Assignment Change

Mission hasn't started yet and already there is a change.  We received an email late Tuesday night, Dec. 4, which is Wednesday in Japan, notifying us Mission President Mack has changed our assignment from working in the mission office to labor in the City of Kagoshima.  Kagoshima is located at the southern most tip of the main islands of Japan.  Using Wikipedia, Kagoshima is a city of over 600,000 and being further south, it tends to be warmer than Fukuoka.  June, July, and August tend to be fairly rainy months there.  We literally will be put into the frying pan as we'll be couple miles west of an active volcano, Mt. Sakurajima.  I'll be praying for wind to blow the smoke and any ash to the East.

Mission Call

In latter part of June 2018, we received our mission call packet.  The letter was dated June 19 and signed by President Russell M. Nelson.  It indicated service would be in the Japan Fukuoka Mission as an office specialist for 23 months.  After reading the body of the letter out loud so Mayumi can hear what it said, I noticed that the next page in the packet was another letter addressed to Mayumi.  I looked at the first letter again and realized the first was addressed to me.  I told Mayumi that we had gotten separate letters.  Mayumi then quipped that she hopes that she got called to the same place as I.  After 40 years of marriage, our sense of humor are very much alike.

Mission Application

For the last few years as I approached retirement, I occasionally checked to see what missionary opportunities are available, which came in form of a PDF file that typically gets updated every Friday evening on the LDS.org website.  It was a tedious process to read through the PDF file, which is also kind of mundane since often times the PDF does not change much from week to week.  For those opportunities that interested me, I analyzed if Mayumi and I were qualified.  Since we had been serving in the Mt. Timpanogos Temple since February 2012, we had thought about serving a Temple Mission at a temple where local members have a hard time filling required number of workers.  Since Mayumi is fluent in Japanese but I am not, we thought of going to serve at the Tokyo Temple where English speaking workers are acceptable.  However, as we got closer to retirement, Tokyo Temple underwent extensive renovation and will not be reopened until sometime in 2020.  Therefore Tokyo Temple was out as a possibility.  We looked at alternatives in Hong Kong Temple and Taipei Temple but availabilities were slim and timing bad.  Using the new senior missionary website,
https://seniormissionary.lds.org, that came into use early 2nd quarter of 2018, replacing the old PDF file, playing with different kinds of filter to see different mission opportunities, we stumbled upon English Speaking Couple Office Specialists in non English speaking countries.  We pounced on this opportunity.  We quickly turned in our application with first preference in Fukuoka, Japan, 2nd preference Nagoya, Japan and 3rd preference Hong Kong, China.  We had our interviews with Bishop Hunt and Stake President Juchau, after which President Juchau submitted our application to Church Headquarters.  We then had to wait for our mission call papers, which seemed at that time a lifetime of waiting.