Hello everyone,
It's been another amazing week, different, but amazing.
The church held an Employment Conference in Salt Lake City for all the managers from Employment Centers across the United States and Canada. We gathered with approximately 175 missionaries for training, advice, and encouragement. Our favorite part was getting acquainted with so many wonderful people and learning new ideas. We got to stay at the Marriott Hotel and were well fed. We enjoyed dinners at the Church Office Building and This Is The Place State Park. One of our meals even had flowers on the table from Pres. Nelson's 100th Birthday! What an amazing man and prophet he is!
While there we enjoyed walking through the Temple Gardens, the Family Search Center and the Church History Museum. Along the way we bumped into my cousin Ann Calder, met a Visitor Center missionary who knew my cousin Erica serving in Mongolia, met a couple who knew Hermana Laurie's family in Concepcion, Chile, and invited a young man from India who was interested in the temple to visit the Oakland Temple near his home in California. He took our number to coordinate visiting us when we serve at the Oakland Visitor Center. Cool to continue to do missionary work. I love wearing a missionary badge! It brings so many opportunities to share the Gospel.
After our conference, we traveled home and stopped at Cafe Rio in American Fork for dinner. We had 3 different groups of people ask us about our mission. The first one grew up in Antioch where we currently live, a daughter and her parents lived for years near the Oakland Temple and then a man stopped at our table saying he had overheard our conversation and wanted to share that he had served in the Oakland/San Francisco Mission as a young missionary. How amazing to connect with so many people during one meal while away from our mission!
The church let us choose when to fly in and out so we tagged on both weekends before and after the conference. We were able to catch up on a few things around the house and yard, and spend a lot of time with our kids and grandkids. We flew back to California quite late Saturday night, arriving at 11:00p.m. We took the BART - Bay Area Rapid Transit, then Uber to get to our car parked at the Mission Office. Then we drove a short distance to an empty senior apartment to go to bed by 1:30. This saved us time traveling back to our apartment another 40 minutes away and also saved us that 40 minute drive Sunday morning. Instead we were only 20 minutes away from finding a church in downtown San Francisco to attend the Bay ward, the Golden Gate ward, a YSA ward and then we traveled into Chinatown to attend the Cantonese "group" that meets in what was once a restaurant with very vibrant decor! Then we got to visit a senior couple who serve in government relations. They live on the 10th floor of an apartment building that has a huge wall of windows overlooking San Francisco clear out to Angel Island and Alcatraz. On our way home, we exited the Bay Bridge to drive out onto Treasure Island. So many amazing sights here in the Bay area. We love our mission and know the last 3 weeks will zip by. We have begun to say our last goodbyes to missionaries as we see them out and about, or here for dinner one last time. We will be sad to pull away in a few weeks. We have had a grand time, every day, in every way.
Love Elder and Sister Jerman
No comments:
Post a Comment