Flat Cindy

Flat Cindy joined us at the Bering Stake Center where we work out of the YSA ward clerks office every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. We teach the Career Workshop in this stake center. There is an English ward which is the ward in which we live -Memorial Park, a Spanish ward and a YSA ward which meet in this building. It is 3 miles from our apartment so it is nice and handy.We are assigned to attend over 100 wards in the 11 stakes we are assigned to help with employment needs so we have only been to our ward about 5 times in 8 months.

MTC here we come

After dropping off 6 children at the Provo MTC, or sending them on the plane to MTC's in foreign countries, it is finally our turn to serve a mission.

We checked ourselves into the MTC the day after April's General Conference. Our Stake President, President Hulet managed to save us tickets to 2 sessions of General Conference which were wonderful. We also spent a few days visiting with family and friends in the area...The Greene's, Kaufman's, Burn's, and Berges's.

The MTC was wonderful. I loved to watch a table full of Elders stand when 2 Sister's would join them at their table. And when the cafeteria line would part and the younger missionaries would motion for the senior missionaries to come to the front of the line to get their food. And especially when we would watch the younger missionaries trying to memorize or learn their assignments for the day.

Fabulous Clouds

We love the clouds in Texas. The skies are so blue and the clouds put on a different show everyday. We live about 30 miles west of Galveston Bay and so there is usually a light wind blowing most of the time and the clouds are always moving across the sky and making a new picture for my camera to shoot. I have tons of cloud pictures already and loving each new day.

We love serving here in Houston.

NASA with the Shipley's

In November we were able to go visit NASA with the Shipley's. They were at the MTC with us in April and are serving in the Houston South Mission. They are in the Record Preservation's at the Clayton Genealogy Library.We were called to the Houston Mission but live in the Houston South Mission boundaries since we work out of the Bering Stake Center.
NASA in Houston is smaller than Cape Kennedy in Florida. We took a tram ride around the complex and got to visit mission control where they supervise the space shuttle missions. They said that they had a humongous pool on site which the astronauts practice in since there isn't a way to practice weightless maneuvering here on earth. This is the closest they can get to weightlessness. It has a duplicate of the space station and satellites and shuttle all underwater. We need to go back and see the rest. We cut our visit short so we could go watch Voland baptize his family.

Cousin Drew Giles

Last month we were able to attend a Renasaunce Fair about 40 minutes northwest of us. Drew Giles, our cousin has been working there for the past 14 years and is currently teaching a dance class. He pulls people who walk past and convinces them to join his class. He has 4 different circle dances he teaches and does an excellent job of it. He thoroughly enjoys doing this every weekend in October and November. He was able to get us complimentary tickets which was very nice of him. He said that there were a projected 30,000 in attendance that day.

Jim is feeding the seagulls some trail mix on the beach in Corpus Christi. We were able to spend the weekend with Jan and Ruth Snyder who are serving in the mission office in the McAllen mission. We both traveled about 4 hours to get there. Corpus Christi is the northern border for their mission and about an hour south of the area we cover as Employment Missionaries. We attended their stakes Saturday night adult session. Then on Sunday we drove 1 1/2 hours north to Porte Lavaca and attended the branch in their small phase one building where we met their Employment Specialist and offered him our support.

A Baptism!

We were at the right place at the right time and found Voland. A baptism waiting to happen. He signed up to attend our Career Workshop class. He arrived 45 minutes early with a soft 'missionary' copy of the Book of Mormon which he had recently purchased at a 1/2 price bookstore for $6. He had received his first copy about 18 years ago and had been reading and studying off and on all this time. He wanted to be baptized! We called our sister missionaries and they were there waiting to teach him the 1st discussion after our class. He was baptized 2 weeks later. Last week he e-mailed us and invited us to go to his ward and watch him baptize his wife and son. What an honor. You just never know who the Lord has prepared and placed in your path.