A Certain Fragility

Dear Family,

The role of the office couple in a mission is always an odd and sometimes an interesting one.

As one might imagine, communications, records, receipts, funding, bills, managing apartments, inspecting vehicles, making out reports fill much of our days. In so doing we don’t work in a corner, but interact with the two elders assigned to the office as Recorder and MSM or quartermaster, with the assistants to the president and with the president and his wife. The MSM is of necessity a native Japanese speaker and deals with a mountain of bills and correspondence, almost all of it in kanji which not even the most experienced American missionaries can read with sufficient understanding. We know little Japanese, and that lack makes the work more difficult but not intractable. We are members of a mission district and we enjoy meeting in district and zone meetings where the young missionaries sometimes seek our counsel and always make us feel welcome.  Generally, we feel very much a part of all that is happening here, but there are times when we get left out, when we seem to be invisible. It’s no one’s fault, it’s just in the nature of the beast. Then there are other times when we experience wonderful, spiritual events like a great baptism, or a testimony meeting with departing missionaries, or when we witness the excitement of new missionaries embarking to their first areas or meeting their first companions.

There are six missions in Japan ranging over 1500 miles from Sapporo in the north to Okinawa in the south. A distant fellowship emerges between the office couples who serve here. We never see each other, but we communicate by telephone and Internet.  We often post questions and share ideas and methods: “How did you deal with this problem? Has this ever happened to you?”  - that sort of thing.  Most of us are here for an 18-month tour of duty, but there is a certain fragility among us.  Around New Years the office couple in Kobe went home six months early to care for their single-parent daughter dying of cancer.  This week the office couple in Nagoya is going home three months early to face a cancer problem of their own.  We are now into our 11^th month, and as of next week, we will be the senior office couple serving here. Inexplicably, all these greenie senior missionary couples in neighboring missions seem to expect us to know what we are doing.

This week we met at the airport and hosted a newly arriving senior couple for our mission, the(Shinkansen) from Tokyo where she and her family lived for three years. 

Schroeders, from Elgin, Illinois the home ward of our nephew, Shawn Beus, who also served his mission here. Tomorrow we accompany them up to Hiroshima to their new apartment and field of labor. We’ll stay the night in Hiroshima, then on Tuesday we hurry back home in time to greet our daughter, Natasha, who is coming for a visit, arriving Wednesday by the bullet train 

               Over the kilometers, we send our love and greeting; we are your faithful far-eastern correspondents, 

Mom and Dad