Missionaries are Constantly Changes

It continues to be hot and muggy and shows no signs of letting up. We are becoming more accustomed to sweating all the time. In spite of the heat, we continue to feel so blessed to be here with the great missionaries in the Tokyo South Mission. We added 14 more new missionaries this week – four came from the Philippines, nine from the states and one from Australia. We are getting more Australians assigned to our mission. They come with such great faith and enthusiasm but also very tired. We learned our first time that you get them here, feed them and then let them go to bed because they have been up over 24 hours.

We love getting new missionaries but it means we lose some too. Santos Shimai, Lee Choro and Nelson Choro departed the day after the new ones arrived.

To welcome them Laurie makes a Luau meal for them. They love the panipopo rolls she makes! When they depart we make them Sukiyaki. Suki means “like” and Yaki means “cook” so they cook what they like in a pot on the table. It’s difficult to gauge how much they will eat but we do our best. Sometimes we run out of food and other times we have too many leftovers.

Change of Plans

We were all geared up and ready for a Mission Tour with Elder Esplin and Elder Kim. All preparations were done but the weekend before the Tour Laurie started feeling a little under the weather. It had been a busy week with late airport runs and meals to make and she just thought it would pass. But it didn’t! When she only got worse Steve encouraged her to take a Covid test and she tested positive. Not wanting to ruin the entire Mission Tour for everyone we thought we thought she couldjust mask up around people and move ahead as planned. While visiting with our daughter Adrian, she convinced her mother it would be better to let everyone know for their own safety and then let them decide what they wanted to do with the information. So three hours before our first meeting was supposed to start we received word from Elder Esplin that given the likelihood that Steve will come down with it and “the sensitivity to Covid here culturally, and the need to be very conservative with Elder Cook coming next week” all meetings would be canceled until September when we will do the Mission Tour. Laurie had prepared a meal for everyone so we decided we would have enough food to live on for the next few days and we could lie low and get feeling better. Laurie felt so much guilt for stopping the whole Mission Tour with only hours notice. Our sweet office missionaries were so kind to make us feel better by delivering kind notes and delicious fruit – something that finally sounded good to Laurie.

Because our lives are so busy we thought one week in our apartment sounded pretty good. We were wrong. After a couple of days Laurie was going stir crazy. Not much changed for Steve. He was in the apartment office and never stopped working. Everything just moved to Zoom. We had even been asked to speak at Tokyo West Stake Conference and we did that through Zoom. When the following Monday morning rolled around we couldn’t wait to go our for our normal morning walk. It felt great!

We interview 135 missionaries every six weeks. Those days start early and end late as we leave the busy city and go to where they are – or a church closer to them. It is one of the things we love most about our job – being with the missionaries. There is one church in particular that we really dislike driving too. We drive a large van and the closer you get to the church the more narrow the streets become. The street in front of the church is so narrow we have to do a three point turn in order to get into the parking lot. This week we chose to drive the smaller van instead of our large Alphard. We were so grateful because our GPS took us on so many narrow streets.

Every six weeks we also have MLC – Mission Leader Counsel. All leaders in the mission come into the Mission Home and we go over the needs of the mission, discuss ways to improve, talk about problems we are dealing with in the mission, etc. Once again, we always love this time because we are with our missionaries. Each time they leave we talk about what great missionaries we have in our mission.

When it’s lunch time during MLC we all walk over to our apartment, four minutes away and have lunch together. They are dedicated and spiritually minded misisonaries but tend to be a little more relaxed during lunch time.

We have another busy week ahead of us with Elder Cook coming, Temple week, more interviews and Priesthood training meeting this weekend with all the Mission Presidents, Stake Presidents, Temple Presidents and other leaders meeting all day on Saturday. We will report on that in our next post.