Pres. Knudsen,
In your letter you asked what a typical Sunday is like for us - an excellent question, and one that I would have loved to have known several months ago. I imagine that Sunday is different for every senior couple, depending on your assignment. We have ten senior couples in our mission: five couples are MLS like us, of the remaining couples: one is assigned to Spanish speaking, one couple serve as medical advisors (for ten missions), two are office couples (one couple cover finance and housing, another couple have vehicles and mission secretary).
As this wasn't a typical week, I'll mention what we did on Friday and Saturday; (this will also serve as a blog post that Kim will insert) but our Sunday was pretty typical:
FRIDAY, JUNE 29 - COSHOCTON & NEW ALBANY, OH / WEST VIRGINIA / CHRISTIANSBURG, VA
9:00 a.m.: FIND A NEW APARTMENT
We decided two days ago that we need to move. Our 175 year-old apartment is fun and quaint, but the old building has problems with mold, water, leaks, etc. and it's affecting our health - so we're in the market for a better situation. We met with a realtor to tour a condo built on an abandoned golf course - a two bedroom condo in NE Coshocton. We decided "yes" the second we entered. We're taking it over the Bell's home ( a couple going to the Dominican Republic on a Methodist Youth Mission is looking for someone to house-sit for them, much as we were looking for renters a few months ago), and the apartment over the candy store in Roscoe Village. Both alternatives were larger and more impressive than the condo with selected, but we really feel good about the choice.
11:00 am to 1:00 pm: TRAVEL TO NEW ALBANY
We drove to New Albany, about an hour away, for a special Zone Conference to meet Pres. & Sis. Stratford, our new mission president who arrived yesterday. He met with three zones (half the mission) in the morning and the other half (four zones) at 1:00 pm.
1:00 pm: ZONE MEETING / MEET THE NEW PRESIDENT
We had a three hour Zone Meeting, Pres. & Sis. Stratford are wonderful people and we took to them immediately. They're from Layton, Utah and are about our age. She's a former career nurse, he owned and insurance agency. She's very quiet, modest and gentle - a very genuine, sincere person. He is extremely likeable, enthusiastic and kind. The missionaries warmed up to them and the transition is done. Pres. & Sis. Daines departed Thursday evening after a three-hour overlap to hand off the keys and a bit of transitional information.
5:00 PM - TRAVEL TO VIRGINIA
We left the meeting in New Albany and made the six hour drive to Christiansburg, VA to spend Saturday with our son Ryan and his daughter Katie. We arrived there at 10:30 pm and stayed at a motel in Christiansburg.
SATURDAY, JUNE 30 - CHRISTIANSBURG, VA
We spent all day Saturday celebrating our granddaughter Katie's birthday with her and Ryan before driving back to Ohio from 5:00 pm to 11:30 pm. We stopped at a small town in West Virginia for dinner and found a restaurant that was on "Greasy Ridge Road" which was just "about three or four "I.C.'s" west of "Possum Hollow Road", no joke.
SUNDAY, JULY 1 - COSHOCTON, OH
- 6:00 a.m: Up at our normal time. There is no set schedule for seniors as there is with the young missionaries; nor are we required to be together as companions all the time. We occasionally split up for laundry/groceries, meetings, visiting teaching, splits with elders, etc.
- 8:00 a.m. Drove to the church to set up for the post-church luncheon.Today was our day to provide the meal, Kim had prepared it on Friday before we left for Virginia. Each Sunday the branch provides a lunch right after church for about 15 people. That includes an "Implant Couple" who belong to a ward about 40 miles away and are serving in the branch as helpers for 1-2 years. He is a counselor in the branch presidency and also executive secretary and branch clerk. She serves as Primary President (three children in the Primary, all of them from one less-active family, the branch president and his wife bring them each week).
- 8:15 to 9:30 am BRANCH COUNCIL
Council meeting includes the three-man Branch Presidency, the Implant Primary President, the Relief Society President, the young elders (absent this Sunday) and the Blanchards. The Elders Quorum President (one Elder in the Quorum) was absent. There is no High Priest Group, no Young Women no Young Men. We spent most of the meeting planning our special Sacrament Meeting planned for July 23 when each branch member will bring an invited guest. Our branch is fasting today to prepare for the meeting and prayerfully decide who to invite. (See October 2016 Conference Talk by Elder Oaks)
9:30 - 10:00 PICK UP INVESTIGATORS
Normally we spend this time going to pick up investigators or members who don't have cars. Of the 20-30 people who attend church each week, there are two or three who have jobs. The parking lot usually has about 6-8 cars each Sunday.
10:00 CHURCH SERVICES
- Fast & Testimony Meeting: Today we had 19 present since one of the Full Time Missionaries had his appendix out on Thursday and they were absent. (A normal week is 25-30 present). The missionaries usually bless the sacrament. We only had one person available to pass the sacrament - a 65 year old diabetic who walks with a cane. He tried to fast today and it was too much. He collapsed during testimony meeting and had to go home. Kim and I always bear our testimonies - it would be pretty noticeable if we didn't.
- Sunday School: Sis. Liddel taught the lesson in Gospel Doctrine, the only class. There were about 8-10 present.
- Priesthood Meeting: Today wasn't a real good day, there were four of us present - the branch presidency and me. We sat in a four-man circle and read the lesson together. With the young elders in bed and the absent EQP and his dad (who collapsed) here, we would have had our normal 8 person priesthood meeting. A few Sundays ago we had a family visiting from Florida with two teen-age sons and I was pressed into duty as a Young Men's president. I took the two boys into a classroom and we had a terrific lesson together!
- Relief Society: they normally have about 5-8 sisters present. There is a President and one counselor who is a young sister in her 20's who was just activated.
1:00 - 2:00 pm: TRANSPORT & SACRAMENT
Following church each week, we normally divide up the duties of transporting investigators / members home and also taking the sacrament to shut-ins. Today with the missionaries out of action, I took the sacrament to Sis. Parsons, a shut-in, and the missionaries, who were incapacitated. During this time, Sis. Blanchard rounded up a team to prepare the meal.
2:00-3:30 BRANCH DINNER
We had dinner in the church. Our church has one multi-purpose room for all meetings. When church is over, we pull back the chairs and set up a couple of tables for lunch. Today we had about ten people for lunch. About once a month, we have an official "Linger Longer" when the whole branch brings a potluck and we have a full-blown dinner together after church. Today we had a wonderful meal that Kim had prepared - pasta salad with turkey wraps. The lunch conversation was a mixture of gospel topics, health reports, talk about the new mission president and an update on the Branch President's on-going litigation against his village in his battle to keep his pet ducks. (He has been featured on CNN, Time Magazine for his battle to keep his flock of twelve ducks as therapy pets for his post-military PTSD. Just Google " Darin Welker, Ohio and ducks" - he's pretty famous actually.)
4:00 pm to evening: we cleaned up the church and headed home. For the rest of the day, normally this is the time we do a combination of visits, planning, study, Skyping with our family, etc. Not too many evening meetings or firesides. We normally try to get out for a walk around 8:30-9:00 pm because the fireflies are coming out then. The down-side of our climate is the 85% humidity, but the upside is having fireflies. I don't think we'll ever get tired of them - we love fireflies!!
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