The Call
We have planned to serve a mission since the early years of
our marriage, and have tried to prepare ourselves to fulfill this commitment.
Over the years, we have prayed for the Lord to place us where He felt we could
best serve Him in building up His Kingdom and in helping the work go forward.
For the past three years, we have actively explored many of the senior
missionary opportunities before us. We focused primarily on the potential
preference of a Humanitarian Mission or for Sherry to serve as a Mission Nurse
(recognizing however, that our assignment would ultimately be made by the
Quorum of the 12). Surprisingly however, a new option surfaced in the beginning
of last year as we learned of a need for retired attorneys to serve as
Associate Area Legal Counsels in various locations of the world. For some
reason, we felt impressed to explore this option in depth. As a result of
numerous communications with Br. Bill Atkin at Church Headquarters and later a
wonderful and spiritual meeting with Elder Lance Wickman (the General Counsel
for the Church) we knew our direction was changing.
Upon completion of our interviews and paperwork, we were requested to notify the Office of General Counsel (OGC) as soon as our paperwork was transmitted. We then began what we anticipated would be a 4-6 week wait for our assignment. Exactly one week later, we received a phone call from Elder Wickman stating he had a letter in his hands addressed to us from the First Presidency and wondered if we might like to have him read it to us. He then proceeded to read us our call to the Africa Southeast Area Offices.
Needless to say, we are so excited.
Ironically, Lynn's grandfather (William Whyte) was called on a mission to
South Africa in 1914. When he got off the ship in Capetown, all of the
Mormon missionaries were thrown into prison. Two weeks later, they hired
an attorney who got them out of prison and back onto a ship to Liverpool,
England where he ended up serving out his mission. Lynn has also since
learned that one of his cousins served his mission in South Africa. In
addition, two other women who we are close to, served their missions in South
Africa as well as other friends who have served their missions in the Africa Southeast
Area. Hardly a day has gone by that we don't find someone with some connection
to South Africa. It has been amazing.
Lynn retired from Lansing Building Products in April, and we have begun diligently preparing for our assignment, including all of the shots, the fingerprints for the required FBI background investigation, etc. We were a little worried because the fingerprint scanner they use evaluates the quality of the fingerprint and it either passes the image or it does not. On the first time, only one of Sherry's fingerprints passed. The second time, three of her fingerprints were acceptable. We thought for sure the FBI would reject them and we would have to go thru the State authorities for her background investigation. Amazingly, she passed the FBI investigation despite her fingerprints. Her prints look more like tic-tac-toe lines or like constellations with lines connecting the dots. The problem is that angels just don't have normal human fingerprints.
