September 14, 2014

We just got through giving talks in church today and I am glad that is over!  I can honestly admit that I don't particularly like giving a talk.  I would much rather give a lesson any day.  That way I can get other's thoughts and ideas and it isn't just me talking.  Roger was given the assignment to talk about reading the scriptures.  He started talking about scripture reading but basically said that we should do what the scriptures say not just read them and then talked about home teaching.  Home teaching is a real problem out here.  There just doesn't seem to be the testimony of what good it can do.  Granted, there are so many inactive people on the list that I think the best percentage that we could possibly get would be 50%.  But even that would be an improvement.  I spoke on Baptism.  I gave a lesson a couple of months ago on - you guessed it - baptism.  So it was a little bit of a stretch to get excited about teaching the same thing again.  But we do believe in repetition.  Right?

Our days are 8-5 Monday through Friday.  Every other day we switch off with the other couple in the office and go home at 4 instead of 5.  I am starting to think that I would rather go in late so that I could have time to swim before the office.  That would make my body happier too.  Our third couple will be coming in this next Saturday and we will need to train them for a few weeks and then that will give us some help so that we can go do the other missionary work we have been doing.

The office is a great place to be.  We love the missionaries and enjoy helping them.  Our mission president and his wife are amazing people and we love working with them.  We really enjoy the other couple in the office, the Soffe's!  They are darling are hard workers.  We are a little sad that we aren't able to spend the time we used to spend on helping those in our ward.  And they wonder a bit why we can't just keep helping them.  We are kept busy most every minute we are there and could find a lot more things to do if we wanted to.  There is always something going on.  I have tried to remember while I am there that the work needs to get done but the most important thing we do there is to help the missionaries.  And sometimes that means just giving them our time, listening to their latest triumph or trial and trying to help.

I am going through a little bit of a learning curve.  There is always a problem with finances - rent, bill payments, missionaries loosing their debit cards, utilities, credit card charges being attributed to the wrong account etc.  If I was working with a regular accounting program like Quick Books I think that I could figure things out but we work with IMOS and it is a very unique animal!  I finally called Salt Lake to ask about how to untangle the problems that were created before we were even in charge and they realized that I really hadn't been trained right.  So they took over my computer and taught me a lot of cool tricks and things are running much slicker!

The set of the theatre

The Festival Theatre

In the evenings, we usually have stuff going on.  One evening this week was spent ushering at the Festival Theatre in Balboa Park.  There are 3 theaters there and this one was a wonderful out door theatre where they do a Shakespeare Festival each year.  The play was Two Gentlemen From Verona and we both amazed ourselves by actually understanding what was going on!  We were there with our tour guide friends and enjoyed them.  Wednesdays for the next while will be full for Roger.  He is helping to coach Vera and Charles' granddaughter's softball team -helping especially with pitching.  Our scripture study class is Thursday evenings.  We will be having more people come each week which will be good.  With the new people in the ward we have a lot more strength and support.  We had Rita, a lady in our ward who is getting baptized in October come along with the regulars this week.  It has been so fun to see the light of the gospel come into her as she begins to understand and feel the gospel in her heart.  Any other spare time we had this week was spent planning the lesson for Thursday night and planning our talks for today.  Did I say that I am glad that is over?

We are happy and extremely busy and that seems to be good for us.  We are both feeling good.  Roger gets to the beach several times a week and that keeps him smiling.  We love the work out here and still love San Diego.  It is a beautiful place to live.

Keep praying for us.  We feel your prayers and are strengthened by them.

Sorry not many pictures this week.