls Idaho.  They are a bit younger than we are and I never knew them while I lived there.  They are going to San Jose where he will be in charge of all of the missionaries vehicles and cell phones and she will be working in the office.  They are going to live in their trailer while on their mission.

Both of our instructors are returned missionaries.  Neither of us can remember the Elder's name but he was a BYU student and did a good job of teaching us and preparing us for the teaching role play exercises that we had to do on days 3 & 4.  Our other teacher was another returned missionary/BYU student, a sister Thomas.  She also did a great job and was so cute we tried to get Sam to call her and set up a time to get acquainted but it seems Sam wants to do his own thing.  Too bad, she seems like a great young woman.

There are people who volunteer to come to the MTC and play the part of investigators to let the missionaries practice on them in 45 minute teaching sessions while the instructors listened at the doors and evaluated.  We were all nervous about that.  We heard that some of them ask some tough questions and put the missionaries through the mill so to speak.  Fortunately both of ours were non member women, one older whose husband had died and who had a neighbor she was friends with that had told her some things about the Gospel but she didn't want to ask that neighbor some of kinds of things she really wanted to know about the church.  The other was a recently divorced woman from New York whose children were raised.  She had been received warmly and felt at home in Utah but also had some questions about Joseph Smith the the "Mormon Bible"  We were both surprised at how real it seemed and how well both of those sister played their parts, to the point that we really wondered if they were not real investigators.  We wondered what we could possibly talk about for 45 minutes but in both cases we had to hurry and finish up because our time was up.

We also did a lot of role playing on each other and couple on couple.  We enjoyed watching all the new missionaries come in on Wednesday.  There were 280 of them.  The sister in charge said they are getting 660 the Wednesday before Thanksgiving which is in just 3 days now.  Our mission has 12 missionaries going home this week and 20 more coming.  We are also going to be increasing the number of sister missionaries the early part of next near from the current 10-12 to 124 because of the change in age eligibility announced last conference.  There will be nearly as many sister as Elders in our mission then.

Overall our MTC experience was great.  We stayed at home at night and drove there every morning by 8 for class.  It was exciting to get to know people going to places all around the world to spread the gospel and do all kinds of good works for people in every circumstance.  To be a part of that great effort is humbling and exciting at the same time.

On Saturday, we packed our car and got the house ready to leave after our week at the MTC and started driving the following Monday morning, Nov. 6, 2012.  We went as far as Denver the first day and stayed with Jalene and Tim.  We got to stay in their recently completed downstairs suite.  Jalene fixed us some great food so we ate, slept and visited and left early the next morning.  We drove another 500+ miles to Wichita, Kansas the next day.  Then another 500 + to just past Memphis, Tennessee on Wednesday.  Thursday we drove another 500+ miles to Tallahassee but it also included a side trip to Panama City, Florida on the gulf coast.  It was only another 40 miles each way and we had never been to the gulf, so we decided to go.  The last day, November 9th, we only had about 160 miles to go to the mission office.  We got there around 11:00 am.

We met President Barry and his wife plus the mission office couples, got the keys to our apartment and a bunch of supplies they had for us and we started out to see where we would be living for the next year or so.  We had originally been scheduled to be living in Hilliard, Florida, but they were unable to find us an apartment there so we ended up in Callahan.  Callahan is close to Jacksonville and about 35 miles from the mission office.  Our apartment was very nicely furnished by the Priests, one of the mission couples.  It is in a group of three duplexes situated behind the McDonalds in the middle of town.  The trains lull us to sleep each night.  Our apartment has a living room/kitchen, 2nd bedroom or office and bath/utility room on the first floor and a bedroom and bath on the 2nd floor.  Gratefully there is a brand new washer and dryer.

Hilliard is another 12 miles north and is a smaller town so we are glad for the change.  The church is located north east of town in Hilliard and is about in the middle of the Branch.  The Hilliard Branch is geographically very large.  I think it is about 60 miles from the North end of the branch to the South end and probably over 30 miles side to side.  We haven't been able to count them all yet but there appear to be over 400 names on the Branch list but there are only 60-70 at church each week.  There were 62 people in sacrament meeting today.  As in many small ward/branches there are several core families that are the most active/committed/faithful people that hold everything together.  It is the same way in Sunvalley.

Branch Pres. Scherck is a highly motivated man in his 50's with young twin daughters.  He is going to school on line and about to complete his bachelors degree.  He works as a mentor/teacher for an autistic child and his wife is a school teacher.  He was an executive with the Boy Scouts of America and has had a couple of other businesses before deciding to get into psychology.  His goal is to make this branch a ward.  It has been a branch for a very long time.  I talked to a brother at church today who was baptized into the branch 31 years ago so there is a long history of "branchhood" here.  Maybe we can change that.

We had a potluck dinner after the block today.  We folded up some of the the chairs in the chapel, brought in some tables, set up a food line and ate dinner.  The chapel is also the cultural hall.  It is a nice little bldg. that is fairly new.  It serves the needs of the Branch quite well.  It is built so that if we become a ward and have a lot more members a new chapel can be built on one end and the current chapel/cultural hall will then be only a cultural hall.  It has a kitchen, Branch Pres. office, clerks office, relief society room, classrooms and a font.

There are many, many names on the list that no one has been able to contact in years. People come here to disappear and they do a good job of doing just that.  There are miles and miles of forests, wetlands and dirt roads that are not listed or that can't be found by our GPS.  There are also a number of people that converted years ago and have since decided that they don't want to be in the church anymore.  We found a couple of women on Saturday who said they had told others not to come anymore and while they weren't necessarily angry, they made it plain that they didn't want to see anyone from the church again.  One of our main goals is to find out who is here and who is not and who we can contact and who doesn't want anything to do with the church at least for now.  If we can get the records straightened out we will at least know what we are dealing with.

We were surprised to learn that senior missionaries are really given little or no direction as to what they are supposed to do.  Pres. Barry told us to talk to our Branch Pres. and do what we could to help him.  Sharyn made a good point, i.e. regular missionaries all have a senior companion whose job it is to train them and bring them up to speed.  Not the case with Seniors.  It appears they think we have all this experience and we will figure it out.  I guess we will but it has been a bit frustrating.  We don't want to step on toes and make people think that we feel they haven't been doing a good job and we don't want them to think that we are taking over.  We want to work with them, get their ideas, learn the background and history of people we need to work with so we can help them better without offending them in any way so we have been talking to people, trying to get home teaching lists etc. and learn what we can about the people and the culture of the Branch.  It is a bit different here but not unlike a lot of other small communities where people have been born and raised and are pretty set in their ways.  But we already know that there are some humble, knowledgeable, good people here and we look forward to getting to know them better.

This is a picture of our first district.  The elders on the left are assigned to our branch.  The shorter one is the district leader, Elder Lyman.  He is from Texas and is going home on Tuesday.  He is the District Leader and very knowledgable about the branch.


We have a busy week this week.  Tomorrow we will drive two Elders who are going home down to Jacksonville.  Tuesday evening we are going home teaching to 3-4 families with Bro. Chapman who is a nearly 80 year old convert who is doing all he can to help the people here.  He is a prior Branch President.  He home teaches 25 families just because he likes to and wants to know that it is being done.  He calls them his motly crew. He is raising one of his grandsons who is the only Aaronic Priesthood kid that ever comes to church.  He is the High Priest group leader and he is the one that takes charge of most of the service projects in the Branch.  What a guy.

Wednesday we have to go to Jacksonville again and pickup a new Elder who will be serving in our area.  We will be attending the Transfer Meeting and be introduced as new Senior Missionaries.  Thursday is Thanksgiving and we have asked if there is someone we can have over for dinner.  If not we have been invited to go up to Folkston with the Jones family.  Bro. Jones is blind but a very sweet man who is great to talk to.  Friday we are invited to a 4th Friday cottage meeting with a group of people from the ward.  We also need to get out and visit some more members to see if they too don't want us coming around anymore.  Bottom line is that next week we will have more to do and that is good.