Dear Family,
Consider this bizarre scenario. After a 24-hour odyssey, 32 exhausted young single adults arrive at the airport at 9:45 pm. They are met by people they don’t know. They surrender all their luggage into 4 vans, then they are loaded into several cars driven by people they have never met. They take them to a local church building, take away their passports and newly-acquired residence cards, then have them sign several documents they can’t read and which are only vaguely explained to them, included among them two power-of-attorney documents. Beyond exhaustion now, they fall into bed (actually futons on the floor) after 1:30 am, only to be roused a few hours later, some to catch planes as early as 7:00 am, others by bus and train, to places they have never heard of, where each will connect with someone they have never met who will become their constant companion for the next several weeks, maybe months. All of this they endure uncomplainingly with huge smiles and unbounded enthusiasm. Who does this sort of thing?
Lest you think this the usual scenario, let me explain that the new missionaries got side-tracked with airplane problems en route to Japan and spent the night in a hotel in Dallas, and so arrived a day late. Because the arrival of the “beans,” as we call them (as in green beans), is tied in with transfers and departing missionary schedules, we only know how to accommodate their lateness by compressing their orientation. And the midnight signing allows us to register them as residents and enroll them in insurance in absentia so we don’t have to take them all down to the city offices. Anyway, it all came off without a hitch (okay, there were two beans who missed their flight and had to be rerouted.) We now count 170 missionaries in the mission, up from 100 one year ago.
Sunday we taught the Gospel Doctrine lesson to the combined English and Japanese class. This we do every odd month on the first Sunday. The delightful young Brother Koh Uehara, a recent graduate of BYU Hawaii was our translator. The subject was the martyrdom of the Prophet Joseph Smith. It’s instructive that in D&C 136 the Lord includes Joseph among the likes of Adam, Moses, Abraham and Jesus’ apostles as those whom he called ”…upon by my angels, my ministering servants, and by mine own voice out of the heavens, to bring forth my work; Which foundation he did lay, and was faithful; and I took him to myself” (verses 37, 38). In recounting his enormous contributions, I worry sometimes that we make too much of Joseph Smith, that those outside the church might imagine that we worship him. To keep the proper perspective, we like the statement from the late Truman Madsen, who of all those who didn’t know the prophet personally, perhaps knew him best. He said, “Joseph Smith is the lens through which we see the Savior Jesus Christ more perfectly.” Surely that would be the principal role of every prophet.
Meanwhile we are thrilled to report that our grandson, Matthew Naylor, has arrived for his mission in Nagoya just a short 300 km north and west of us here and has hit the ground running with his Korean companion and loving the Japanese already.
Still hanging on through storm, wind, rain, flood, typhoon and volcano (no earthquakes yet) we are your intrepid and faithful far-eastern correspondents,
Mom and Dad
No comments:
Post a Comment