Nauvoo Holbrooks

Starlight Art Glass Studio The temple missionary group has a lot of activities planned. Last Monday on our P-day we went to Burlington, Iowa, to tour a stained glass studio.  This is part of their lobby. Lots of beautiful glasswork. Arline's mother would have loved all their birdhouses In addition to their glasswork, they have some side hustles: selling koi, metal and glass yard sculptures, and aquatic plants. One of their koi ponds Yard art Dave's Favorite* --The Drgaonfly Story    In a pond, under the lily pads, water beetles live. Sometimes they feel immense sadness when a beetle climbs the stem of a lily pad and is gone forever.    One day, a little beetle climbed the stem. She was sure she would return home to tell what she discovered. She broke through the surface of the water and lay on the top of the lily pad. As she slept in the warmth of the sun, her body changed into a magnificent, colorful dragonfly with wings. She soared and discovered a new world. ...

Temple Baptistry On Tuesdays and Saturdays we get to be in the Baptistry. A group of people from our ward in Fort Madison came in last Saturday. It was sweet to see familiar faces and get hugs from our new friends. One of the best parts of the day was seeing someone who had joined the Church eight months ago. He baptized a new member he helped teach and just joined the Church the last week. We already love these good people!  Our beautiful font We've been told this oval font is the largest temple baptismal font in the Church. Last week when we were all trained and no patrons had been scheduled, they let us do baptisms in it for our ancestors. That was a great experience because usually only the youth get to do baptisms here.  As you probably know, the oxen represent the Twelve Tribes of Israel. We heard about someone who came in and named each ox--in order. We do good to come up with half their names and have no idea of the order. The stained glass picture the people see when ...

LOCAL WILDLIFE & MORE We don't feel like we're out in the country, so it has surprised us to see so much wildlife. There are a lot of grassy fields around but no cornfields near us. *On one of his walks, Dave got a picture of eaglets in a nest down by the river. They hatched about the time we got here. If you look closely, you can see the second eaglet's beak to the right of the mother's shoulder. Looks like Dad is bringing a fish for dinner *A couple of days ago there were two geese proudly marching alongside the highway with their goslings. So cute! A few days later there was some sort of territorial dispute around our house with ganders. We could safely watch from inside, but we didn't dare go out to get a picture or to go anywhere--they surrounded our house, even out onto the road. They were really going at it, hissing, honking, charging. Never saw a female. *Birds of all sorts, some like at home (sparrows, crows, and lots of very red robins), as well as bir...

  Fort Madison, Iowa The influx of missionaries overwhelms the wards in Nauvoo, while many of the wards and branches in outlying areas are struggling, so they have the missionaries do outreach and attend wards within a two-hour radius of Nauvoo. We've been assigned to the ward in Fort Madison, Iowa, along with another couple, the Riries from American Fork.  We recognized several people in the ward because they also serve in the Nauvoo Temple. And then we've recognized more people when they came as patrons to the temple.  It's about a 20-minute drive to church. There's a toll drawbridge that's free going into Iowa, with a $4 toll when we cross back into Illinois. It's owned by the railroad and a train also crosses the river. We were told that if we can time our trips with the train schedule, we won't ever be stuck waiting for a barge to go through. When it closes for several months this summer for maintenance work, it will take us more like 50 minutes to get ...

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 five of the 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...

  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 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 to ...

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...