Timing Is Everything

 Congratulations! By clicking on this link you have been cordially and exclusively invited to attend our first ever Pity Party! It will be a brief flurry of suppressed whining and complaining about our present circumstances. There are not many photos to go along with this party narrative so you will have to use only your imagination and auditory memory but we promise to serve refreshments at the end if you'll just stick it out. 

To begin this Whinefest, did we happen to mention maybe a few times before that we are stuck in the Garden of the Selfish Giant where it is perpetually Winter with no end EVER in sight? Oh sure, we can endure November 7th to February 28th and call it a typical harsh winter season, right? But seriously, it's beyond the time to wrap this gig up. Let the little croci emerge now without fear of being crushed by a blanket of snow, please! Our friend the Sun has shone maybe a handful of days these last 4+ months but even then, it is always accompanied by a lion-like bitter cold wind. We've not seen a lamb-like day even once! Believe me, I notice these things. In truth, we have not experienced another season BUT Winter while on our mission and these desert dwellers are getting so so weary of it. How long, O Lord?

A blanket of heaviness once again descends

                                                      Sorella Umbrella

Perhaps we're unduly impatient only because we are a little sleep deprived, which tends to bring out our less than best selves, eh? Exhibit A. Our building complex used to be completely filled with missionaries, a little bit of Zion on earth if you will, but then they started moving out all the single sister missionaries and upgrading their digs so they wouldn't have the hardship of doing their laundry in a public facility. (Laundromat life is only as bad as your attitude so actually we're ok with this and will not bemoan this aspect.) But this exodus of missionaries has led to many empty apartments, only a few of them temporarily filled by visa waiters. As a result the church stopped leasing many of them and let the leasing office rent them out but still left a few completely furnished ones available just in case they have an influx of new VWs from the MTC. In kinder gentler times, the instruction has been when your visa finally comes and you vacate your apartment on your departure, just leave your door unlocked and your keys in the drawer for the next tenant. This practice worked just fine in a Zion-like society when everyone in the building was living with basic honesty and integrity. But now since they've started filling the building with regular renters from the leasing office, the temptation has proven too irresistible. One woman brought in her entire extended family to squat in the apartment across the hall and we started hearing a continual buzz of noisy family life. Still, children are an heritage of the Lord and so we cheerfully endured the sounds of screaming toddlers and crying infants at all hours. But then to make matters unbearable, the college-age girls on the 3rd floor decided to use the apartment right above us to extend their partying square footage. It was nigh to impossible to tune out the sounds of heavy running footsteps, loud laughter, squeaky bed springs, and the throwing of beer bottles out the balcony to land on the pavement below 'til 2:00 in the morning. And this was on a working day! Zion has surely fled!! Since there are no interior stairs to go stomping up to banish the revelry in non-existent bath robes and because we weren't willing to put on winter attire to go outside to go upstairs, we simply endured the agonizing night. The next morning we immediately voiced our bleary-eyed complaints to both Church Housing and the leasing office to "please, lock up these open apartments!". Thankfully, things are now back to a semblance of peace and quiet that should prevail in missionary housing. And so in this frazzled state and with yet the unsettling ambivalence of broken promises from the travel department regarding our visas, we soldiered on through the week...

Thursday things started looking up. And how?  Ann Howell!! This is our friend's name! She works in the FSL on the 2nd floor and months ago gave us the contact name of an Institute teacher/church tourguide with some interesting connections to India. Timothy Taggart's class was held conveniently only 3 blocks away in a church building in the Aves and honestly, we're not sure why we delayed getting in touch with him and attending his class til now. He began his class with a slide show of his friend Satish Kumar who is a pastor and who he met years ago in his travels to India. Weekly he puts out a contribution jar for his Institute class and then sends the proceeds to Satish, whose current humanitarian project is teaching local women in small villages how to sew. His church ministry is in the city of Vizag, not a part of our mission boundaries.

                                                                His project is sew good!

With the weekly donations, he helps the women purchase their own sewing machine, basic supplies and pays a woman to teach them how to make their own patterns. This has given them a valuable skill to clothe their own families as well as provide additional income allowing them to be self-sufficient. Brother Taggart said the largest obstacle Satish has found is finding a room large enough to hold the classes in. The machines require no electricity but that's not the issue. No one wants to rent a building space to Christians these days. So most of the time the classes are held outside. What a tragic problem of overt persecution but isn't that a fulfillment of prophesy of these latter days? We stayed on longer to listen to Brother Taggart's Come Follow Me lesson and came away edified by all that we saw and heard.

                                 The friends of The Indian Society of Salt Lake

Now as it so happens, earlier in the week, we read the Neff's blog- rickneff.us, our fellow missionary friends who lived one floor below us in the early days of our mission, telling us the sobering series of events they are experiencing in the New Delhi mission in connection with their Humanitarian calling. Basically, the Indian government has put a moratorium on ALL their clean water projects they were involved in and tied their hands to anything else they might try to do to better the lives of the poor and needy there. Does this make any sense to anyone? They were so discouraged and frustrated. And all of this in their current field of labor in Vizag. Our ears perked up in the Institute class. Vizag?? Isn't that where Satish Kumar has his sewing ministry? Isn't that the same place where the Neff's are serving? Surely the government wouldn't be aware if the Neffs were to be involved in something as small scale as a sewing ministry until these absurd sanctions were removed? Well, we don't know the end of this story but to us it felt MTB, like we were possibly in the right place at the right time to put Timothy Taggart's Indian Society, The Neffs, and Satish Kumar in touch with each other. Timing is everything! If anything comes of this coinkidink, we will follow up and let you know but if not, let's all continue to pray for the Lord's work to go forth in all countries unimpeded by bureaucracies and government secret combinations. 

Friday was MONUMENTAL in so many ways. We finished reading the Book of Mormon together as a missionary couple since starting our mission. We already had a firm testimony of its truthfulness but now we can honestly testify to the power we felt in our lives as we once again took up a serious daily study of it. We know assuredly it is the word of God given through ancient prophets to come forth in our day, when we so sorely need it to navigate through the very circumstances previous civilizations went through that ended in their complete destruction. If we want our society to end differently, we must heed these lessons!! How much more can we all do to put out a warning voice to the world? (Tell everyone you know to read it and learn the solution!) 

Right after our study hour, we left our home in a blizzard and proceeded on the freeway and then up the steep mountain to the Bountiful Temple in the heaviest snowstorm of the year. It was harrowing but I think our efforts that day to persevere were later greatly rewarded. It just so happened that we performed the very last ordinance in our reservation list that would've expired while we were in India. Coincidence? Maybe. Later that afternoon, I was working with an older gentleman whose father was born on a ship in the Indian Ocean. We found a birth record and a ship log that showed his place of birth as Bombay, India. How cool is that? How incredibly foretelling too. Right in the middle of finding these records, Rob hands me his phone. It's Michelle from Travel telling us our visas have finally arrived! What? Can this be real? Our wait is finally over? Winter is over and India has come? Thank you Lord for our deliverance from the awful monsters of Death, Hell & Winter! The timing of all the events of the day just couldn't have been more right. All of our Discovery Zone friends rejoiced with us! Rob's daughter Kinzi showed up right on schedule just moments after we got the phone call to celebrate with us too! She was down in Salt Lake doing some volunteer work with an organization that benefits the homeless and she came and stayed overnight with us. It's not often we get to have a slumber party on a mission! It made the whole day feel very special indeed!

                       Beanie and baby. 

So your next question- When do we fly out? Because Travel called us a mere half hour before they closed for the weekend, there was no time to ask questions. We do not know anything at this point. In a way, now that we've waited this long, would it spoil some vast eternal plan if we left after General Conference? There happens to be an India Mission reunion here in Salt Lake on March 31st with Area Seventy President Gutty, all past Mission Presidents, and any missionaries that ever served there that we would absolutely love to attend before we go. We also would prefer watching the proceedings of General Conference not in a jet-lagged state first thing when we get there. We may not have a choice in the matter and that's okay at this point. The last directive we were given- Please don't share this news on Social Media to make sure that no other missionary in our group learns his visa status until he hears it from his Mission President. So I'm bending the rule a bit to put the news in this blog, even though I'm on a Facebook page of parents of India missionaries, they would not have access to this blog nor my page but just in case, I am asking a favor that if you feel inclined to send congratulations, (which we'll assume you'll have, but don't feel you must.. it's implied) that you do it internally on this blog rather than on Facebook. Thank you for enduring the pity party and now we will resume our regularly scheduled optimism.

 

PROOF!!!

"Thine adversity and thine afflictions shall be but a small moment, and then if thou endure it well... thou shalt triumph over all thy foes..."