Senior Seniors

What better way to celebrate than a toast of colonoscopy drinks!

We celebrated our 6th wedding anniversary this week.  We love to tell people the unusual tale about how we met and married six years ago, and it makes us laugh when we see their reaction.  We love that our marriage has allowed us to serve a mission together in such a wonderful island paradise as Hawaii.  We continue trying to do the best we can with the talents and gifts the Lord has blessed us with, and we rely on the Holy Spirit to guide us and help us along our missionary journey.  We feel so blessed to be serving God at this point in our lives, and we hope we are making a difference in the lives of others - the saints who live here, the young elders and sisters, and those we serve in the community. 

We celebrated their anniversary by taking a cruise of the Hawaiian Islands

All of the senior couples who were here when we arrived have already returned home, and so for the next three months we have the honor and distinction of being the "senior senior couple" in the mission.  Maybe we know all of the answers by now.  All that means is we get lots of questions like "When are you going home?" from the members and missionaries we talk to.  Most of the senior couples choose to serve 18-month missions, but since we're here for 23 months, it must seem like we've been showing up at zone conferences and hanging around church gatherings forever.  

The one thing that we encounter (because of the missionary badges we wear) every week, almost on a daily basis it seems, are individuals who come up to us and tell us about their experience growing up in the Church, but who no longer consider themselves a member of the Church because of the choices they've made which have caused them to drift away from the gospel teachings they cherished as a youth and step off the "covenant path" that leads back to our Heavenly Father.  These are the ones we feel need our love and support the most.  We make an extra effort to sit down and talk to them, and allow them to open up and share their story so they can feel the Spirit by giving them some kind words of counsel and encouragement.  Sometimes it appears to help, but most of the time they don't seem very interested in making the lifestyle changes necessary to bring them closer to God.  All we can do is show love, kindness and compassion as Jesus would, and assure them that God loves all of us, regardless of what we may have done, and it's never too late to come back to church again.

Elder Mundell loves this vintage iPod that clips onto his shirt when he goes walking in the morning that allows him to listen to his favorite music from the 70s and 80s. But one day after he plugged it in to recharge, it was completely dead.  He was certain that his old piece of technology had finally quit working and he'd have to find a replacement.  But to his surprise, he later discovered that the problem wasn't with his iPod, but the small charger cord that connected it to the outlet.  The lesson he learned from this that we can apply into our lives is - we have the right or authority to act in God's name by virtue of our priesthood or church calling, but without the power of God that flows to us, like electricity in a connecting cord, we will not be able to do God's work and feel the Spirit guiding us.