Things I Would Teach My Hypothetical Children (Plus Some Pictures From Sardegna)

A little while ago a friend put this poster up on her Facebook feed:

It made me laugh but it also made me think about my own judgments of how people parent. The thing is, you see, I am not a Mom and I never will be in this life. I married later in life and for my husband it was even later in life and so starting a family wasn't in the cards for us.

Now before some of you go all feeling sorry for me, know that I'm completely at peace with this. Sure, there were moments of regret but for me it's all okay. What I became instead was an awkward, bumbling step-mother to grown children and after that a fairly okay step-grandmother.  Still, there have been lots of moments on this mission when I have thought, "if I had been a parent, it would have been good to teach my children this..." Or I might think, "Parents really should teach their children ________________ (fill in the blank) before they go on a mission."    

Now I don't want those of you who are parents to start squirming in your seat and to feel like I'm about to lay a guilt trip on you. Know that I'm in no position to judge any parent and how they raise their children. But if I could take a few of the things I've seen and learned on my mission and apply it to a younger version of me who actually did become an "ideal" parent, these are some things I would want my children to know and understand if they chose to go on a mission:

#1:  Mental illness is no-one's fault, and they will encounter it on a mission. They themselves may not become mentally ill (or they might) but if it's not them, a missionary companion or someone in their district will struggle with it at some point. If it's themselves, I would want them to seek and adhere to medical advice from medical professionals.  I would want them to understand that serving a mission does not exempt them from taking medications for these problems if needed. If it's a companion or other missionary that they work closely with who is struggling, I would teach them to be compassionate and supportive of this missionary and to keep their mission president and mission nurse informed when serious problems happen.

#2:  I would want them to know how to clean a bathroom and to have that be a regular part of their chores. One of our duties as senior missionaries is to do apartment inspections. There are some missionaries who do a pretty good job of keeping their apartments clean and some who really, really, really don't. On one apartment inspection we did, the two missionaries complained that when they had been put it that area, it took them four days to deep-clean their apartment because the previous missionaries had left it in a disgusting state. As one of them said, "These are my friends. How could they do this to us?" Another thing that happens is the mission has to pay for expensive repairs because of silly things these kids (because let's face it - they ARE kids) do. We are working on educating these young people about cleaning and taking care of their apartments, but still, I think would want to teach my hypothetical children that church funds are sacred and not well spent on preventable apartment repairs.

#3:  I would tell them that they are going to be a "have-not" missionary. Oh, I don't mean I would leave them without proper clothes or the things they need and I wouldn't leave them without occasional fun money for Christmas and their birthday. But I would want them to learn to budget and live on the monthly money they get on their church debit card for food and personal items. I would want them to learn how to do without when they can't afford something that isn't an absolute need. There are in our mission "have" and "have not" missionaries. Personally, I'd prefer my hypothetical children to be "have-nots."

There. That's what I would do if I could project this on to a past me who is living in an alternate universe where I became a perfect parent.  Ha, ha, ha! As if I could ever be a perfect parent. Does such a person even exist? Okay, enough of that.

Well, getting back to the topic of apartment inspections, it was our privilege to go to the island of Sardegna a few weeks back to do the inspections of the apartments there. Sardegna apartment inspections is something that rotates through the senior couples in Rome because we have no senior couple serving on the island to do them. So it was our turn.

Sardegna is a place I've long been curious about because my sister-in-law's children have relatives there and rave about it. What they mainly rave about are the beaches in the summertime, but November really isn't the time to see beaches. In fact, we hoped we would see some beaches but it didn't happen on our travels. 

Now you're probably thinking, but what about that picture? Because you're seeing palm trees etc. Well, this was taken at the port of Olbia early on a very chilly morning when our ferry first got in. But it is an awfully nice sunrise, isn't it?

Now this is what kills me about this Mediter-ranean climate. Even when we are wrapped up in our toques and scarves, we can wander past blooming bushes and trees. It just warms up my little Canadian heart. 

And here's another thing that warms up my little Canadian heart: thick dark Italian Hot Chocolate for breakfast. Nobody, but nobody, can do Hot Chocolate as good as the Italians can, in my humble opinion.

We saw mountains, lots and lots of mountains. But when I look at this picture, I realize that the photo doesn't really do justice to the magnificent mountain scenery we saw near Cagliari. Oh and we saw lots of sheep too. More sheep than you can possibly imagine.

And another big thrill was to see one of these: a Nuraghe (a.k.a. Nuraghi). Nuraghes are pre-historic structures that you find here and there throughout Sardegna that date between 1900 and 700 B.C. Historians don't really agree what they were used for and don't have a lot of information about the civilization that built them. But because we climbed right up to this one and peeked inside, it looked to us like a meeting place with a hole in the top where the smoke from a fire would have come out of, similar to a tee pee. It was a thrill for us to see that we could get this up close and personal to a Nuraghe. 

It must sound like all we did was have fun and games on Sardegna but not true. We spent the first two days there just driving to apartments and doing inspections and it was exhausting. It was the third day, our P-Day, when we finally had some time to see the sights. So now my curiosity about Sardegna has been satisfied, though I may never get to see one of their magnificent beaches.


It doesn't matter because I have seen and experienced so many wonderful things here. Everyday I realize what a blessing it is to be here, to serve a mission, to associate with great people and to get to see the wonders of Italy. I couldn't ask for more.

All Roads Really Must Lead to Rome

A week ago Saturday we finally did something we've intended to do since we got here which was walk a little bit of the Appia Antica. It was a beautiful day with just a little bit of autumn crispness but still sunny and mild.        
                       
The Appia Antica is an ancient Roman road that apparently extends all the way from the sea coast at Pozzuoli to the Colosseum in central Rome. It is perfectly straight because the Romans didn't believe in windy roads. There are ancient mausoleums along the side of the road as the nobility liked to be buried there, I guess so people would notice them and remember them as they would make their way to and from Rome. We took this picture below of the monk walking along the road with a walking stick, just as if he'd stepped out of the middle ages. You can also see the remnants of some of the mausoleums in the background.

The Appia Antica is a famous road from the past. In a grimmer part of history in about 70 B.C., 6,000 people who fought with Spartacus in the slave rebellion were crucified, their crosses lining both sides of the Appian Way. In a more positive part of history, it is recorded in the Bible that The Apostle Paul came to Rome on the Appian Way (Acts 28: 13-15).

The part we walked was a cobble-stoned road full of cyclists and strolling families along with the occasional car. I loved it there. It had such a special feeling to it I can't quite describe. You could feel the history of the road as if the shadows of ancient people were still walking there beside us.

I've given this blog post this title in part because of this day. But it's also because of all the people who've come to Rome since we've been here. In October our mission was visited by yet another high ranking church leader, President Russell M. Nelson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. He makes the fifth General Authority we've met in person since we got to Rome just under a year ago. I'm sure if we lived in the heart of Salt Lake City, we wouldn't have met so many.

Here's a picture of President and Sister Nelson with President and Sister Pickerd. I stole this picture of the Pickerd's blog: pickerdsitalyromemission.blogspot.com.

 

President Nelson is the most senior of the apostles in our Church. Can you believe he is over 90 years of age? In his previous career he was a reknowed heart surgeon. I was amazed to read recently that he was at one time challenged by another church leader to learn Mandarin Chinese so he took the challenge and is now fluent. Where did he find the time? He is one very smart man.

We had a mission conference with President Nelson where he talked about the Abrahamic covenant and how it relates to us today. It was very interesting. He has obviously studied it considerably because in our follow up studies on the subject, we found three previous conference talks he gave on that general subject.

You can find those talks here:
https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2006/10/the-gathering-of-scattered-israel?lang=eng

As well as here: https://www.lds.org/general-conference/1995/04/children-of-the-covenant?lang=eng

And here: https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2011/10/covenants?lang=eng

In October we were also visited consecutively by Hermes' two daughters and their husbands. This is one of the privileges of being senior missionaries is being able to host family while we are here. We had so much fun! We did take them to see places we'd already been like Civita di Bagnoreggio but it's nice to show people we love all the places we love.

This is Georgia with her husband Malan having strawberry crepes in Nemi.
Nemi is a beautiful little town not far from Rome that overlooks a volcanic lake in the valley below. It's also famous for growing strawberries.

I also love the look on Georgia's face with these invisible men buskers in central Rome:

The day after Georgia and Malan left, Francesca and her husband Jerad came to visit.

This is them at Civita di Bagnoreggio. It had been really foggy that day and when we arrived we couldn't see the town at all but fortunately the fog burned off so we could get some pictures.

And this is another nice one of them at Ceveteri, which is an ancient Etruscan cemetery or what they called an Etruscan City of the Dead that archeologists have excavated. The Etruscans believed in burying their dead in these cave like mounds that resembled the houses they lived in in life. It's hard to describe but it's a very interesting place.

Both visits from the girls and their husbands were happy times for us. We were sorry to see them go.

And speaking of being sorry to see someone go, we will soon be saying goodbye to Elder and Sister Sears from our mission. I'll start with talking about Sister Sears:

Although in her life outside the mission, she is a published writer with a Master's degree in theatre, she has been our Mission health specialist. We call her our mission nurse although she is quick to say she is not a nurse. But she has been the one to help our young missionaries (and occasionally the old ones too) through difficult and not so difficult health challenges, both mentally and physically. She said she was shocked when she was first put in this position and wondered why they would ask her to do it, given her background. But she has also testified to us, "Whom the Lord calls, the Lord qualifies." She says that sometimes she is on the phone with missionaries who are describing their symptoms and she has no idea what to say and all of a sudden she just opens her mouth and out comes advice that is exactly what the missionary needs. I think she has also been like a Mom to many of these young people and they will miss her a lot!

Now about Elder Sears. He has been our mission technology specialist (a.k.a. computer geek) and we do not know what we will do without him. After he leaves, when we have a computer problem, we will have to call the help line in Salt Lake City. This is not a happy thought for us. I'm sure he won't miss our whining about our computer problems though. But just the same, he has contributed to our mission invaluably and he will be terribly missed!

As part of their send off, on Saturday five of us couples went for lunch at the most charming little restaurant about 30 minutes north of Rome in a town called Sacrofano. It was already a favorite restaurant of Hermes and I and I can happily report that our entire group give this restaurant 10 thumbs up (or twenty if we use both our thumbs). So if you're ever in Rome and have access to a car, make the drive to Sacrofano and go to Al Grottino Ristorante. You won't be disappointed.

Here are some of the pictures:
 

And after you eat, there's a charming little medieval borgo (town section) that dates to about the 1100s and is fun to walk through just around the corner from the restaurant.

So in the same way that all roads lead to Rome, they also lead away from Rome and unfortunately it means that we have to say goodbye to people we love. 

Vi vogliamo bene, family and friends... and that includes you, Anziano and Sorella Sears! I hope your roads and our roads will lead us back to Rome for a happy reunion at the temple.

Reflections on Earthquakes and Rain Storms

I always knew that by coming to Italy, I could experience an earthquake. I remembered well the news reports of the terrible earthquake in L'Aquila in 2009. When we were visiting this place in the picture below, Civita di Bagnoreggio, we could see that, though it is a beautiful place, much of the original town had fallen off into the ravines below, no doubt from earthquakes.

So in the early hours of the 24th of August, it happened. My husband noticed it more than I. I remember sort of waking up and thinking something was odd, but my husband said, "Did you feel that? The building was swaying and shaking! There's been an earthquake." I may have mumbled out an "oh really?' in my half asleep daze. I don't remember if I said anything else. I drifted off to sleep again thinking I was feeling the earth underneath me in motion and half thinking of our young missionaries wondering if any of them had been more affected than us. An hour later another tremor happened and again I wasn't sure I even fully noticed it. I just remember hearing my husband say, "it happened again!" I think the rest of the night was fitful as I dozed and wondered if this was all there would be to it.

At 6AM my cell phone rang and I shot up in bed thinking, "Oh no! This can't be good!"I raced from our bedroom to the living room looking for my phone and sure enough it was President Pickerd's name on my screen. Fortunately his voice was reassuring. He told me they had been up listening to CNN and that there had been a bad earthquake by the town of Norcia, but our missionaries were all okay. He asked me to get to the office as quickly as possible to send out an email to parents to reassure them that all was well with our young missionaries.

In the office that day, I felt some aftershocks, a particularly strong one in the afternoon. We knew there was a mounting death toll in the towns around the epicenter 130 km from Rome and we felt sadness that the tremors would be affecting them and the recovery effort. I won't dwell on that in this particular blog but I do feel badly for those who lost their loved ones.

Over the next few weeks I asked various missionaries if they felt the earthquake and how they felt about it. Some said it woke them right up and they worried. Others said they slept right through it while their companions asked them if they were responsible for shaking their bed. Others were like me; they woke up a little bit and had a vague awareness that something had happened and then drifted off to sleep again.

I've gotten thinking lately that scripture study can be like that. So often we sleep through our reading or we come across something that affects us a little and we go "that's nice"and then we go on back to whatever we were doing. And then sometimes we come across something that we may have read many times before (or at least our eyes passed over the words many times before) and suddenly it shakes us to the core. I had an experience like that with section 121 of the Doctrine and Covenants recently. That section has a couple of famous verses that many in our church would be familiar with and that's not what I'm talking about. In fact, I don't think I'm even going to tell you which verse it is because some may look at it and say "so? What's so interesting about that?" But I felt the tremors of the spirit teaching me when I read that section and I was in awe. And like I say, I'm sure my eyes passed over that verse many times before and it never registered - just like sleeping through an earthquake.

As for rainstorms, since September came, we've been experiencing them with some frequency. July and August was non-stop heat with very little rain and the plants and grass showed it. It's amazing to me how just a little rain turned the grass in the park by our office back to green again. 

We were in Crotone, a town in Calabria on the very bottom of the "boot" that is Italy last week. (In case you never noticed, Italy geographically looks like a boot). Here's a look at Crotone from our B&B:

Hermes was there to perform a financial audit on the church units down there. On the day we flew in we phoned the missionaries there and they said they were cleaning up the meetinghouse because a flash flood had poured rain through a few of the windows, We experienced a near flash flood a few days later ourselves. On the Friday night we went to see this castle:

and decided to come back the next day to see it in the daytime and see the view of the Sea there. We were sabotaged by a very strong downpour that made us turn around and go back to our B&B. It was pouring buckets to the point I was a little worried.

Traveling to Crotone was such that we had no choice but to spend a few days there. There is not train service into the town, and even if there were, it would have been expensive and taken 8-10 hours to get there.  A no frills airline, RyanAir, flies in and out of Crotone from Rome but the only flights we could get at the last minute was to fly in on Thursday and depart on the Sunday. The audit was scheduled for Saturday morning so we took the opportunity to explore the area a bit. Neither of us had ever been that far south in Italy and I don't know if we ever will again.

We saw a nice castle and scenery and some archeological digs which were pleasant.

But I realized after that the most pleasant thing about being in Crotone was connecting with people and it's those people I will remember the most.  Here is one person who was an absolute delight to get to know especially for my husband who got to do the audit with him. This is Salvatore Corrado with my husband:

Until approximately five years ago, he was a Catholic Priest-Exorcist there in Crotone as you can see from the picture below:

Now he is a married father of a little baby and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He has an absolutely incredible story of conversion to our church which I'm not sure is my story to tell. Regardless, he gave me permission to put his pictures and talk about him in my blog. That is him with his wife, Eleonora Ranieri, and their baby Giuseppe.

I am astonished at the courage it must have taken for him to change his life so completely. He has a PhD in theology and is an extremely learned man. He had to give up his livelihood and face the scorn, anger and broken hearts of his family to join the LDS Church. He makes his living now driving a taxi. He is an absolutely incredible person.

As a priest he wrote some books on theology and he continues to do so. I want to recommend one of his books to you:

You can find a link to it here:http://www.lulu.com/shop/salvatore-corrado/mormons-catholics-friends-enemies/paperback/product-22602351.html. I think it might also be on Google books.

He was asked to write it for the Neal A Maxwell Center for Religious Studies after they became intrigued by a comment Joseph Smith made in the early 1840s that the LDS Church and the Catholic Church were the most similar of the two churches.

The book is astonishing! People of both faiths are likely to learn things they were not expecting.

Besides Salvatore, we had fun meeting the owner of a seafood restaurant named Sergio. He must have encountered Mormons before because when we sat down he took one look at our nametags and offered us water instead of wine. :) Sorry, I don't have a picture of him on my own camera. But here's one of us at the restaurant. 

And we had a fun evening with the four young missionaries who serve in Crotone, Sorella Conde, Sorella Hills, Anziano Simonsen (also known as President Simonsen since he is currently the Church Branch President in Crotone) and his Italian companion Anziano Redaelli. It was nice to spend an evening listening to their concerns and experiences. It is difficult not to love those young people who serve here. Actually, I don't even try not to love them.

I often think, how lucky can I be to serve here? Italy is an incredible land with so much to see. But I know that what I will remember most is not the castles I've visited, the beautiful cathedrals I've explored or all the other wonderful beauties, it's the time spent with good people and hearing their stories. Crotone taught me that. Oh, and I'll probably remember that rain storm too.

Ferragosto - Rome turns into a Ghost Town

My husband has said for years that one should never go on holiday to Italy in August because that's when all the Italians go on vacation all at once and everything shuts down. It is absolutely true.  Parking our car in Rome has never been easier and the roads have been eerily empty. I was half expecting to see tumbleweeds blowing across the streets the other day. Everywhere little shops are closed up. Even medical clinics shut down for a few weeks which is tough if one has a medical emergency as some of our missionaries have found out.

I had never heard the word Ferragosto until recently, but that's the name for this time of year and specifically the 15th of August. Apparently Ferragosto has been the traditional summer holiday since Roman times. It started as a time for horse races and celebrations and many of those traditions remain today. Nowadays, however, it has largely become a time when Italians hit the beach. I can't imagine how packed the seashores must be right now because there sure aren't many people in Rome.

This has been a summer like I've never experienced before weather wise. Rarely has the daily forecast high been below 30 degrees Celsius (about 85 Fahrenheit). The nightly lows rarely go below 20 degrees Celsius (about 70 Fahrenheit). Where I come from in Canada, it's always a gamble whether summer will decide to grace us with her presence. Never before have I lived anywhere where the weather has been so darn predictable ("ho hum, another hot and sunny day"). My husband complains about the heat but I rarely do because I'd rather be hot and sweaty than freezing my butt in a parka in January. That's probably a very unCanadian thing to say but it's true.

This is also the summer where the Italy Rome Mission office moved out of our dingy little offices attached to the Church and into a more spacious and sunny apartment with a view of a park. Consider the view we used to have when entering our old office:

Yes, if someone forgot to close the bathroom door, we would have a lovely view of the toilet upon entering the front door of our offices. The sometimes stinky office toilet. 'Nuff said.

Now take in what we see when we enter the new office:

You can almost hear the angelic choruses singing can't you?

We used to have four cramped offices in what used to be stores that opened up on the piazza. They were dark and dingy. Now check out Hermes and I's office:

Our office is really a converted apartment so we even have a kitchen! Oh how we love having a kitchen! Sister Guercio even bakes cookies here now! Hermes doesn't approve of the cookies. "That's junk!" he says. What a Party Pooper.

Brother Calebrese is the only one with a little less room than what he had before. I hope the cookies will make up for that.

The Presidents office is really nice. Of course it's Elder Sears, our Tech missionary who uses it more than the President does. But now the President can meet with special guests and do small group training there which he couldn't do before.

The one thing we're finding is, it's so quiet. In fact Brother Calabrese said one day that he's starting to feel lonely. Where we were before, the young missionaries would drop in. Now we're more out of the way and our drop-ins are mostly couriers and our postino (mailman). 

Our old offices have been converted into extra classrooms for the two wards who meet at the church. They are happy to get them. That church strikes me as more of a branch building, and it's really not big enough for the two wards that meet there. Eventually the wards will move into the stake centre that has been built at the temple. But for now, they will make do with this church.

August 16th was the halfway point of our mission. It has gone so quickly that we can't believe that we will begin the downward slide to the end. I hope the second half will be as joyful an experience as the first half has been for us. 

To close, here's a nice pastoral late summer picture from Italy. I took this when Hermes and I took a hike a few weeks ago and got lost in a farmer's field. Long story. Of course it doesn't beat the story of two other senior couples here who told their Tom Tom to take the back roads back to Rome and ended up driving right into the middle of a farmer's field. We love our Tom Toms here but sometimes they fail us miserably.

Anyway, Happy Ferragosto to you all!

Putting Together the Pieces of the Puzzle: My Conversion Jouney

Here in the mission field, people often ask me if I'm a convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and when I say yes, they want to hear my story of how it happened. Usually I answer by saying, "Oh you should hear my husband's story. It's much more interesting than mine!" I'm afraid that people want from me a wonderful faith-promoting story and I don't feel like I can offer that. But I feel like it's time to tell it anyway, so here I go.

I came into the Church as an eighteen year old who was just finishing High School. My teenage years had been very difficult and I struggled against depression, anxiety and extremely low self-esteem. The truth of the matter is, I became interested in the Church because a boy I had a crush on in High School became a member of the Church and I was completely amazed that he had done that. Up to then, I had seen Mormons as particularly uncool people who went door to door and were a bother to people in their homes. My brother liked to call them "The Morons" and I saw no reason to disagree. But the thing is, that boy in High School who became a Mormon WAS cool. He was totally among the cool kids so I was absolutely floored he would become a Mormon, of all things.

I didn't have the courage to ask him about the Church. That would be too much like admitting I had a crush on him which, when I look back on it, he knew anyway. How I started taking the missionary lessons is by encountering a pair of particularly uncool missionaries on the street who started talking to me. I agreed to let them come back to my house and teach me. 

My parents weren't thrilled but didn't stop me. I was legally an adult by then, after all, and they weren't ones to interfere much with my decisions. So I started learning about Joseph Smith and The First Vision and The Book of Mormon. I started reading The Book of Mormon and didn't understand everything but it made me think and ponder the questions of life and religion. A little bit of my teenage misery melted away as I began to read and learn about the Church. People noticed.

When the missionaries asked me to come to Church, I said no. I was terrified I'd run into the boy from high school and then "HE WOULD KNOW!!!" I guess when you're a self-conscious insecure teenager, that's the way you think.

I don't remember how, but eventually that boy found out I was investigating the Church and he expressed his happiness to me that this was so. So I attended a meeting the next Sunday. And when the missionaries challenged me to be baptized and seemed so sure it was the right thing to do, I went along with it.  

Looking back on that situation now, I see myself allegorically as having been handed a box with a jigsaw puzzle inside and being told that a beautiful picture would unfold as I put it together. I took out a few pieces from the box and what I was able to put together looked good and mostly felt right but I wasn't really sure. The thing is, I was incapable of being sure of anything. It would take years and years before my mental and emotional anxieties would heal enough for me to gain confidence in my beliefs.  

Early on I was taught to pray and read scriptures daily and I mostly did after being baptized. My life improved in increments. I found love and fellowship among the young adults of the Church which I needed desperately. I craved to be something better than I was and eventually I decided that going on a mission would make me into the perfect person I wanted to be. I also thought it would make me sure of everything I had questions about. By this time I had attended many church meetings where people told these wonderful faith promoting stories of their missions and I wanted experiences like that. And besides, my friends were going on missions so I thought it would be the right thing to do. It was common to hear returned missionaries say, "It was the best eighteen months (or two years) of my life!" and I was sure my mission would be the same. I heard it would be difficult but I romanticized those difficulties before I actually experienced them.

My time in the England Coventry Mission had incredible highs and incredible lows and believe you me, I quickly stopped romanticizing about the difficulties I experienced. I learned much from my experience and about the Church there but my self-doubt and low self esteem were always lurking in the background. We didn't have the medical and mental health helps that missionaries have now. We just put our heads down and got on with things. We taught some people, and some people came into the Church because we taught them. Those were nice experiences. But at the end of my mission, I felt disappointed that I wasn't perfect and still felt unsure about many things, most of all myself.

I can't honestly say that my mission in England was the best eighteen months of my life. I can, however, say that it was probably the best eighteen months FOR my life. The mission I'm on right now is the best eighteen months of my life. I've never been happier.

Between that mission and this, I have slowly but surely been putting the pieces of the puzzle together and what is forming is indeed a beautiful picture.

But there have been times over the years that I have picked up puzzle pieces that didn't make sense to me and didn't look like they fit anywhere. Others may have picked them up and showed them to me saying, "This is weird! This is stupid! This is strange! Look how ugly this is!"and the puzzle piece by itself did indeed look strange. I have stared at and analyzed those puzzle pieces wondering if I should toss out the entire puzzle because of these particular pieces that made no sense to me.

I have also at times looked hopelessly at the empty parts of the puzzle feeling like there would never be pieces of the puzzle to fill in the picture. 

And if I had allowed myself to only focus on those strange pieces or the empty space, I would indeed have tossed out the entire jigsaw puzzle. But I didn't. My eyes would go back to the part of the jigsaw puzzle that had been put together and it did indeed look like a beautiful picture was forming.

Let me tell you some of what I see in that beautiful part of the puzzle. First and foremost it is The Book of Mormon. For me, it is an amazing book that fills me with wisdom, understanding and peace to my soul. It companions with The Bible so beautifully and has helped me in my life in powerful ways. Having read and studied it many times, I can't believe it could be anything but what it claims to be: an ancient scripture translated for us in modern times by a prophet of God.

I also see in that picture the teachings of where we come from, why we're here and where we're going after this life. Although people of other faiths may say it to us, we don't say that people of different beliefs and churches than us are going to Hell. When Christ said "In my house there are many mansions" we believe that's true and that there is a place for most of God's children based on God's grace and their choices in this life. We want to teach people why they came to this Earth; to turn to Christ so that they don't have to feel the Hell of remorse and regret for not choosing to do better with their time here or for doing things that have hurt others. To me a beautiful part of being in this church is understanding our purpose for being on this earth. 

My conversion to this Church was and is just as this Book of Mormon scripture says in 2 Nephi 28:30:

"For behold, thus saith the Lord God:

I will give unto the children of men

line upon line, precept upon precept,

here a little and there a little;

and blessed are those who hearken unto my precepts,
and lend an ear unto my counsel,

for they shall learn wisdom;

for unto him that receiveth I will give more;

and from them that shall say, We have enough,

from them shall be taken away

even that which they have."

I truly have faith that one step at a time in my jouney through life and beyond, my jigsaw puzzle will be completed and will be an even greater joy to behold.

A Surprise Visit from President Uchtdorf

A couple of years ago in my home Ward (church congregation) in Calgary, my husband and I sat on the back bench just as Sacrament Meeting was starting. The Bishop had just gotten up and, as he made his announcements, we thought we heard wrong when he said, "Elder Todd D. Cristopherson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles presides at this meeting." I turned to Hermes and whispered, "was he talking about a video conference from a Salt Lake?" and he answered "Yes, I think so." I didn't have a clear view of everyone sitting at the front where the pulpit is so I leaned over to my right to get a better look and sure enough, Elder Cristoherson was sitting up there. I thought that was the only time in my life I would have such an experience but I was wrong.           
        
This past Sunday, I had just finished up in Primary (children's meeting) and was heading for a drink of water when Hermes pulled me over and whispered, "Don't tell anybody! President Uchtdorf will be in Sacrament!" My eyes widened but I went about my business feeling quite excited. For those not of my faith, President Uchtdorf  is in the First Presidency of our Church and one of our top leaders. If our church were a nation, he would be the equivalent of a Vice President. We consider him to be a prophet.            

I'm sure all the American tourists who came to our Sacrament Meeting was wondering what was going on because all of our local leaders were standing at the front in expectation looking at the door. Hermes got the advanced heads up that he was coming because he was ushering at the door and would open the door when President Uchtdorf and his family arrived. Sure enough the moment came and Hermes opened the door, signalled the congregation to stand up, and in walked President and Sister  Uchtdorf. I couldn't stop smiling.  

Let me summarize a little of what he said when he spoke to us later in the meeting.

First of all, he announced that earlier that morning, he had made on behalf of the Church ("on behalf of all of you" as he put it) a significant donation to an agency seeing to the needs of refugees who are coming by the thousands to Italy. He reemphasized again the Church's position that we provide service and do all we can to help the refugees worldwide and reminded us that in our early church history, Mormons were refugees in their own country. He said that in 1838, 10,000 Latter-day Saints were driven from their homes in the dead of winter after the Missouri government issued the Mormon extermination order, and they had to cross the river on ice with barely any winter clothing, no money, no food etc. They arrived in Quincy Illinois, a town of only 1500 people, none of whom were Mormons, but they did all they could to provide for the 10,000 Mormon refugees. There's quite a powerful short video about it here:   

So President Uchtdorf again encouraged church members to strive to be of service to refugees from Syria, Africa and elsewhere.

He also emphasized a scripture, Doctrine & Covenants 12:8 which says:
And no one can assist in this work except he be humble and full of love, having faith, hope and charity, being temperate in all things, whatsoever shall be entrusted to his care.
  
He also talked about his visit to the Rome Temple construction site and encouraged members to wait patiently and to strive to be worthy of the temple. 

I was wondering if he would be ushered quickly from the meeting before we would leave but we were thrilled when he lingered to meet as many people as he could. Here's one I took with Hermes: 

And a few others with other members and missionaries:

 Sorella Clark (below) is introducing him to some people who are investigating the Church.

This tiny cute little old sister has been in the Church for many years. This must be the thrill of her life to meet him.

To close, here is a video telling his story of being a refugee. I think it provides a good summary of what we should be striving for. See you next time!