The Call

Well, here it is the 14th of April.  The day we will be set apart for our mission.  Tomorrow we plan on heading out, en route to Nauvoo, Illinois where we will be spending the next several months of our lives - serving a mission for the Lord.  As we look back at the events that transpired to get us to this point, it has become obvious to us that the Lord's hand has been in this from the beginning.

Mid-summer, last year, the president of the Mt. Timpanogos temple, Noel Reynolds, requested that any of the ordinance workers that were working there and that had a desire to serve as temple missionaries in either the Nauvoo or Palmyra temples submit their names to be considered for such a calling.  I mentioned it to Becky and, feeling very good about the idea, we added our names to the list of about 30 or so to be considered. 

A month or so later, Pres. Reynolds let me know that there was a very good chance that we would be selected - and let us know how the call would be received.  Sure enough, shortly after that, in the October time frame, our Stake president got a letter from the temple department, asking that we be called to serve in the Nauvoo temple.  He gave the letter to our bishop who invited us in, determined our worthiness to serve such a mission and to extend the call to us.  He then informed us that we then needed to fill out the papers to be submitted to the missionary department for processing.

Not having the needed medical insurance, we applied for it.  We waited for the acquired insurance to kick in and then tried to make appointments for our medical exams.  I discovered that the doctors who accepted the insurance that I had obtained would not take new Medicare patients, so I had to start over with a different insurance company.  By the time I had finally got my physical and the appropriate immunizations, it was mid January.  Everything was now submitted and only required the approval of ward and stake leaders.

On the last day of January, while driving to the Mt. Timpanogos temple to work my shift that day, I received a call from a member of the Temple Department in SLC.  He wanted to know if we had received a call and why we had not yet submitted our papers to the missionary department.  He explained that on the letter that had been given to our stake president that there was a deadline specified, December 15th.  We were already 45 days late!  But he went on to explain that if we could get the papers to SLC by the end of that day, he might be able to expedite the call, otherwise the call may have to be changed to some other location than Nauvoo.

I called the bishop.  I called Becky, asking her to call the Stake Executive Secretary and set up an appointment with our Stake President.  A lot of action occurred that day, and mostly through the efforts of the executive secretary, it resulted in our papers making it to Salt Lake and ready for processing by the Missionary Department.

Two weeks later, Becky got a call from a sister in the Missionary department asking for some clarification on the papers that had been submitted.  She also indicated that our Stake President had annotated on the bottom of his form, that we had expressed to him our desire to follow this mission call up with a second mission, perhaps to a Spanish-speaking country.  She then expressed the Church's immediate need for senior couples to serve in that capacity and hoped that we could make ourselves available for such a call as soon as possible.

The official call to serve the Lord came in the mail on the last day of March.  In it we were told that President Spencer Condie, president of the Nauvoo temple, would receive notification of our call to serve under his direction within the next week.  Accordingly we got a phone call from him at that time to welcome us to his mission and to get some kind of a feel as to our experience and capabilities.

In addition to the materials sent to us from the Missionary department, we also got material from the Nauvoo temple giving us lists of things provided by them and lists of things that we would need to provide for ourselves.  They would provide us with an apartment to live in, pretty much fully furnished - and with utilities included would cost us $500 per month.  That left us with about one month to obtain all we needed and prepare to head out on this opportunity of a life-time.

We are to serve as temple missionaries in the Nauvoo temple.  We are not called to serve as site missionaries - thus we have no responsibility to help on the site; either as tour guides or entertainers.  We will be wearing missionary tags wherever we go, and as missionaries, we will need to portray the appropriate image to all.  We will be serving in the temple, administering temple ordinances for both the living and the dead, helping to bring eternal life to all of God's children that are willing to accept the proffered blessings.