Seminary, Ward Clerking, and Flat Inspections

Our P-day on Monday was pretty slow. It was a national holiday for the King's birthday, so we didn't have Seminary. We had a wonderful Zoom call with Douhet. He and Kylee were on an anniversary weekend at the beach. With school and seminary over for the summer, they are both feeling a little free for a while. It is also the first time in a very long time where they don't have an assignment at Young Women Camp. Sometimes it is nice not to have so much to do. 😊

I spent the rest of the day working on my Seminary lessons and Family Home Evening. Steve went grocery shopping and bought a deadbolt for one of the Elders' flats. As it turned out, no one showed up for Family Home Evening. 😢 I think we may only do it once a month and see if that gets more people.

Tuesday started with our Zoom Seminary lesson. Sometimes I feel like I'm pulling teeth. We had some technical difficulties with getting students on the call. It also seemed challenging to get any answers out of them. 

We headed to the Elders' flat so Steve could install the deadbolt he bought. I gave each set of Elders a key. For the first time in I don't know how long, they have been able to lock their flat when to go out for the day. I'm so glad they finally told us they didn't have a working key. Steve also checked on a potential new leak they reported. He checked everything and couldn't find any fresh leak. We think it may be the result from when their washer overflowed a week or so ago. We asked them to put a fan in front of the wet spot to dry it out and told them we would check on it again to see if there is any new dampness on the carpet in the closet. They also told us they were still experiencing fleas and bed bugs even after doing all the tips we gave them to do. So, we called the Garners to see if we could get an exterminator in to take care of the problem. They said yes and we scheduled an appointment for Thursday morning.

Next, we headed to the Whangarei Library to try and find more addresses in the books containing the electoral rolls. There are a total of 72 books, and we have 96 names to look up. We got through most of three books and only found 2 names. 😢We reported that at our DCM meeting on Wednesday and several missionaries said they would help us look once a week until we are done. So, next Tuesday we will see how many we can find.

Sister Budge

Sister Budge did her Pathway class in the afternoon, and then her companion joined us (she was in a threesome with another sister companionship) so we could have our Comp Study session. After our study, they asked for some help creating a lesson for a mother with several young children. Her mother wanted the sisters to teach them about faith. We bounced several ideas off each other and they came up with an outline for a lesson. They reported back to us after our DCM meeting that it went well.

Elder Dixon and
Elder Cockbain

Elder Cockbain had been sick all week. He was hoping to be better so they could teach their seminary lesson on Wednesday morning. Just before 10:00 PM, Elder Dixon called us to let us know they wouldn't be at Seminary and could I cover for them. I had told them previously that I had actually already prepared that lesson as I thought it was the one I was supposed to give. However, a new schedule was sent out because of the holiday, and I ended up teaching the previous lesson instead. Since I already sort of had the lesson prepared, I said that it wouldn't be a problem. 

It was our in-person lesson. We had four girls in class and the family of three joined via Zoom. The lesson went quite well. We had good participation and interaction. I was also able to piggy-back off the previous lesson that I gave before. I gave the next lesson on our Thursday Zoom lesson. We did another in-person on Friday and Sister Paratene gave that lesson.

Later in the morning we had our District Council Meeting (DCM). I always enjoy those. We headed back to the house after our meeting to take care of some administrative things for the Ward as well as preparing my Thursday Seminary lesson. I prepared a nice excel spreadsheet that we can use to track the lost names we need to look up at the library. 

The Thursday Zoom meeting was so different than the Tuesday Zoom meeting. It went very well. All the technology worked, and the kids interacted on the screens very well. We had all three of the siblings join us as well as one of our young women. The other three young women have sports practice. I'm hoping that will end before too long so we can have everyone again.

We had our Mission SPF meeting. Elder and Sister Leishman did our training on ways to work on reactivation. They had some great ideas we want to try. We headed back to the library to try out the new spreadsheet. Since it is on OneDrive, we were able to access it on our tablets. It worked pretty slick, and I didn't have to manually update when we got home. The main reason I created the spreadsheet is so we can track what books we have looked at since we can't do more than one or two books at a time. 

The Hesters

At 2:00 we headed to the Hester's house to meet with Brother Hester and the Elders. We held our first Missionary Coordinating Meeting. We are going to try and schedule it every week, or at least every other week. I think it went well and we have a plan we are working on. The Elders are going to work on looking for 3 new friends a week, contacting
and working with 10 less actives a week, and continuing to teach the 5 or so current friends they are working with. We will work with the less active as well.

Back at home, we worked on preparing the Sacrament Program, preparing for flat inspections, and other administrative things on our list. Steve is picking up the computer portion of his new calling pretty good. It will be a while longer before I can back away completely. 😇

The Bream Bay Sisters Inspection

Because of the King's birthday on Monday, we had Seminary on Friday. Since Sister Paratene was teaching, we just had to show up. We thought we were going to have a fairly light day, but it ended up being very long, when you consider we begin our day at 5:00 AM. 

After grabbing a bite to eat, we headed down to Bream Bay. We were assigned the Bream Bay Sisters' flat since their previous couple went home. They have a beautiful house that rivels our house. It is the nicest young missionary flat I've seen. Everything was spotless so we gave them full points and a bag of candy. 😊I wondered how the other two flats we needed to inspect would look compared to the Bream Bay house. 

We went to the Denby Sisters' flat since it was on the way back. It is an older home but is still in great shape. We found a few little things that we docked 1 point off each but managed to give them bonus points for other things, so they still got awarded full points and a bag of candy. The place really looked great.

Lastly, we headed to the Elders' flat. We have two sets of Elders living there. The Hikurangi Elders and the Punaruku Elders. I wasn't sure what to expect. The past two times we have been there it has been a stretch to give them passing points. The first thing I noticed was the drapes were all open. They have sheers in front of the windows. I actually think it is the first time I noticed the sheers. The dishes were done, the counters were clean, the floors were vacuumed, their desks were fairly neat, the beds were made, clothes were picked up, there was no lint in the laundry room, bathrooms were clean. It was AMAZING. They even cleaned the windowsills. The flat looked bright and inviting. We gave them full points too, and because there are two sets of Elders, they got two bags of candy. 😄All three flats got perfect scores. That is a first! We were so pleased with all our missionaries.

Dinner at Sister Paratene's

As much as we wanted to call it a day, we had a few more things to do. We told the Bishop we would pick up some paper for the printer. We forgot to do it when we were in Whangarei inspecting the Denby Sisters' flat, so we had to go all the way back to Whangarei. Then we headed all the back to the Chapel. It is only a block from the Elders' flat. I needed to print about 40 copies of one of the new songs from the new hymnbook since the actual hardbound book won't be printed until 2026. Elder Wilcox needed to finish the Sacrament Program as well as take care of some financial things and member updates. We thought it would be very quick, but as usual, things always take longer than expected. We didn't get home until 4:30. Once home, I worked on our finances and then started on a big project for the Elders. I didn't finish it. Elder Moyes stopped by our house around 7:00 to pick up a package we picked up for him when we were in Auckland. We had the package with us at DCM but forgot to give it to him and he forgot to ask. 🙁Then at 8:30 PM, we had a group call with our Elders and one of their friends they are teaching. We all visited with Joe for a few minutes, and they started doing our group Book of Mormon reading. We are hoping to stop in and see Joe this week. We try every couple of weeks.

Elder Dixon, Elder Cockbain, and Sister Paratene

It was nice to stay home on Saturday. Elder Wilcox did go out to do grocery shopping. Since I hate to shop, I decided it would be a good time to work on HawkSoft. Hahaha. Steve also started working on his quarterly reports for Church. We still have time, but he needs to know what all of them
are. He is also going through all the training videos and documents to learn everything he needs to do. I wanted to work on the Elders' project some more as well as preparing for Seminary next week but ran out of time. There is always Monday.

Sunday was wonderful as usual. We got there about 7:30 so Steve could take care of last minutes updates to the Sacrament Program before printing it for Brother Horsford, who was conducting. 

The Elders' Flat

I updated the hymn numbers in the hymn board for Sacrament meeting. I also had the printed music out for the new song we were singing today. And finally, I greeted people at the door as they came in.

Our meeting was good, and our singing was so much better than last week. I think last week no one knew the songs that we tried to sing. I didn’t know them. Today we had familiar songs, and everyone sang great. 😄

We had a couple people get sustained for new callings, so Elder Wilcox had something new to do after Church. Brother Horsford gave us a family that moved out of the ward. He even had the address they moved to, so they won’t show up on our lost member list. 😊

This evening, we had a lovely dinner at Sister Paratene’s house. She is a single sister and
cannot have the young Elders over without another adult present. She asked if we would like to come to dinner so she could have the Elders too. Normally she would fix them something and they would pick it up and take it home. This turned out to be a very nice evening.

One last thing. We had a very special event that is happening in our family that won't ever happen again. We have four beautiful grandchildren graduating from four different high schools from each of our four children this year...probably happened this weekend. I feel bad that we are missing it, but we are so proud of each one of them. I know they will all do GREAT things in their futures.

All our Love,
Elder and Sister Wilcox