We survived...just barely.

It is Sunday, Aug. 28 and I am here to say, that we survived our meetings with the General Authorities. In fact, we really enjoyed being with them and all the valuable words they shared with us. It was just being busy and not having a P-day for 14 days that was hard. On Saturday, yesterday, we slept until 8:00am and it felt so good to have the extra two hours. All in all, I think we made it.

Last Saturday, we had the "Big 5" meeting. That was with five general authorities. In fact, Elder Bednar commented, never will we ever have the experience of having such a small, intimate meeting, about 220 of us, with so many general authorities, 5,  again. Elder Bednar and Bishop David A . Burton were absolutely amazing to listen to. Elder Bednar talked all over the place, many subjects, many directives, many words of wisdom. I was amazed, at one point,  he told the missionaries not to get trunky, but he was going to talk about marriage. He told the missionaries not to have a checklist of different things they wanted in a spouse, but rather they needed to make sure that they personally met the criteria themselves of those items and then looked for someone who would keep their covenants. I thought it good advice.

Elder Bednar spoke about being agents of the Lord and making choices because we are His agent and can choose to live and support him. He talked about how the manual Preach My Gospel was not a manual, but rather what we are to become for the Savior. He also talked about how, when we bear our testimonies, it is to be "Pure Testimony" and not something tacked on at the end of a travelog, or some experiences of occurrences in our lives, but rather our testimonies are "Pure Testimonies" of what we know to be true.

Elder Maynes came to visit the office last Tues., Wed., and Thurs. It was interesting just speaking with him. One night while we were all together for dinner at the Olson's, he shared that he is currently the Executive Direction of Family History. He said that as the records in the granite vaults are being digitized, they are coming on line. Originally, they thought that it would take about 100 years to index the records. They currently have about 150,000 indexers, people who just want to help around the world. With the speed of the work being done now, he anticipates it will take only 5.3 more years to complete the work. Amazing to me....  He also said that the church is making plans to have a "backup" copy of the digitized records and they are making plans for an underground storage facility in Kansa City. Once again, amazing.

The last two months we have had the opportunity to be taught by about 8 general authorities. It has been a marvelous, but exhausting schedule we have kept. We are now anxious for the next group of incoming missionaries, 20 to be exact, that will be arriving Sept. 13 We will also be sending home 20 missionaries at the same time. One thing is for sure, the Lord's missionary work continues forward. We are grateful that we have been a part of it.