Nauvoo Holbrooks

Our First Week in Nauvoo It's been a busy week. We've been in the temple every  day. Sunday we were set apart and got a little tour, Monday we had more of a tour and were sent on errands around the temple to find things (not an Easter egg hunt, more like where would you go to get this or turn that in), and Tuesday morning was our first shift. That was baptism by fire! Fortunately, the ordinances don't change, but there are a lot of procedures that are different, plus we're up and down all six floors throughout the shift. Can you say  lots of stairs ? There are two rather slow elevators, but most people use the stairs. The spiral staircase is beautiful. Our shifts are 5-6 hours, and the temple closes for a few hours in the early afternoon. Right now we will be working three mornings and two afternoons a week. Surprisingly, the morning shifts are easier on us. Baptistry training will start next week. Then we'll have two shifts in the baptistry (one morning and one aft...

 The Adventure Continues Although our stake president set us apart as missionaries, we're not doing any mission work yet, just traveling to Nauvoo. We don't even get our missionary name tags until we get there. It's been a fun week of traveling.                                                                  Tuesday morning we went to the Oklahoma City Temple, then drove to Bentonville. It's beautiful! Although the temples have the same reverent feel and purpose, all are individual in personality. Those two places remind us we're going to do the Lord's work. Branson was delightful, as usual. We've been to several of the bigger shows in the past, so we changed things up a bit. This time we primarily came to see the Biblical production of David (amazing, fantastic!) and then chose to also go...

Our Nauvoo Adventure Begins Boy, with several missions under our belt, you'd think it would be a piece of cake to get ready for another one. We've got lots going for us--previous and longer missions to help us know what to do, leaving our condo now instead of a house so we don't have to find someone to move in and keep things going, our family trip was early this year (in January), and we got called to the mission we were hoping for the first time we turned in our papers almost 15 years ago. All we can say is it's a good thing we had all of those experiences to help us gear up. This time the preparation has been harder in several ways: we're older and have slowed down quite a bit, the application process took longer for some reason with lots more hoops to jump through, and the last few months have been full of challenges, mostly health issues. Fortunately, most of those have been resolved. Unfortunately, Arline got sick and missed speaking in church--the lengths som...