Mission Update 8/25/2024

 August has been throwing fun weather our way this week with random rainstorms and gusty wind that makes styling hair seem rather useless. It much more fun that the non stop hot of July. Fall is coming!

We started our week of with our Monday mission devotional and the Cravens spoke and the choir sang. We did an arrangement of The Lord is My Light that was put together by Sister Roth in our mission. We've done another of her arrangements this summer and both are beautiful. This one was such a big hit that we get to do it again for a devotional in September. She uses the same words to the hymns but puts them to new melodies and we love them.

We had a devotional on Tuesday about doing our family history work and this was the first slide in the presentation. It got everyone's attention quite nicely.

One day we had a couple of students from the same area with similar issues. Both had been away for the summer for military assignments and both have been learning from the missionaries. The first one joined the church before he left, back in June and the second is working to be baptized very soon. So, we helped the first student get his record number attached to his account and we interviewed the second and told her to let us know when she was baptized so we could help her get her number attached. Sometimes we feel more like a tech help desk. But, both students were just delightful.

We had another fun photo sent to us from a brand new member of the Church in Nigeria!  He talked to us a couple of weeks ago and we did his endorsement interview.  He told us he was planning on being baptized soon!  So I told him to send a picture of his baptism when the day occurred!  That day was today, Sunday August 25th, and he was baptized and confirmed today!

Joshua is the tallest one in this picture!  Second from right!

BYU Pathway Worldwide is truly changing the world!  We are training people with better education and with testimonies of Christ who will lead their families, then their communities, and then their countries to a whole different level of success and direction!  Joshua's words to me today: "By the special grace of God I have been baptized and confirmed today in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  I am so happy to be part of the true Church of Jesus Christ."  I too am so happy to have been born into the true Church of Jesus Christ!

The semester starts in mid September so the panic is setting in for the students who procrastinated. But, fortunately we have gotten ourselves caught up enough that we have time to help these last minute ones. We really feel like miracles have occurred for us to be able to get through so many students this summer. Currently we are really grateful to Elder and Sister Kunz, from Blackfoot Idaho, who have stepped in part time to help with the interviews.

Packs and Kunzs in the Church History Library

Friday night we went to the concert in the park and the group was Molly in the Mineshaft. They were a bluegrass group--fiddle, accordion, guitars, mandolin and percussion. They wanted a unique name when they first formed their band, and they found a story about a Molly in the Mineshaft out of California when a mule named Molly fell into a mineshaft and had to be rescued, so the name stuck!  It was my favorite concert so far. So much fun, fast paced music!  You should all look them up on YouTube! There is one more concert next Friday and then we'll have to actually search for concerts until December when the daily Christmas performances start again. 

Molly in the Mineshaft Concert

Elder and Sister Lund who have been our zone leaders almost from the time we came on our mission, are leaving this week. We're sad to see them go! The Lunds, Smiths, and Packs went out for Sushi this week before the Lunds leave and go home to South Carolina. There is a place in Salt Lake, Itto Sushi, that gives half price sushi to missionaries and it was so good!

Packs, Lunds, and Smiths eating sushi

This coming week will be exciting as we start conference choir rehearsals on Wednesday. We're so thrilled with this opportunity! We'll have rehearsals every Wednesday and then some extra ones the week of conference when the whole choir will finally sing together. It is a massive undertaking and we are so impressed with the music committee and all their organization and experience.  We have absolutely loved working with them helping organize and prepare for this amazing experience.  We will need a few extra prayers sent our way so we can successfully memorize all of the songs for our Conference Session on Saturday evening!  

Have another wonderful week!  Look for God in the details of your life and thank Him for all of your blessings and challenges!

Elder and Sister Pack

Mission Update 8/18/2024

 It was a funny week. We started off with the usual feeling of being completely buried in students to interview and then on Friday we looked at our list and wondered if we'd have enough interviews to do this next week. But, the deadlines start happening over the next few weeks and that gets the procrastinators moving so I'm sure we won't be out of work. 

We went to lunch with some departing missionaries and ran into one of my cousins at the Cheesecake Factory. She and her husband recently returned from their mission in the north east (Massachusetts I think). It's fun to be in Salt Lake where we run into so many people we know.

Monday evening we went to visit a family in our ward to help their son get signed up for Pathway and give him some encouragement. They fed us a chicken dish with sweet potato leaves and it was spicy and very good. I think Gary was ready to move in and eat there all the time!

Tuesday the conference choir emails went out so that caused both excitement and tears. We feel bad for the 30 or so who did not make the choir but are so happy for the 60 that made it. Auditions are always a hard thing. We start practices in a couple of weeks and should be getting our music very soon to start memorizing. 

Gary got to sing in a quartet for our Tuesday devotional and it was lovely (Brightly Beams our Father's Mercy) and he gets to do it again with 3 other men for a devotional in a little over a week. It seems to be the song of the month which is just fine with me because I love it!

Thursday we did sealings in the Bountiful Temple and then got back home just in time for our district dinner and fireside. President Kush from Ensign College spoke and we loved it. Ensign college works very closely with Pathway (as does BYUI) and several of the things he talked about were directly connected to what we do. The church education system is doing so many amazing things around the world to give more and more people the opportunity to get an education. 

Today we had Stake Conference and since it started later than our normal meeting we were able to go to Music and the Spoken Word which we loved so much. 

We've also loved the beautiful skies the past few days. We get this and then a rain storm. Perfect August weather.

From Gary:  Today we started with Music and the Spoken Word because we can go the Conference Center early and can listen to their rehearsal that happens before the broadcast.  We then went to most of our Stake Conference session before heading to a missionary Welcome Home for Allison Dittmer, who is my nephew Justin's daughter!  She just returned from serving in North Carolina - Spanish speaking!  It was really great to see Justin, Joanne and their kids, along with Tony and his kids, and Dyany and Jake there too!  Family is everything!

We are loving our mission!

Have a great week!

Elder and Sister Pack 

 

Mission update 8/11/2024

 Shockingly enough, it's been another busy week. But, we survived and didn't have any complete meltdowns so it's a win. The number of students needing interviews is almost under 200 at the moment but that will go up a bit after the weekend like it always does. Somehow it seems almost manageable.

We had a devotional with Sister Amy Wright (Primary Presidency Counselor) on Monday and it was beautiful. I loved when she took a couple of chapters in 3rd Nephi and pulled all the bad circumstances out and then the good. It was really fun to see how both were happening at the same time and how similar it was to our day.

The good

A zone devotional this week started with this slide: 

Elder Baldwin then shared how he was able to learn from the spirit a better way to look at a spilled bowl of cheerios and have a memorable moment with a small son. I love so much when people take every day experiences and show how the spirit of God works in our lives so regularly.

After missing the temple last week, we went to the Bountiful Temple on Thursday and it was quite wonderful. I love this entrance from the underground parking.

                            And, if you angle the camera just right, you can see the temple too.

We seem to trade off days of bad connections and missed interviews but we eventually got hold of most of the students who were set up to talk to us. Sometimes all we can get is the bare minimum answers and other times we have lovely conversations. I just have to remind myself that the fact that we can have any sort of conversation on the other side of the world is pretty miraculous. 

Saturday we were up in Logan again, cleaning the basement apartment. It is looking much better and we have a pretty doable list of repairs that we'll work on over the next little bit. We had dinner at McDonald's with our Logan bunch and the grandkids had a great time in the play area. It was a fun, busy day and a very nice break from all the interviews and computer work.

Today we taught the 6 and 7 year olds again and they were great. We just show up every Sunday with a mostly prepared lesson that can be adjusted to whatever age and then see where they put us. It's a fun adventure. 

It's our monthly One Heart Gathering and we're sending some missionaries home that we really do not want to lose this month. It's a sad reality of missions.

The Temple Square gardens continue to amaze us

From Gary:  We had our One Heart Gathering which showcases the new missionaries that joined us this month and then we listen to the departing missionaries that we have grown to love.  I was reminded that it is indeed an amazing place to be when we work at Church Headquarters.  We are involved with dozens of departments and assist them in their work.  We now have about 1400 Senior Missionaries that are working here in our mission.  A little over 200 of us are full-time missionaries and the rest live close enough to Salt Lake that they can come into Headquarters and assist in the work.  We have made many eternal friends with the missionaries and Church employees that we work with.  

Most of all, I was reminded that this truly is the work of God to build His kingdom on the earth!  He is involved with us every hour of every day!  We feel His presence here whenever we pay a little bit of attention and recognize it.  

I also know that every one of the believers of Jesus Christ who pray and work with their families to find the way back to our eternal home are building the Kingdom of God just as much as we are here!  We just get to spend almost every waking hour engaged while we are missionaries!  

What a great blessing it is to have parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and even great-great-grandparents that embraced the gospel and were willing to sacrifice so much to bring it to their families.  We love this work!

Have a glorious week!

Elder and Sister Pack

Mission update 8/4/2024

 This week just about did us in but thank goodness for the weekend and we're almost ready to tackle another week. We adjusted to a new spreadsheet and are sort of okay with it. We sent Elder and Sister Smith off to the Church Office Building and they're getting used to their new assignments there while we are getting used to not having them right next to us all day. We also got some new temporary part time help with Elder and Sister Kunz, so we spent Thursday and Friday helping them do interviews as well as doing our own. They are great and very excited to have more to do and to talk to the fun students we get. 

After all of that, we came home Friday afternoon ready to either cry or run away. But, here we are on Sunday afternoon getting ready for a new week and hoping for the best. It shouldn't be nearly as stressful. We're cutting the number of interviews we do each day down to our more normal levels and making sure we schedule time in the temple which we missed last week.

We had some great interviews amidst the stress. I talked to a 17 year old from Eswatini who is in her second semester of the degree program and very focused and happy to be moving forward with her life. I also spoke with a man in his 40s who had his son right next to him during the interview. As he answered the question about honesty his son piped up and said that his dad was always honest. Pretty good confirmation! 

We have devotionals pretty much every day and they are all good but I think the ones that impact me the most is when people share the ordinary events of their lives where they saw the hand of the Lord. I can relate to that and it really helps me to recognize those ordinary times in my life where I have seen the hand of the Lord. I had a time like that on Friday where I was in a room, ready for a zoom interview with a student. I had earbuds in so I could hear the student and was just waiting with my phone on the zoom site. We give them plenty of time to connect so I sat there for 20 minutes waiting. It was a sea of calm in a day of craziness where I just sat in silence. I needed that so much on Friday! That time of silence helped me survive the rest of the afternoon. Tender mercy for sure!

Friday night's concert in the park was Coco Garcia and his band. They played Latin music and it was such fun, happy music. What a fantastic way to end the week!

Beautiful Friday night sky over the Conference Center

Saturday we did some cleaning of our basement apartment in Logan to get it ready for new renters at some point. There will be more cleaning and repairs but we did a lot of work before we left on our mission so it's not too horrible. We also stopped in Hooper to see Gordon and Maria's house that they just bought. So fun for them! 

Fun flower, growing way out west in Hooper

Our Fast and Testimony meeting today was just the best. We had a man coming back to church after years spent making bad decisions and he talked about how the Spirit was working with him, testifying of truth. We had a sister sing her testimony beautifully. We had brand new father who had just blessed his 3 week old baby talk about how much his life is blessed and we had a teenager, who gets up every single month, share her testimony of her Savior. I just sat there feeling so blessed to be in this ward!

From Gary: It was a busy week, but it was also filled with amazing students and amazing interviews!  I was very grateful for the timing of one interview in particular!  We can only do the endorsements for non-members of the Church.  Since many are joining the Church while they are attending BYU Pathway Worldwide, we find out that they have joined the Church since the last time we checked on them, so we have to send them back to go through the right channels of getting their endorsements through the Bishop, then their Stake President.  

I was talking to one student, Okey Justice from Uganda, who, when asked if he was a baptized member of the Church, said yes, I just got baptized!  After congratulating him on his decision, I asked him when he was baptized, and he said "last Sunday."  Then with just a glimmer of hope, I asked if he had be confirmed yet.  He said "no, that will happen this next Sunday!"  Since I know they are not actually a member until they are confirmed, I was thrilled because I could still complete his endorsement before he became a member!  A tender mercy.  Here is a picture from his baptism along with others who were baptized at the same time:

Okey Justice and friends Baptism

We do love what we are doing!  We see the hand of the Lord in all of the work that goes on here at Church Headquarters!

Love you all!

Elder and Sister Pack