Elder & Sister Mundell

The new school year is almost upon us, and we are getting ready to teach another semester of seminary. We will be learning from the second half of the Book of Mormon, starting in the middle of Alma. We attended a training meeting in Laie yesterday, and got a lot of good information to help us become better motivators and leaders for the wonderful youth in our class. We liked that the Church's emphasis was on helping the students gain a testimony and deepen their conversion to Jesus Christ, and our objective is prepare them for a life of discipleship, and not just graduation from seminary. That's been our approach, we want our kids to enjoy seminary, make it fun and interesting, be a class that invites the Spirit, and a place where they can ask questions and feel free to express themselves. All we really want is for them to show up and participate. The rest will follow if we're able to do that. We volunteered through Just Serve to assist a charity called Helping Hands Hawaii...

It was a fascinating week for us, as we experienced a kaleidoscope of many different beautiful and wonderful events each day as we went about our missionary efforts.  On Monday we used Play-Doh for the people we visited as a means for them to describe various emotions and feelings, such as sadness, shock, playful, happy or surprised. We found the boys at the correctional facility felt trapped and angry, but the girls had a better feelings about themselves. The  Play-Doh made a reappearance on Thursday evening when we asked the men at New Hope to create a scene from the Bible and everyone had to try to guess what it was. Tuesday started with our district council, and our mission leaders were also there, so.we had the privilege to sit and talk with them for several minutes about how our mission was going. We really love and appreciate Pres. and Sis. Andersen, they are genuinely supportive of the senior couples and are interested in us as well as the young missionaries. We later ...

It feels good to be back doing all of the usual ward activities and our community service again. For some of our service opportunities it's been more than a month since our last visit with them. We are trying to be a good influence wherever we go. We are teaching the most basic Christian principles in life, and we are representing Jesus Christ and his church in a positive light, which can hopefully result in good outcomes down the road. We're now exactly halfway through our 23-month mission. 11 1/2 months in the rearview mirror, 11 1/2 more months ahead of us. We hope we can build upon the relationships and friends we've made so far to have more of an impact,  influence  and successes in the future. We had a new opportunity to volunteer at the New Hope Ministry in Kailua this week. They asked us to do Bible trivia with them on Thursday nights, so we planned a Jeopardy game. It was an awesome experience, everyone had fun, and we established a lot of goodwill with them. They ...

This is an LDS Living article entitled "20 happy surprises of a senior mission from couples who've served".  “Senior missions are some of the best-kept secrets in the Church.” In putting together this article, I spoke with three couples who’ve recently returned from serving senior missions, and the quote above is just one example of their enthusiasm for the work. My “proof-is-in-the-pudding” takeaway was how eager each and every one of these senior couples were to talk about their experiences and to encourage others to serve a mission. Something  this  exciting to  this  many people, coming from  very  different walks of life and who served  very  different missions, had to be simply  amazing , right? The short answer is yes. Here are some of the unexpected blessings and pleasant surprises these couples shared with me. “You can’t help somebody grow spiritually where you don’t grow spiritually,” says Aaron Speirs, who has served senior mi...

Life is full of surprises. And it's the wonderful surprises that make our lives happier and more rewarding. We had one of those pleasant surprises this past week. After we picked up Cathy's daughter Keilah and her fiance Anthony at the airport, her mother asked both of them if there was one thing they really wanted to do while they were on vacation in Hawaii. Keilah mentioned snorkeling, and then Anthony said he'd like to get married! We both looked at each other, not sure what to say next, but we could tell he was 100% serious. After we got over the initial shock, we did everything in our power to make their marriage a reality. Elder Mundell was curious if his status as an official minister of the LDS church would allow him to perform the ceremony. We found out that it's relatively easy to get married here even if you aren't a resident of Hawaii. All they needed to do was fill out the application for a marriage license online, go to the health department downtown f...