Independence Breakfast, Ward FHE, Walk, Heat Again, Temple Trip, and Training

 Auntie Sandra held her "transfer" breakfast on Monday. In honor of so many USA Missionaries, she called it Independence Breakfast and decorated everything in Red, White, and Blue balloons and hung small US flags all over. It was a wonderful treat for us. The entire Zone showed up and we had a great time.

After that, we stopped by to help out a member, before picking up some vitamins. After we got home, we had our video call with Douhet's family. We got to visit with all the girls, except Audrey who is at BYU Idaho. We even got to see Roman. He is getting so big already. I can hardly wait to hold him for the first time. 

Elder Wilcox made some apple crisp for our Ward Family Home Evening. I was busy on the computer as usual. LOL. Family Home Evening was fun.

On Tuesday, we were able to take a nice walk around the lake in our neighborhood. We have every intention of doing that every day, but alas, it only happened once this week. 😢What was supposed to be a day of just catching up, turned out to be a very busy day as one thing after another popped up. I received a few requests for training for the Family Name Assist tool. We also were involved with helping out with the Temple Baptism trip for the youth and our new members. I worked on some financial reports for the Bishop. I worked on ordering new whiteboards for the missionaries in the Northland. And I helped Steve prepare his Personal Finance Class that he will be facilitating over the next 12 weeks. 

On Wednesday, we missed most of DCM because we had to hang out at the Hikurangi Elders' flat while they had a heat pump installed. Since Elder Olson is our District leader, he had to be at DCM. I took my laptop and used the couple of hours we were there to work on some HawkSoft ACORD forms work. We got to DCM in time for the last part of the training. We were able to participate. Each companionship was supposed to act out one of the Christlike Attributes discussed in Preach My Gospel in Chapter Six. Our assigned attribute was “Faith.” We acted worried and then decided to Pray. The group guessed it right away. The Carlisles had a fun one. They were to act out patience. Sister Carlisle stood up there while Elder Carlisle poked her and pulled her hair and did other annoying things. She just took it. We all guessed patience really quickly too. The others all did a great job, and we were able to guess theirs as well. It was a fun activity. Elder Wilcox made Apple Crisp for our main dessert and Sister Carlisle brought cucumber slices and cinnamon apples. It was all yummy. In the afternoon, we had Comp Study with the Hika Elders. Then we went with them to visit a member, but she didn't answer the door.

Thursday was similar to Tuesday. Lots of things just popped up. We had our Mission SPF Zoom meeting in the morning. The Sisters came over after that for an English Connect lesson with Sister Vili. It was a learning experience for all of us. We have been trying to have these lessons for weeks, but the Sisters kept scheduling other things. I think they know we need to make this a priority now for Sister Vili.  

We had lunch with the Sisters after our lesson, before they headed off to work again. It was pouring rain, so they really didn’t want to leave the comfort of our home. LOL I was glad I didn’t have to go out in the rain. We got another invitation to do training. This time it will be done via Messenger. I'm not sure how well that is going to work. It will be for this coming Tuesday evening. I finalized the Ward Council Agenda and the Sacrament Program. We won't be at Church Sunday morning for Ward Council because we will be in Auckland doing a Stake Bishops Training. We will be back in time for Church and our Personal Finance Class. We managed to watch an episode of Follow Him with John Bytheway and Hank Smith. 

We got up fairly early on Friday to acclimate ourselves to going to bed earlier for Friday night and Saturday night. I took care of everything that needed to be done for the weekend since we won't be here for much of the weekend. I spent the rest of the so-called p-day working on HawkSoft. I am trying to finish up the new ACORD forms mapping. We had to stay home because we finally got our heat pump back. They worked on it for a few hours in the morning. Then they had to go away for a couple of hours to let the lines get reinitialized again. They came back to check everything out and make sure there were no more issues. Everything worked perfectly. We have heat again. I poured all day, so it was cold. 

The Bishop stopped by around 5:00 to pick up the reports I made for him for Sunday. At 6:00pm the other set of Sisters came by for Comp Study. I was glad they could come in out of the rain. We had a wonderful comp study about Section 76 of the Doctrine and Covenants. There is so much in that section. We had a good discussion. 

After dinner and showers, we headed to bed. 3:00am comes awfully early!

We were up at 3:00am to drive to the Auckland Temple for the 8:00am Baptism appointment. Of course, we were basing our travel time on all the other trips we have done. Guess what? There is NO traffic at 4 in the morning. We were over an hour early. With no traffic, it only takes 2 ½ hours, not 3 ½ hours. Hahaha.

Jared and Ben

We took Ben and Jared for their first time at the Temple. They had an awesome experience. We had lots of adult leaders to help, so we went on an Endowment session instead. We were not scheduled to help, and we didn’t want to be in the way. We didn’t have an appointment so we weren’t sure we could get in. However, it pays to know the right people. It appears that the Whangarei Stake provided most of the Temple Workers for this morning. Bishop McQueen was the supervisor on the shift, and he said there would be no problem letting us in. So, he added a chair for me, and Elder Wilcox was able to find a seat on one of the benches. It was so nice to be in the Temple today.

When we got outside, we took several pictures. One young Sister came over and offered to take the group pictures. Low and behold, it was Sister Ngawaka who used to serve in our District. She went home many months ago. She lives in Australia. We keep in touch on Facebook. We were so surprised to see her back in New Zealand. She is here to attend the Temple Wedding of her friend at the Hamilton Temple. She had time and decided to check out the Auckland Temple before heading down to Hamilton. Tender Mercy that she was there at that exact time for us. Such a delightful blessing. 

On the way home, we swung by the Mission office to pick up a few things for some missionaries up north. Somehow, they found out we were coming and asked if we could pick them up. Once home, we grabbed a quick lunch and then headed out to pick up the whiteboards we ordered to replace the old ones with metal sides. We will pass them out at DCM this coming week. We ran down to Bream Bay to drop off two whiteboards and one of the packages that go to the South District. We still need to coordinate with Kaikohe to drop off a package for an Elder up there. 

Sister Ngawaka

We slept in until 3:30am on Sunday morning. Hahaha. We headed to the Harbour Stake to do a Family Name Assist training. We thought about staying overnight but thought we would prefer to sleep in our own bed and just drive up in the morning. We were right. The roads were good. I wanted to be early enough to get set up to use the big screen. That doesn’t work if no one else is early. Hahaha. People started showing up a little before our 7:00am meeting. Luckily it didn’t take long to get set up. We had most of the Bishops and the Stake Presidency. I think the meeting went very well. They seemed eager to learn, and the Stake President is definitely behind the program. 

We headed home at 7:30 and made it to Hikurangi at about 9:40. On the way back home it started to rain again. We sat in the car for a while before going in. We were hoping the rain would slow down at least a bit. When we got there, Ward Council was just ending. As I was getting the songs ready and starting the Organ, I noticed that our organist was missing. Our regular organist is out of the country for this week, but we had an organist who said she would play. I suppose I should have sent out a reminder. She ended up helping another Ward in another Stake and didn’t make our meeting. We did the best we could. Sister Paratene directed the music, while I tried the pre-programed organ again. It worked until one of the songs we were singing wasn’t on the pre-programmed list. Sister Paratene pitched the song, and we sang it acapella. We didn’t sound too bad. LOL.

We heard from three teenagers who went to the Temple on Saturday. We also heard from our two Elders. All the talks were good. Relief Society was good too. After Church, I took care of a few things the Bishop asked for. Then it was time to go home. 

We were starving and ate lunch. Getting up at 3:30 made us very hungry at 12:30. Hahaha. Once lunch was over, we got all set up for our Personal Finance Class. We didn’t have as many show up as had signed up. I will send out reminders for next week’s lesson. We are also going to change our time to an hour later. It was really tight at 2:00 and everyone that did come was about 20 minutes late. We had a wonderful class and discussion. I think this will be a great experience.

All our Love,
Elder and Sister Wilcox