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.