Lots of Meetings, Presenting to New Missionaries, Farewell Dinner, and a New Bishop 

Our Family Home Evening Group

Monday morning, we packed and straightened the rental house. We all left around 10:00 AM. Our kids headed to Coeur d'Alene for a nice little vacation and we headed back to Utah. We got home early enough to get everything unpacked and laundry started before our weekly Family Home Evening. Elder and Sister Walters gave a wonderful presentation on Temple symbolism. It was really quite fascinating. It was the Durrants' last Family Home Evening with us. We will miss them so much.

On Tuesday morning we had a meeting with Baptiste and a guy from security named Mike, to talk about General Conference logistics. We thought we were talking with the guy in charge of food for GC because he is in the Events department. Normally we go through COB Catering for food, except for General Conference. Events take care of going through COB Catering. However, Mike wanted us to talk directly with Josh, who is over COB Catering. Our biggest concern is if the changes to the access badge stations are going to be done before General Conference. We couldn't get a definitive answer. We are not sure how that is going to affect us for check-in. I have a feeling we won't know until General Conference weekend!

Elder and Sister Durrant

In the afternoon, we had our Team meeting. We weren't going to talk about General Conference because we had a General Conference Preparation meeting on Wednesday morning. Curtis mentioned how we weren't going to talk about conference and then proceeded to have a 45 minute discussion about General Conference. We scrambled to cover everything else in less than 15 minutes because Baptiste had another meeting, he needed to attend at 3:00. After our meeting, I put together a slide show that we needed for a presentation we were doing for our Zone to show new missionaries at one of their last training meetings before they get assigned in the mission. This particular group were all Service Missionaries with a few Visa waiters. We need new full-time missionaries. We will be doing the presentation again in September to the full-time missionaries.

One of the Slides from our Presentation

On Wednesday, we started with our General Conference Preparation meeting and basically continued from where we left off the day before. It is hard to believe we have 5 weeks left. After lunch, we had a section meeting. We met on the 27th floor. We were in charge. Baptiste had each team present what their team does and introduce their team members. They were all good reports. 

Sunrise on the way to Oregon

After our meetings, we stopped at the Missionary Medical department to ask some questions about what is needed for our Visa application. They didn't know all the answers, so they sent us to the New Zealand Visa section in Missionary Travel. They gave us some good answers but couldn't answer all our questions. They are going to reach out to others and try and get us our answers. I'm glad we have lots of time to get all our questions answered.

On Thursday we basically played hooky. We met with Baptiste at 9:30 for our one-on-one meeting. He wanted to know what we needed for General Conference. I told him we were in pretty good shape, but as soon as we know the logistics, we may have more questions.

After our one-on-one meeting, we headed to the NOB (North Office Building) to do our presentation to the new missionaries. We were second to last. I think it went pretty well. After the presentation, Sister Bauer wanted a copy of our PowerPoint presentation and the "script" that goes along with it. We don't have a script! So, we are going to be creating a script and sending that to her by next week sometime. After our presentation, we went to lunch and then to the Temple. 

Dinner with the Durrants and the Jacksons

After the Temple, we went home and took care of a few things before we met up with the Durrants for dinner. Elder and Sister Jackson went with us too. It was all kind of funny. We invited the Durrants to dinner. They said that they owed us dinner and did we want to go out to dinner. We said that would be great. Then the Jacksons asked if they could take the Durrants out to dinner. So, we all went together. We went to Zupas. We had fun with the cashier with each of us trying to pay for some else's dinner. It ended up with us paying for the Durrants, and the Durrants paid for ours, and the Jacksons ended up paying for their own. We all had a wonderful time.

We were up very early on Friday as we threw in the last few things into our suitcases before we hit the road again. This time we headed to Oregon. We got a call a couple of weeks ago inviting us to Oregon so we could be there with our son-in-law was sustained as our new Bishop. It was a long trip, but everything went smoothly. We arrived about 15 minutes after our kids got home from Coeur d'Alene. It has been a crazy weekend.

We watched a movie and ate Pizza Friday night. On Saturday, we went to the Classic Car show in downtown Canby. That was fun to see so many cool cars. I loved all the vibrant colors. After walking around for a while, we headed to an ice cream shop to cool off with some delicious ice cream. Once we got home, I think everyone managed to doze off for a while.

Bishop Sean Hawkins

On Sunday, we were there for our son-in-law's sustaining as the new Bishop of our ward. We were also able to surprise some of our other family members as they didn't know we were coming. We couldn't tell them because the announcement of the Bishop was a surprise, although I think most of the ward had already guessed who it would be. 😊 We knew it was going to happen soon as our Bishop had been in just over 5 years. The Stake President waited until after all the youth activities this summer before making the change. We suspected it would either be our son or our son-in-law as both men are outstanding. However, at the same time they called our son-in-law to be the Bishop, they moved our son from the High Council to be a Seminary Teacher. He will be an AWESOME Seminary Teacher. He has worked with the youth his entire adult life. It was very fun to see our ward members and share in this glorious day. We relaxed Sunday afternoon. We packed the car so we wouldn't have to do it so early in the morning. We will leave dark and early Monday morning to head back to Utah.

All our Love and Prayers,
Mom and Dad
Grandma and Grandpa
Great Grandma and Great Grandpa
Steve and Leslee
Elder and Sister Wilcox