Weekly Letter

This was one of the longest weeks of our lives.  We were planning on driving to our mission home on Wednesday but we got a call from the office that the mission president was out of town. We drove from Kristy's home to Indianapolis on Tuesday and then on to our new area on Wednesday.  We have a nice apartment, one bedroom and an office, one bathroom, a kitchen and a good-size living room.  This is an old but stately house. It looks like this was the really nice part of town when these houses were built. Our house is built on an acre of land and there are trees all around us, especially behind us where it looks like a forest. Anyway, when we got here we didn't have any internet and the data speed on out phones was impossibly slow. We still don't have any blinds in the windows and Mom thinks the whole world is looking at her.  Our washer and dryer are down in the basement in what looks like a dungeon.  Mom can't reach the light switch so I have to help her down the steep staircase and through the dungeon. At least we have our own washer and dryer.  We are grateful to have a Super WalMart close by.  We have visited there often as we try to set up our home and stock up our shelves. We didn't really have anything to do except to set up our new home until Friday when we went up to Morgantown, West Virginia for a district meeting.  It was good to be around the young elders and sisters and another senior couple that serve at the Institute.

Sunday we finally got to meet the branch leadership and get some direction from them.  The couple that was here before us did a lot of visiting of members not coming to church.  Only about 25% of the members are active. Another interesting thing is the average age of the members is about 60. The day we went there were only about 15-20 people there, nearly all senior citizens.  We didn't see any youth although they do have a Primary and YW presidents. Mom and I gave the opening and closing prayers in Fast and Testimony meeting and were told that it is kind of an assignment to bear our testimonies, not really but they asked us to kind of introduce ourselves and bear our testimonies, which we did.  The branch president gave us a notebook with notes the previous senior missionaries left of their visits to nearly all of the inactive members.  He gave us the notebook and said, basically, go to work.  It is a little bit daunting right now, not knowing anybody and not knowing anything about the area.  A lot of these houses are up in the mountains with no clear addresses. It will be a challenge.

Yesterday we were invited to a branch empty-nest Family Home Evening.  We'll talk more about that next week.

I guess that's about all for now.  We'll have more to share with you next week.  Thank you for all of your prayers and support.

Love, Mom and Dad