THE QUEZON QUIBBLER: Small and Simple Things

Dear Family,

I must admit to getting a little frustrated with how short the missionary letters home became from some of you during your missions. You used the excuse, "There's nothing new--we just do the same thing every day!" And now I understand. I also feel like we do the same thing every day. I had to think hard, but some little miracles happened this week:

1-We went to Manila to visit Sister Rojo, a visa waiter assigned to Las Vegas, who had her thyroid removed Wednesday. It's a blessing she went on a mission and they discovered the cancer while she was at the MTC and she got the best care available at St. Luke's hospital. If she had stayed in her province here in the Philippines, she would likely not have known about the cancer until it was far more advanced, and then may not have been able to afford the operation required. She is actually happy with this start to her mission! And she and her companion were both pleased with the DQ shakes Dad brought them--it's her first "solid" food. (And afterward we went to our favorite hamburger place and had a great meal ourselves!)

2-Elder Ewing decided to stay in the mission instead of going home for his brother's funeral. Dad arranged with his stake president for him to view the funeral live through Facetime. This required him to come to the mission home Saturday night and view it at 2am, but it worked out okay. We're so thankful for his change of heart. He's been blessed with some companionship unity struggles this week, which has distracted him from his grief (but gave Dad and his Filipino companion plenty of grief!)

3-Elder Brown's grandpa died, and since Elder Ewing had permission to view the funeral, Dad let Elder Brown come to the mission home FRIDAY night to view his Grandpa's funeral, mainly because his dad also died on his mission and he was never able to view the recording of his funeral because of poor wifi.

Anyway, the miracle that came from this inconvenience to us (I can't walk around in my PJ's with elders here) is that he and his companion mentioned having their sixth week training almost two years ago at the mission home. This little piece of information opened our minds to possibilities for moving many meetings from our mission office to the mission home, which led to some breakthroughs in where to move our mission office (the Church will need it for a stake office in the next 6-9 months). More to come on this in future letters, but we may have a solution! (We thought we already had a solution, but we were shocked to find Monday that the building we were planning to close on this week was suddenly sold to someone else!)

4-Friday night we had a stake dinner with the stake presidency and bishops of our stake, Fairview. At these stake dinners, Stewart expresses appreciation for their help and then teaches the importance of members finding the people to bring into the Church instead of the missionaries finding them (and he did it amazingly this night!) and then the assistants teach the "Jiffy" program of the mission and get ten names from each guest present. The idea is that they then do this in their own wards. Well, last week this was done in a ward where this was taught on June 30, and the missionaries in that ward collected over 700 referrals -- and this is a ward that hasn't been at all helpful to the missionaries in the past!

5-Yesterday we attended a baptism about a 90 minute drive from the mission home of two teenagers and a beautiful 11-year-old girl. Their relatives and so many youth from the ward came to support them. And the bishop was very honored that the mission president would come all that way to their ward baptism. He invited Dad say a few words and Dad "invited" me say a few words. The miracle is, I wasn't petrified, even though I only had a few minutes notice. Maybe I've just given so many talks in the past year that I am tired of being afraid of giving talks, so I wasn't. Well, not very.

6-Best new of the week? See screen shot of text below.

We love you and are so thankful for the support of all the family in Utah for the Fent and Joyce Hughes reunion. THANK YOU all for going and helpful. We love hearing about Dallin and Hannah's adventures and are praying for the Smarts in their flight to California. We love you all so much.

Love,

Mom