August 17- Friday, Our “Go Forth Day”

We followed our normal routine this morning. For me it is get up just before 6am, read for 10-15 minutes including Book of Mormon study time, exercise for 10 minutes, have personal prayer, shower and shave and then eat breakfast (normally cold cereal and milk plus juice and sometimes some fruit).  We try to leave between 7:10 and 7:15am so we can get to the Joseph Smith Memorial Building to our training area which is on the 3^rd floor by between 7:25 and 7:30 am.

This morning was our turn to give a spiritual thought, scripture and prayer.  We sing a song to begin and today we sang hymn #263 “Go Forth With Faith”.  This ia a favorite hymn of mine. For my thought I shared that all of us have had challenges in our lives and that as we move ahead with faith, we can accomplish difficult and challenging things.  I shared several challenges including when Sister Tolman and I were first called to be over Family History work in our stake and knew very little about it.  Since then we have learned a lot and this area has become a strength for us.  All of us agreed that preparing for our full-time missionary service was difficult.

Sister Tolman gave the prayer but first read the scripture from 1 Nephi 3:7 “And it came to pass that I, Nephi, said unto my father: I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them.”  

Following our morning devotional we left for the chapel for our “Go Forth Meeting”.   This is where all of  the missionaries in our group received their assignments.  

Joseph Smith Memorial Building Chapel

We are all looking forward to this meeting and will be happy to know our specific assignments.  President Fenn spoke to us to begin the meeting and then announced our assignments.  Each person was asked to stand, the assignment was announced and then the zone leaders stood so that we would know who to meet with after the meeting where we had some refreshments and received some brief instructions about what to expect and when to plan on starting on Monday.  Elder Woodward our zone leader shared the following video containing pictures of all the missionaries.  Here is the link.

As we said previously, we indicated that our first choice was to serve in the “Help Services” Zone in the Family History Library. The Zone description is “Provides assistance to first-time visitors to the Family History Library getting started with FamilySearch and beginning family history research for US and Canada ancestors.”  Our second choice was to serve in the “Training” zone where we have been training for the past two weeks.

When our call was announced we were assigned to the “Help Services” zone.  We are very happy and looking forward to serving there.  We are located on the top floor of the Family History Library.  We start on Monday and are excited to begin our assignment.  At least for the first week or two we will be at the library from 7:30 am to 4 pm Monday thru Friday.  When we  complete our training there we will be given a specific shift assignment.  

At the end of the meeting we watched a video prepared just for us missionaries.  I will try to post it later.

We all attended the 11am Endowment session at the Salt Lake Temple finishing a little after 1pm or so.  Many of our trainers and the two mission presidency counselors and their wives attended as well.  

It was wonderful to be there in the temple together.  Following the session we ate lunch in the temple cafeteria.  I had salmon and Sister Tolman had a loaded baked potato.   It was a good meal and we won't need much for dinner.