Serving An 18 Month LDS Mission

In the LDS church, when a girl turns 21 she has the opportunity to choose to serve an 18 month, self-funded mission. I have wanted to go on a mission since I was a little girl. My parents both served a mission in Rome in the 1970's. In 2001-2002, my sister Letty served as a missionary in Hong Kong and my brother Algot in the Philippines. As soon as I turned 21 I submitted my papers. The Prophet and 12 Apostles determine through inspiration which of the more than 300 missions worldwide each missionary will be assigned. I was overjoyed when I opened my mission call and discovered that I was called to Rome, Italy! I feel immensely blessed and I feel that God has been preparing me to serve the Italian people. Each week, while I am on my mission, I will send my sister Letty an email and pictures to post on the blog. I won't see this blog till I come home, so I will be unable to directly respond to your comments until then. However, the sidebar will always have a current street address for me, and I promise I will respond to your letters! If you would rather write via email, just email your letter to my sister and she will print it out and send it me with her weekly snail mail!

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Rose is Officially a Missionary!

And Grandma Took the Best Picture of the Day!
Hello friends! This is Letty, Rose's sister.  She entered the Missionary Training Center at 1:25 PM today! We started the day with some last minute shopping due to a clothing mishap (yes, you can sprint thru a mall in heels) and then ran back to Grandma's house to pick up everyone else. Mom, Dad, Me and our 93 year old Grandma headed down to Provo to drop Rose off at the MTC, where she will spend the next 9 weeks learning Italian and missionary teaching skills.
But first, lunch at Chuck A Rama Provo, thanks to Grandma.  As we walked up to the cash register a lady smiled and said, "have you got a new missionary?" (I guess Wednesdays in Provo a lot can be assumed, lol) and Rose got a free meal! Yay for Happy Valley!
Isn't Our Grandma Just Lovely? I Hope to Be As Beautiful at 93!
After lunch we had some fun times trying to find an open church building so Rose could get a blessing from her father before entering the MTC (we had forgotten to do this at home before leaving). Finally she thought of trying an old roommate, who wasn't home. But Dad started Rose practicing on some door-to-door approaches, and tried the neighbor to see if she had a small, private space they could use. The neighbor happily obliged (again, LUV happy valley) and after being invited to stay for the blessing, started crying right along with Mom at the beautiful words of blessing Dad spoke.

Finally we pulled up to the curbside drop-off at the MTC, where Elders currently training in the MTC waited in pairs to part the prospective missionaries and their luggage from their families. I got busy with the camera (although we had been asked to have all pictures taken before, the hectic pace of the day simply had not allowed it. So I engaged in a little judicious rule-breaking (only minutes into her official mission, sorry Rose) and snapped the following pictures.
 
  
  
Obviously, she's not having any fun at all! I think this pictures will probably be Rose's entire mission theme.

Posted by at

1 comment:

  1. Mark and LisaAugust 1, 2012 at 9:24 PM

    Hi Letty, I am Lisa Wightman. My daughter Paige is in the MTC going to the same mission as Rose. They were friends at BYU. I am so happy to see this blog. We do one for Paige too if you want to check it out - sisterwightman.blogspot.com. Paige had been in the MTC since June 20th. I am sure they will be great friends! Good luck to you all. Though they can't send pictures home from the MTC anymore, Paige sent her sd card home and we got some. You can see them on her blog.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)