Mission update 8/17/2025

Hello Family and Friends!

Sunday (August 17) kind of got away from us so we didn't even attempt to get this started yesterday. So, the date above is not correct, but that's life. Of course we're working on the Christlike attribute of integrity this week so we'll need to work on repenting...

We had our oldest son, Jeremy, with us for a few days at the beginning of the week and it was wonderful. We also got to go to South Jordan a couple of times to see the rest of the family who were staying at his in law's home while Jeremy was at the Small SAT conference. We got to celebrate our daughter in law's birthday and it was great to see the whole family for a bit (except their oldest son who is on a mission). 

The bald head to the right is Jeremy, we didn't plan that picture well

We are working on organizing the training for the missionaries who will be replacing us. We don't officially know who they are yet but want to be ready. They'll be combining what the three groups of Chaplains do all under one umbrella which will be wonderful. That should actually work as the student numbers continue to grow. 

We had almost half our students this week end up being members who joined the church after they started Pathway. One woman who is 42 and has several children was just so excited about all the peace she feels in her life since joining the church. She was also thrilled that her children, who never wanted to go to church in her previous church, are now ready before she is on Sunday and anxious to get to church. What a blessing!

Thursday evening we had dinner with Elder and Sister Dye from our mission and Brian and Susan Alldredge. Gary and Brian are cousins and Elder Dye and his first wife were neighbors of the Alldredges as they were raising their children. It was a great dinner with lots of fun memories and stories. 

Cheesecake Factory

We went to the Friday night concert in the park again and is was a really good Acapella group this time. The weather was perfect and the sky was beautiful. Fun evening all around with a big crowd.

We spent time with two of our Murray grandchildren on Saturday and got ice cream so it was a great evening!

Ice cream from a cute little store near their home

Sunday was the first practice for the multi cultural conference choir for October Conference and we got to help direct everyone up to the choir loft. This got just a bit tricky since the stairs going straight up to the loft were not there. We thought maybe some rope climbing would be great but sadly, we just led them up the back stairs :)

Sunday evening we had dinner with a family from our ward here in Salt Lake. Their middle son is in our primary class and the Dad is in the bishopric. They are from Mongolia and have been in Utah for about 4 years while Dad works on getting his degree, hopefully in engineering. 

The Batmagnai family

From Gary:  We are going to miss the Ward we have been attending for the past nearly two years when we return home.  It is a unique situation where we have people from many different countries and continents that attend here.  So many are converts to the Church who have come here to seek education and better employment in the US.  Their testimonies and the love they share with each other is inspiring!  We have really loved working in the Primary and helping the children learn more about the gospel!  

This coming week I get to do a Zone Devotional on Integrity, which is one of the Attributes of Christ that we are studying in Preach My Gospel (Chapter 6).  We are studying one of these Attributes each week until General Conference.  Anyone reading this should think about joining us in this effort for the next few weeks!  Integrity is one of those difficult subjects that make us feel like we are inadequate because of the perfection it takes to have complete integrity.  Then we have to remember to just work hard every day to be a little bit better and move forward toward so many of these things.  

As I was thinking about the Devotional, I was reminded of the hymn True to the Faith that was sung by the youth choir in April 2025 Conference.  I love that song!  It reminds me that I want to remain true to the faith that my parents have cherished, and that my biggest dream for my children, grandchildren, and friends that they will find this faith too and stay true to it forever!  See this song here:   https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/music/music-from-april-2025-general-conference/2025-04-true-to-the-faith?lang=eng

Have a glorious week!

We love you!

Elder and Sister Pack

Mission update 8/10/2025

Hello Friends and Family!

We started off the week with our standard Monday devotional, this time with President and Sister Webster. They are President and Matron of the Bountiful Temple and Sister Webster is one of President Nelson's daughters. There is always one thing that sticks out to me more than others in these devotionals and this week it was laying the things we have to sacrifice to serve God on the altar. To me that means leaving them there and not being concerned about them any more. One thing we know is that God will way over compensate us for any sacrifice we give. We just need that trust in Him.

On Tuesday Gary got to fill in for a leader of a Leadership Pattern Journey class and it was so good. The theme this week was Building Capability. It is such a great lesson--focusing on building people to become all they can be. The example in a ward is to call people to callings who may not be the most prepared, but choosing those who can learn and grow, becoming the people God wants them to be. It is a beautiful concept!

Friday we got to play for about half an hour at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building in the lobby. It is such a beautiful space and we loved being able to play there. It also gave us a chance to practice for our Monday morning musical number along with a few others just for fun!

In the Partially-Open Joseph Smith Memorial Building - The Old Hotel Utah

After that, we did sealings in the Bountiful Temple with the Smiths. The sealer was wonderful and took the last few minutes of our session to discuss parts of the sealing ordinance with us. Nothing earth shattering or new, but it is so good to discuss those things in the temple.

After that we went to the concert in the park which was a group called The Relics who perform music from the 70s. They had a good crowd for that era! Afterwards, Gary found that he and one of the men went to high school together so that was fun. 

Relics at Brigham Young Park

Gary With Scott Olsen From Skyview High School!

More flower pictures because there can never be enough

Saturday we went to the John Pack reunion in Kamas and got to learn about the Pack heritage up there. The Packs had a timber operation and ran cattle. John Pack also had families in Bountiful and Salt Lake so he was traveling back and forth a lot. Someone told us that he had a horse who could make the trip from Kamas to Salt Lake in a day. 

Gary Telling More John Pack Stories!

Saturday afternoon we got a call from a counselor in the bishopric asking us to give talks so of course we said yes, and then started working on those in between other things the rest of the day. Last night we went to our daughter in law, Emily's show in Logan and loved that. It was great to see her again and makes us even more excited for our visit with the whole family in a few months!

Emily Is AMAZING and Way Too Much FUN!

We've got Jeremy and family in town this week for a work conference, so we will be able to spend time with them when we have free time. We sure love our kids!

From Gary:  We were assigned to talk about President Eyring's talk and from President Nelson's talk from the April General Conference today.  Sylvia gave a great discourse about drawing near unto God and finding our holy places where we can commune with God.  I then spoke about getting confidence in the presence of God through Charity and Virtuous thought.  It was great to review and speak about these wonderful sermons from our leaders!

It was great to see so many cousins from the John Pack family in Kamas this weekend!  John Pack had three of his wives in the Kamas area and three of his wives down in the Woods Cross area.  I learned a lot of things I had not known before about the Kamas families!  And we also had several show up from the Roe family, who come down through my grandfather William Crestfield Pack's sister Lola Eliza Pack who married William Ray Roe and lived in Stone Idaho by Snowville Utah where my dad grew up!  It was really fun to get acquainted with these extended cousins!

Have a wonderful week!

We love you all!

Elder and Sister Pack

Mission update 8/3/2025

 Our huge accomplishment this week is that we have about 20 empty choir music bins. This is very exciting! Unfortunately no one else seems quite as excited as we are about it. Oh well, pearls before swine and all that....

We keep getting a steady number of student requests in, enough to keep everyone at least doing a few interviews every day. This assignment has never been predicable during our mission so training someone to take over from us will be interesting. If dealing with constant change helps keep dementia at bay, we're set!

Gary's sister Genie and her husband Kent came to town on Friday and stayed overnight in our luxury accommodations (we let them have our bed and took the air mattress). We took them to Deseret Book (for ice cream and books) and the Tabernacle along with the statues there. Then they decided that was enough since they'd been up since 3:00 am or so. It was fun to catch up with them (they live in Oklahoma). 

The weekly changing out of the temple top porta potties

We also had to go visit the new granddaughter in Logan again because newborns have a terribly bad habit of growing up overnight. She is still adorably perfect.

Our Primary class was great this week and paid more attention than usual which was weird but nice. One boy in the class has a step dad who just got ordained to the Aaronic Priesthood which is so cool. It's great to see the family make progress! We love our ward here and are really going to miss it when we go home!

The Attribute of Christ we are studying this coming week is Charity and Love. We definitely have lots of work to do on this one! We'll see if we can make a little bit of progress like we've done with faith and hope. This morning I was feeling quite frustrated with charity and my understanding of it. So, I asked for help in my morning prayers and then, the conference talk I was listening to today (Elder Gimenez) started with reminding us of the invitations the prophet has made to study the most recent conference talks followed by this paragraph:

Pondering over this and all the invitations we had received, I recalled something that I learned and decided long ago. I am trying to do these things which are essential to me because I love Him; I love our Savior. This is the real and most powerful reason why I do what I do, and then connected with this is my love for you, my fellow brothers and sisters.

When we can get to the point that we are obedient to Christ's commandments because we love Him, not just because of the blessings or lack of trials we'll be rewarded with, then we are starting to understand charity. That made so much sense to me, progress!

We're loving this emphasis on the Christlike attributes!

We had our monthly Break the Fast this afternoon and got to meet some of the new missionaries coming in this week. One sister fell on her way back to the apartment, breaking that only mission rule right off the bat. She's not the only one! We have one more Fast Sunday in our mission--so weird!

Mission update 7/27/2025

Hello All!

 It's been a fun week of celebrating the Pioneers, our anniversary and a new granddaughter!

On Monday evening we had our Elijah Choir Pioneer Program and it went very well. We had songs and narration starting from the First Vision to the Pioneers arriving in Salt Lake. We had a great attendance with lots of visitors along with the missionaries. These programs are a lot of work to put together but always are quite wonderful. 

We spent the three days we were in the office this week doing mostly choir music sorting and dumping. We filled 4 dumpsters but think we are mostly done with the dumping of music that is not needed. Now, this week we need to go through and reorganize and catalog the remaining music. Then we'll figure out how many crates we really need to move over to the Joseph Smith Memorial Building.  Our current office is in the North Office Building (NOB), but the Joseph Smith Memorial Building is opening up after years of construction and our Mission Office is moving back there.

We got a few interviews done and trained another part time Chaplain from our mission but the numbers are still down a bit so we were able to assign all the students out to other Chaplains while we did the organizing.

Wednesday we got a new granddaughter up in Logan and got to go visit her a few hours after she was born and then again a couple days later. She is a beautiful combination of her three older siblings and it's so fun to see bits of them in her. 

Grandchild Number 22!

Instead of watching the Days of 47 Parade from the balcony in front of our apartment building, like we did last year, we watched it on TV from Logan. It was much cooler and we loved all the commentary but are glad we got the in person experience last year. On our way out of town on Wednesday we saw  the parade entry for the transporting of the granite temple blocks:

Wagons Down North Temple Street!

We celebrated our 43rd anniversary on Tuesday this week with lots of work and a not very good meal out. So, of course we celebrated the rest of the week as well and had a lovely weekend with beautiful drives, the Bountiful Temple, and a show at the Planetarium. It was great!

At the Bountiful Temple!

From Gary:  It is amazing to have a 43rd wedding anniversary!  After meeting in the Orchestra at USU nearly 44 years ago, we are still making music together!  What an adventure our life has been so far!  We are still in love and our love for our family continues to grow with every new grandchild added!  We are so excited to have our 22nd grandchild here and healthy!

It is always good to think about our pioneer ancestors and know they continue to watch over us and all that is now happening with the restored gospel since their involvement in the beginning!  We love Pioneer Day and all of the memories it brings to our minds!

We have just two more months here on our mission.  We are still having phenomenal experiences every day as we work with all of the missionaries here at Church Headquarters and call Pathway students all over the world.  We are still loving working with our mission choir too!  

Have a wonderful week!

We love you all!

Sister and Elder Pack

Mission update 7/20/2025

Hello Friends and Family!

We started off the week with a devotional by President and Sister Craven about the Attributes of Christ from Chapter 6 of Preach My Gospel. They have challenged all the missionaries to work on one attribute a week until conference. What a great way to prepare for October conference!

With less student endorsement requests coming in, we've got more time to catch up on other things, like the sorting of choir music (and dumping). We got through 16 tubs of music and filled two recycling dumpsters with music we don't need because if it ever gets used again, it is the type that is okay to copy as needed. That is less than half of all the music we need to go through but it's a start.

We're feeling a bit pressured to get this done because we have an actual move date for our mission office to go to the Joseph Smith Memorial building and it's a month away. The goal is to have the music cut drastically by then so we have room to store it all. We'll spend more time working on that this week and should be able to get it done before too long. Then we'll need to reorganize and re-catalog everything. Yipee!

After being in Salt Lake for going on two years we finally got around to doing a Salt Lake puzzle this week:

Saturday we had a zone party on the 26th floor of the Church Office Building. I think we had almost half our zone there and lots of great food, fun games and beautiful views.  Our Zone here supports nearly every department of the Church and has nearly 150 missionaries in it now.  That is bigger than most entire missions around the world!

Headquarter Support Services East Zone Party

View From the 26th Floor!

Sunday we shared a video from the "related content" in Come Follow Me with our Primary class, which was our choir from last fall singing at the church music festival in the Tabernacle. They thought it was fun to see both of us in the video. Then we taught them the song--I Will Walk with Jesus. That and the coloring page took the whole lesson time. Primary lessons are so short now!

Sylvia on the Church's website!

Link: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/media/video/PTH_PRJ13471638_2024_11_16_ChurchMusicFestival_IWillWalkWithJesus_titled_master_eng.?lang=eng&alang=eng&collectionId=9d60c62c195541a69c8520136e3f8349

We're looking forward to a shorter week with Pioneer Day this week. It's fun to watch all the preparation downtown.

From Gary:  We love the events around July 24th!  We are very blessed to have so many of our ancestors who came with the early saints to Utah!  Our mission Elijah Choir has our Pioneer Program coming on Monday the 21st, so we have been preparing for that event too.  We just love to share stories and sing music about the restoration of the Gospel and the lives of those saints who helped bring these miracles to pass!

We had many great interviews again this week with BYU Pathway Worldwide students all over the world.  I would like to tell you about one young man I spoke to.  He is 32 years old and lives in Nigeria.  He has been an Associate Pastor in his church for many years.  He was invited to come to Pathway and further his education by a friend who is also a non-member of the Church.  He hesitated for about a year before finally giving in and giving it a try about nine months ago.  As he started to study with Pathway, he found out that the rumors that he had heard about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are just not true.  And when he read the Book of Mormon, he found out for himself that there is so much more to the gospel of Jesus Christ contained in its pages that he fell in love with it!  Then he went to Church and felt so much love that he kept coming back!  He is engaged to be married on August 2nd this year, and then he and his wife will finish their preparations and be baptized into the Church!

This Church truly is the work of God on the earth!  We love all churches that teach about Jesus and His Gospel, but we have so much more to share with the world!  

Have a wonderful week!

We love you all!

Elder and Sister Pack

Mission update 7/13/2025

Hello Friends and Family!

 Happy mid July heat! We're really happy it hasn't reached 100 yet and really really happy any time we see even a hint of cloud cover. But, the flowers all over Temple Square are loving the heat and it's all so beautiful. 

We found a fun statue this week, not on Temple Square but just on a random downtown street:

Cat's Cradle, brings back fun memories of elementary school (for me, not Gary)

We got to have lunch with Debbie Dittmer.  She is a sister of our brother in law Kent Dittmer.  It was great to catch up with her. We've loved all the people we get to spend time with!

Lunch with Debbie Dittmer in the Church Office Building cafeteria

This quote was shared in our Monday devotional (put on by the missionaries who serve in Ensign College) and is a great definition of charity for me:

We had a great week of interviews--enough, but not so many we went completely crazy. We actually had time to go back and try to catch some of the students who didn't respond earlier. One day I was able to track down several who had used different variations of their names from what was on their record. It's like some of them have half a dozen names and then use different combinations of those six whenever they have to write their name. :)

Friday we went to the Layton Temple with the Smiths and loved our time there so much. It is a great way to finish a week!

Packs in Layton!

Today we went in person for the 5000th broadcast of Music and the Spoken Word. It was so fun to be there and so cool to see how many people came!

Five Thousandth Broadcast!  Before it Started...

From Gary:  We continue to have amazing missionary experiences every week!  I spoke to several non-members of the Church who told me how much BYU Pathway has given them more faith in Jesus Christ and how much they are loving the Book of Mormon!  I also love to ask them how many of their friends they have introduced to Pathway.  The average student has invited more than five of their friends and many of them are already taking Pathway classes!  Imagine this: Since we are baptizing around 40% of these non-members who join Pathway, some of our greatest missionary referrals are now coming from non-members inviting their friends to come to Pathway to get a world-class education at the best price on the planet.  Then they get to take Institute classes and fall in love with the Church.  They then invite the missionaries to their homes, get baptized, and keep bringing more friends to Pathway!  It is no wonder that the Church has seen more baptisms in the last 12 months than ever in the history of the Church!

I spoke with one woman this week who now has her husband taking BYU Pathway classes too.  They have two teenage children.  All four of them are attending Church and are loving it!  

Every day as we do these interviews we are seeing the hand of God in the lives of these students all around the world.  

Our family continues to be the source of our greatest joy!  It is amazing to see them grow and progress in life and the gospel!  We love spending time with them both physically and by modern technology!  We could tell stories of each of our their families and go on for hours and hours, but we do need some time to sleep before we start this coming week with our early morning devotional in the Church Office Building!

Have a wonderful week!  

We love you all!

Elder and Sister Pack

Mission update 7/6/2025

Hello Friends!

We hope you all had a wonderful time celebrating the 4th of July. It's so fun to live in Utah where we start and end July with parties and fireworks. 

Monday started off with an early devotional where Sister Andros and I did a violin and cello duet of The Lord is my Shepherd. The change from our first run through to Monday was rather amazing and it ended up sounding quite lovely. The first time through we kind of had our doubts...

Yet Another Musical Number!

The week was jam packed with interviews and recording interviews again and by the time we got to Thursday afternoon we were just burned out. But, the interviews themselves are always wonderful and we so love these students who are working to make a difference in their lives. I talked to a couple of students who are really hoping to come over to the US to attend their graduation in person when they're done. That would take a few miracles but hopefully they can figure it out. 

Thursday morning we had a wonderful zone devotional for Independence Day but technology was just not cooperating. So, we got the part of the devotional that wasn't the slide show and the video. Then we got to enjoy the pictures and video later when they were emailed to us. I felt bad for the presenters but really loved all the work they put in. After that, I had a devotional to do and I was really hoping that it wasn't one of those days where technology just doesn't work anywhere. Fortunately my power point went quite smoothly and I may have even made some sense in the presentation. With all the devotionals we do we're pretty much set talks for the rest of our lives--just tweak the presentations into a talk and there we go. 

Friday and Saturday we stayed off of our computers and spent time out of the city. It was lovely! We didn't go to any parades or fireworks shows but just enjoyed time together and got a little work done in Logan. Very boring but so good and so needed!

Decor at Big J Burgers in Preston, Happy 4th!

With a little work these onion rings could become Olympic rings

Bald Mountain, which we did not climb because one of us was wearing sandals

Our Fast and Testimony Meeting today was very interesting. There were a few "normal" testimonies and then there were three from members who have come the the US from countries they needed to get away from. One from Czechoslovakia is celebrating his 53 year anniversary of escaping communism this week. Another from Iran celebrates living in a land of peace and is learning to forgive those who want to hurt people in his country. Another escaped about 20 years ago from Sierra Leone and celebrates being a citizen. Our country may not be perfect but it was so wonderful to hear those messages of gratitude for the freedoms we have.

From Gary:  It was a great reminder this weekend of the amazing country that we live in and the freedoms that we have that are not available anywhere else.  Robert Santholzer from our Ward here in SLC spoke about his 53 year freedom from the communists and socialists where he literally lost friends and family members to those regimes.  He plead with us to pray that our eyes would be open to the falsehood of these ideas.  Then the refugee from African wars who was able to escape and eventually come to America and gain citizenship here spoke of his love for America.  And then from an Iranian member of the Church who bore testimony of Jesus Christ's first and second commandments and asked us to pray for the people of Iran. 

Along with that, our weekly Zone devotional was put together by a couple who asked for pictures of our family members that had served in the military, then put together a slide show including a picture of my father William Donald Pack, who fought the front lines in Germany in World War II.  All of these events made me think more deeply of my love for this country and my love of the Lord who declared this country to be the Promised Land!  I know this to be true!  No other place in the world could the Gospel be restored!  No other place in the world can have the land where Jesus will return and reign as King of King and Lord of Lords!  No matter what turmoil we witness here, we know that the Lord is in charge and that nothing can stop His work from moving forward exactly how He needs it to move forward!  We know who wins in the end!  And we choose this day to follow Him: Jesus Christ!

We also had another amazing week here with our missionary work!  One of the young adults I talked to last week sent me a picture of her baptism that happened on Sunday:

Maria From Argentina on Her Baptism Day

These BYU Pathway students are finding the gospel more deeply in their lives and falling in love with the Church!

Have a marvelous and blessed week!

We love you all!

Elder and Sister Pack