Traffic Video

Traffic on our apartment block, Saturday at 1 PM (low traffic hour at home).  Pretty unbelievable!

This and That

Another exciting week has flown by, and it’s my turn to write the blog, so here goes!  My main task the last week and a half was getting four new cars prepared and into service, and bringing the four old cars into the office to get them prepped for sale, and then selling them (not done yet).  Monday we drove to Hampton Bays, about an hour and 45 minute drive each way, to deliver a new Corolla to Sisters Ashford and Johnston.  We arranged to meet them at the church (thinking it would be a nice church with lots of parking), but it turned out the be in a mall where a bank used to be (see pictures below).  Then, since we were just a few blocks from where the Martinos live (the senior couple that we see the least because of distances), we went over to their apartment to see them.  They were having a BBQ with the four elders and two sisters in the town (Monday is P-day) in celebration of Elder Hardy’s birthday, so we got invited to stay for lunch and got to spend an hour mingling and listening to everyone’s stories before we drove back to the office.  It’s always fun to get out of the office, see new areas and get to know missionaries better, and we love it!  The Martinos are from Texas and this is their second mission.  On their first, Elder Martino served as mission president in one of the missions in the Philippines.  Talking to them, their current mission is much like we thought ours would be—working with less-active people and providing any service needed in the community and church.  It sounds neat, but we wouldn’t trade them!!  Maybe next mission…

Hampton Bay Chapel

Sister Johnston & Sister Ashford with their new car

On Tuesday we had the opportunity to accompany another group of elders and sisters to the temple in Manhattan, and as usual it was great!  Sister Morales was on crutches and in a lot of pain with some kind of ankle tendonitis, but she said there was no way she was going to miss going to the temple, since they only get to go four times on their mission!  There is probably about a mile of walking to/between/from subways, so she was really hurting by the end of each trip, and it was great to see the other missionaries help her up and down the stairs, and slow down to wait for her.  By the last ¼ mile at the end of the day, she was exhausted and in tears, so a couple of the elders carried her.  It was a stifling hot day, and those were definitely some hot, sweaty elders by the time we got to the office.  (Probably, the elders didn’t mind that much, though…)  Diane took several pictures, but we decided it would be better not to publish them.  Another sister, Sister Fitt, impressed us so much with her absolute fearlessness on the subway!  Each time we got on a train, she would start working down one side of the car and then work her way back up the other side.  No beating around the bush with her!  She started every time with, “Hi, are you religious?  I’m a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and we have a message that can help people become closer to God.”  As soon as one person accepted a pass-along card and gave her their contact information, or refused, she moved to the next open seat or space at a pole, and talked to the next person.  It didn’t matter if they had headphones on (as most do), she just started talking until they took them off to hear her.  During the day, she gave out 62 pass-along cards, and came back with four referrals for Sister Williams to process!!!  The other young elders and sisters were amazed too, and we saw them asking her questions about her process!  What a great example she was to all of us!  (Sister Williams gave out a pass-along card, too, to a woman more our age!)

8/23/16 Temple Trip

(Sister Morales in black dress, Sister Fitt in red skirt)

Friday we drove to Staten Island to swap cars with some sisters, so we can get some accident damage repaired on their vehicle.  That was our second trip to that island, but the first time we saw the church there (picture below).  The power was out for construction work, and we had fun feeling around for the toilets in the bathrooms, but that’s a whole other story…!  Before coming back, we went to lunch at a diner called ‘Z-One Diner’, which was very good.  For some reason the diners seem to appeal more to people our age than young families, and we are generally impressed with their food and sandwiches.  We have especially been impressed with the French fries in NYC—very good at almost every place we’ve been!

Staten Island Chapel

Just a few more notes about what I do as the vehicle coordinator.  Most of my daily work is just fielding calls from elders and sisters and answering questions and giving advice.  It’s funny how a lifetime of experience driving and working on (mostly older in our case) cars can prepare you for a mission!!  I get questions like, “We can’t move our steering wheel or start the car. What should we do?” (Usually parked on a hill with the wheels turned sharply to one side.) Or, “We are hearing such and such a sound whenever we do such and such. What should we do?”  Or, “Our car was towed away!  We just left it for a minute! What should we do?” Or, "Such and such dash light came on. WSWD?” Or, “Someone smashed our window and stole our GPS! WSWD?” (Just happened this week.)  Or, “A lady swerved over and hit us, but she totally denies she did. WSWD?”  Or, “This is Roy/Bill/Alex from Pep Boys/Sears/Firestone.  We have a Corolla/Cruze/Legacy here that needs oil change/tires/inspections.  What is our authorization number?”  That’s my life most days and evenings!  I like it, and I generally know the answers.  Once a week or so I get surprised by something new, though, and it keeps things interesting!  Remember, we wanted to feel useful…

As Diane always says, we are loving our mission!!  I don’t say it as much as she does, but I do too!  The regular schedule of scripture study and good environment we work in is especially good for me, and I can feel myself becoming ever more receptive to the promptings of the Spirit.  We have a short devotional each morning in the office with the other senior couple, the Shapiros, and giving a scriptural thought from our studies every four days is good for us, too!  It helps us crystalize and verbalize our learnings from our study.  We are still much better at personal study than companion study, so we have lots of room for improvement there.  (Talking to the other senior couples, including the president, they all say the same thing.  All our lives, we’ve had to fit in our gospel study where we can, and it has not often been together at the same time.)  Now we have the time, but need to learn better companion study skills!  I hope all of you have this senior mission experience, in your own time and place.  You will love it!!

Loving and Growing

I love the missionaries.  They are so good to us.  I am learning to read their body language.  I can tell when they have had a really tough morning.  Their body language seems to say, “Everybody rejected us this morning and I’m really tired but I’m trying to keep going.”  Sometimes it says, “I don’t like being with this companion.” Sometimes, “I just want to know someone cares about me.” And the best, “We had such a great morning and I can’t wait to go back out.”  Marc and I try to set aside whatever we are working on and try to encourage them and just show them that someone loves them.

We like to think they linger in the office because they like to be with us but I suspect it has more to do with the air conditioning and the water cooler.  My favorite thing is passing them on the street.  They seem genuinely glad to see us.  So maybe a little of the lingering is because they like us—maybe 20%.

We delivered 2 new cars this week to missionaries out on the island (everything east of Queens is considered “out on the island.”)  I love driving out there to where it’s green and especially enjoy making the missionaries’ days by handing them the keys to a brand new car.

Then there was the unfortunate broken elevator event.  I got in to go workout and it descended rather rapidly, and abruptly came to a stop with a loud thud.  The display said I was on floor 11 (there are only 6.)  I kept pushing buttons to no avail—I was stuck on the mythical 11^th floor.  I actually wondered if I would plunge to my death (or to my pain since I was only actually on the 2^nd floor) or die a slow suffocating death in the hot elevator.  So I tried a fervent prayer.  All of a sudden the door opened.  I know the Lord watches over His missionaries and am constantly impressed at how often prayers are answered in quite dramatic ways.

Later after getting out of the shower I heard alarms in the hallway.  Standing there in my towel my first thought was, “Oh no, I can’t run out without my nametag.”  While pondering whether to pin it on my towel, the alarms stopped.”  Seems someone was stuck in the elevator!  Guess I should have warned them, or at least left a note saying, “if stuck try prayer.”

Last week was a difficult one.  There was so much to do that I didn’t have time to work on Activity Day.  The activity I had planned fell through so I was a bit stressed (ok, a lot stressed.)  I tried fervent prayer again asking Heavenly Father to please put ideas into my heart.  Within half an hour ideas did come and we had the best Activity Day ever.  I know it was the answer to the prayers of a desperate missionary.

I am learning to do hard things.  I can honestly say working in Primary has taught me patience.  Those rowdy kids are not nearly as irritating as they first were and I can honestly say I love them and love being with them.  I find as I communicate with them one on one it is much easier and I can see maybe just a little bit of what our Father in Heaven sees in them.  Their comments surprise me sometimes.  One very rambunctious 8-yr-old was describing the people who rejected Nephi’s teachings.  He said, “They had a force field around their hearts that kept them hard.  Nephi tried to break the force field and soften their hearts.”  I love it.  Kind of what our missionaries are trying to do.

This week I was reading 3 Nephi 12:16.  “Let your light so shine before this people, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven.”  Sometimes as Latter-Day-Saints we get this wrong and think it is saying “that they may see your good works and glorify you.”  Or, “They may see your good works and know you are better than everyone else.”

Elder Holland said of potential converts, “They are children of God, our brother and sisters, and they need what we have.”  This is true of unruly 8 year olds as well as strangers on the street.  Sometimes we just need to pray for the ability to serve and teach with love.”  If we can do this they will see our good works (or our love) and glorify God.

I love serving a mission.  I love what it is doing to our hearts.  I hear the caring and concern in my companion’s voice when he is on the phone with missionaries whose car was broken into or who is having some other difficulty.  Sometimes I feel a little sorry that we are not directly proselyting but am convinced this is the best kind of mission ever and I am grateful for the opportunity for growth and that we can have fun while we are growing.

Chapel in Bayside.  The chapels out on the Island are beautiful.

Modeling my necklace Mom Williams made.  Love it.

Marc gave me my own TiWi card.  Now when I drive mission
vehicles I'm not constantly hearing, "No driver, no driver."  (Now
I hear, "Check your speed, check your speed.")

Odds and Ends and Experiences

This is one of the first weeks that I’ve started to write with nothing much to say!  (My companion did her blog so late last week that she poached all the interesting stuff…)  First of all—happy birthday to my older brother, Randy!!  I’ve always looked up to him, and the older I get, the more I appreciate him taking the right path for us to follow!  (Although there was the unfortunate incident where I went along with Dad to get him at Janice’s house late one night.  I definitely learned that I didn’t want Dad to come get me at my girlfriend’s house, ever! (And I was glad she lived 30 miles away, not one mile, like Janice…) Dad was a man of few words, but just the look, and the label “Lunkhead” got the message across!  I wonder where “lunkhead” came from?  Good topic for some research.  But I digress…)

Diane and I really do love our mission!  She says it a lot more than I do (maybe I’m a man of few words like Dad), but she’s a lot better than I am about expressing that kind of stuff!  If you want the facts of what happened I may be better, but if you want the feelings or the lessons learned, she’s the one.  (Oh well, as long as there are heavy objects to lift or bugs to kill or cars to work on, I’ll always have a place.)  While I’m on the topic of feelings, let’s talk about hugging.  I’ve never been a big hugger, and I’m trying to get over it.  In our mission, hugging seems to be the norm among most of the missionaries (although not elder/sister hugging), and it’s growing on me, but slowly.  As I think about it, hugging communicates acceptance and love, which are both commodities the young missionaries don’t see much of during a normal workday, and that is something well worth sharing and communicating!!  I admire the people who can easily and sincerely share a hug, and I can see myself developing into one of those people (but I’m not one yet).  Right now, I hug the elders I know well and have developed a love for.  That’s probably the key isn’t it—get to know and love more and more of the missionaries!!  I’ll keep working on it.

This last week was the hottest I can ever remember enduring.  Every day has been 88-95 degrees with thunderstorms and high humidity (heat index says it feels like 110 deg.), and we are sure thankful for office and home air conditioning!  The elders and sisters in the area drop by the office dripping sweat to get a drink of cold water and rest for a minute, and we feel sorry for them!!  On Friday I spent 30 minutes or so just inspecting a car prior to sale, and came back in with my white shirt and pants pretty well sweated through.  Then Saturday, standing in the shade on the porch at Teddy Roosevelt’s home (we went again, but this time with Sister Shapiro (Aunt Debbie to family)) listening to the tour guide, I noticed that sweat was dripping off the ends of my fingertips to the porch.  I’m not a huge sweater (not the cardigan kind), and I’ve never sweat that much before while standing still!  The Roosevelt house was not air conditioned, so they kept the inside tour to ½ hour and eliminated the 3^rd floor, which they said was over 100 degrees.  Also, they definitely take the thunderstorms seriously here.  MetLife stadium was cleared of 90,000 fans and all the players the other night for an hour during the Giants game!

We went on a double date with one of the other senior couples last night (Richard & Carol Johnson, dinner and a movie).  It was fun to talk and compare notes and get to know each other better.  They are the housing couple, which is a really busy job!  I don’t think I’d swap (stick with the devil you know…).  They are from Arizona, and he was a lawyer, and she was an office manager.  Dates are a little different experience here.  We met for dinner at Nick’s Bistro after both finding (paid) parking spaces.  Then we went to our cars before the movie and put more money in the meters to get us to 7:00PM when you don’t have to pay any more, then walked to the theater a block away.  No parking lot at the bistro or theater, just find the first parking place you can, and keep it!  It’s a different life experience, but it’s becoming more and more normal and we love the experience!!  Come visit us!

Sounds a lot like David O. McKay, doesn't it? (Makes you wonder where all the statesmen/women like this are today..!)

Front: Sister Bramwell (husband meeting us at restaurant), Elder Johnson, Sister Palmer, Elder Palmer, Elder Shapiro
Row 2: Sister Johnson, Sister Shapiro,
Row 3: Sister & Elder Williams
Back Row: Elder & Sister Lilly

Missionaries Come, Missionaries Go

About a week or so ago I posted the following on Facebook:

 "Now that I'm used to the traffic, I can't believe I wake up every morning excited to start another day as a missionary. I so LOVE it here. The missioyoung naries are so awesome and so good to us. It's so much more fun that I ever imagined! Even though my kids are having a reunion without us, I think it's great that they get to do that (just this once). I am unbelievably happy. I love seeing what each new day will bring.”

I keep thinking maybe it will get old but it doesn’t seem to.  We are still loving it.  Although, we’ll see how we feel at the end of Transfer Day tomorrow.  We were supposed to pick up luggage at the airport around 4:00 this afternoon but due to Delta Airline’s computer glitch, flights have been late or even cancelled all day.  So we have one flight coming in at 8:20 p.m. and another at about 3:00 a.m..  We’ll see how peppy we are feeling tomorrow. 

I started writing this 3 days ago.  What a wild week it has been.  Missionaries coming, missionaries going, lots and lots of pizza being served (by me) and eaten (by them.)  Many of the elders and sisters that left this week were ones that we either worked closely with like the APs or that lived near us so we saw them daily.  It was so hard to leave them at JFK.  Many hugs and tears were shed, in fact one of us cried three fourths of the way home.  But then we got back and started to get to know some of the new missionaries.  They are so very sharp and we know they will be successful.  Most have that “deer in the headlights” look.  I ask them what area they are in and they say “uhhh…” and look at their companions.  I love them already. 

Elder Williams spent transfer day training and drive-testing 2 brand new missionaries.  Their companions were unable to drive for whatever reason so the new companions had to start right away.  It was like, “Welcome to New York, now let’s go drive in rush hour.” They handled it well though.

We pray daily that we might know the things we can do or say to ease the burdens placed upon these young men and women.  We are supposed to discourage them from coming into the office unless they have an excuse reason.  It’s hard though.  Sometimes they come in and drop into a chair and say, “we got cussed out all morning!”  And then there are days when they come in all upbeat and had a great day of sharing the gospel and placing Book of Mormons and want to share their excitement with someone.  There is the added attraction when it is so hot and humid that that the office is air conditioned.

We did have a road trip to Manaraneck, NY to pick up 3 new cars and a mini-van (for Sister Reynolds). We took 4 elders in the mission van.  They loved getting to leave the mission and especially loved that they each got to drive a brand new car back by themselves with no tiwis (little box that tracks their speed, driving, etc.)  Elder Williams and I took the "scenic route" home so the elders beat us back.

I’m so glad I let the Lord decide where to send us.  This is not the mission I would have chosen.  This is the mission I love.

I loaned Elder Smith my phone since his companion had theirs.
They left if on my desk with this message. :)

I told the elders to take a picture when they got back.  They took 10 or 12
(Elder Smith with Elder Woodmansee and Elder Opfar.

Elders Adams, Smith, Opfar and Woodmansee.  We love them!