Global Area Meetings, 2023 RootsTech Videos, and the Temple

I continued this week by going to the Wellness Center every day. I am pleased with the progress I am making. I hope to continue with this for the duration of our mission. 

Last Friday, I left with several unsolved issues with a few projects I was working on. So on Monday I started off trying to solve my problems. I tackled the first project until I ran into a roadblock. I then posted a request for help in our Teams chat and then went on to the second project. I worked on that project for a while until I ran into another roadblock. I again posted a request for help in a different chat in Teams and went on to the third project. I worked on that project until I once again ran into another roadblock and posted a request for help. At that point I was out of projects to work on. I realized I hadn't taken time to do my Gospel study that morning and decided it was a good time to do that. As I got ready to study, I realized I was frustrated with no response to my requests and that I couldn't proceed with them until I received some help. I decided to pray before I studied. After pouring my heart out I closed my prayer, ready to start my Gospel study. I no sooner said "amen" when I got a response to one of my requests. Danny offered to do a video call with me to help solve my problem. It took almost two hours and an additional tech to join our call before we solved my problem. In the process, they opened several other ideas for me to move forward in my major project. I got much more than I expected. It was a wonderful and immediate answer to my prayer! By the next day all three problems were resolved.

Since this was the first Monday of the month, our monthly Mission Devotional was Monday Evening. We were pleased to hear from Ryan Eggett. He was the director of the MTC Choir for October 2022 General Conference. We had many of our Senior Missionaries in that choir. We had heard so many wonderful stories about him from those who were in the choir. He did not disappoint. He has a wealth of information about the history of many of the hymns. And, he has a marvelous sense of humor. The combination made for a wonderful devotional that was informative, spiritual, and humorous. We were all talking about it the day after the devotional. 

Tuesday morning started with our Zone Devotional. Elder and Sister Larson presented a very nice devotional. I spent the rest of the day continuing to work on my projects. I was putting together the spreadsheet I send out to the areas with all their interpreters and the status they have in PLUNET. It still needed some tweaking as I fixed errors in the files to make sure the data was as accurate as possible. Tuesday afternoon was our Team meeting.

We left a little after 4 because we had the first of two Global Area Meetings that evening. This conference we decided not to hold our own for just interpretation and instead piggybacked on the meeting that Translation set up. We had about 15 or 20 minutes of the meeting. I was able to share the spreadsheet I had been working on to send all the Areas to help them prepare for General Conference. It was one of the projects I was struggling with the day before. I was happy I could share the spreadsheet in the meeting with confidence.

Wednesday was more of the same. I made progress on the data cleanup I was working on. I was preparing to send out the spreadsheets by the end of the week after the second Global Area Meeting. I had the opportunity to attend the PLUNET Governance meeting that I haven't attended for months because our Team meeting always went over. We changed our meeting from Wednesday to Tuesday so that now makes it possible for me to attend the PLUNET meetings again. Normally those meetings are all about Translation, but that Wednesday they focused on Invoicing. I was excited at first, that they were finally addressing invoicing, until I listened to all that was going on. They have new software that will automate the process somewhat. At least it will automate the input of data into the Church finance system. Currently, there are young service missionaries that manually input the data. The new software will eventually eliminate the young service missionaries by automating that process. Until it is fully automated the missionaries will convert the RTF files that the interpreters send to them into PDF files that the new software can read. Once they can automate the RTF to PDF process they won't need service missionaries anymore. I had hoped what they were going to talk about was how to make it easier for our interpreters to create and submit their invoices; but, alas that will NOT change for at least a year. They say they will replace PLUNET by the first of next year and invoicing will change for the better. In the meantime it is the same complicated mess.

Wednesday evening we supported the 2023 Temple and Family History Leadership Instruction (videos for RootsTech23) and the RootsTech 2023 Mainstage Video Recordings events. Several of the same people were involved in both events which is why Aaron decided to combine them. We had about 39 people in attendance. We served a delicious dinner from Panda Express that everyone loved. The evening was very complicated as there were about 13 different video segments that were recorded. Some languages did some videos and other languages did other videos. All the languages left at different times. I had to track all of that to make sure the hours were accounted for correctly. Some left as early as 8:30 while others didn't leave until after 11:00. To help make things more fun for those that had to stay for so long, we served Ice Cream as a snack throughout the evening. Everyone LOVED that. When the night was over Aaron headed home with us to spend the night as he had to be back the next morning to do the Tieline session of one of the events we just finished.

Thursday morning I missed the Zone Devotional to attend the second Global Area Meeting. I did my short presentation again. I finished the last piece of my project that morning and as soon as the meeting was over I sent out the spreadsheets to ALL the areas throughout the world. I watched the Global Area Meeting from our apartment. On my way into the office, I received a Teams call from Daniel, our manager. He had a special project he wanted me to work on before Monday. It was kind of fun walking to work and having a video conference call on the way. What times we live it! 😊After going to the Wellness Center I got started on the new project. In the meantime, I started receiving lots of emails from around the world in response to the spreadsheets I sent out. There have been far fewer requests this time around. We are in much better shape then we were even last conference. 

We left around 1:30 to head back to the apartment. I had a 2:00 meeting with HawkSoft that I thought would be better to do at home. Besides we were headed to the Temple right after the meeting. Since we stayed so late on Wednesday night we were able to only work a couple of hours on Thursday. The HawkSoft meeting was to show off their new updated Carrier interface. It is still in development, but it looks AWESOME. I'll probably have another meeting next week to see the rest of it, if they get it finished. After the meeting we headed to the Bountiful Temple. We were surprised to see some awesome changes in the session. If you haven't been, GO!!! I can't wait to go back this coming Thursday.

I spent Friday finishing up the project for Daniel. I sent him a preliminary on Thursday to make sure I was on the right track. Once he approved it, I filled in what was missing and sent it off to him by noon or so. I then started in on the emails I received from the areas. Most were just thank yous. Several gave me lists of people to deactivate. A few gave me fixes to make. All in all it went pretty good. At 2:00 I had a meeting with Matt to go over my progress with my list. I reported on what Danny and the other Tech shared with me as a way to move forward. Matt told me he had already talked to people about that so it is already in the works. That would have been nice to know. At least now I know there are a couple of things I don't have to spend time on as they may be taken care of automatically in the near future. I stayed until 5:30 to finish everything so I wouldn't have to worry over  the weekend. I can start fresh on Monday with the next phase.

Saturday was a very nice day. We had a leisurely morning. I did my scripture study and then worked on my next module for the Leadership Pattern class I'm taking. About 1:30 we headed over to Vicki's house to visit with her. We haven't seen her since about a month after Roy passed away. Between the Christmas Devotional, our trip to Oregon for Christmas, and COVID it had been awhile. Her health is improving a lot. She is able to get out and visit her sister and friends. We had a GREAT visit with her and ended up staying a couple of hours. It was so good. When we got home I remembered I still needed to do a bit of work for HawkSoft and then finish up my class preparation. We finally settled down for some TV before bed.

Sunday is always GREAT. My Emotional Resilience class was really good. I love my Action Partner. We were supposed to work on different ways to help reduce stress during the past week. We reported in with each other several times during the week. Both of us said almost the same thing every time. Something like, "I didn't do anything on the commitment list for how to deal with stress, but I did say prayers, and listened to conference talks, and got up and moved around a bit to clear my thinking. Amazingly enough I felt calm all week in spite of a more stressful than average week." My Action Partner also told me, "Mopping the floors was a great stress reliever but that wasn't on the suggested list!" I wrote back and told her that it was OK to not check off things on the list. As long as we found something that worked for us, that was the point, even if it wasn't on the list. Sacrament meeting and Relief Society meeting were good. Sister Nichols led our discussion. She is so fun and did a great job. We talked about the talk in General Conference by Elder Ryan Olsen called "The Answer is Jesus". It was a great discussion.

At this point it looks like we have a slow week ahead. We shall see!

Have a GREAT week. We love you!

Mom and Dad

Grandma and Grandpa

Steve and Leslee

Elder and Sister Wilcox