Glen and Lynne Tolman Missionary Blog

Tuesday September 4 We attended the mission devotional at 7:30am this morning.   On the way to the devotional, we walked with Elder and Sister Hendricks and visited with them.   She is the sister that I have been helping learn to add families to FamilyTree.   She is making progress and we offered encouragement and willingness to help her as needed.  The weekly mission devotional is normally held on Monday but was held today due to yesterday being the Labor Day holiday.   Normally the weekly devotional is skipped but it was held today as a new counselor in the mission presidency was sustained.   The new counselor is President Unger.   President and Sister Thornock were released.   They both spoke and during their messages it was confirmed to me that we are serving where the Lord wants us to be right now.    After the devotional, I shared this with Sister Tolman and she had the same feeling during this morning’s devotional.  W...

Friday August 31 We worked from 8am to 4pm at the Family History Library with an hour break for lunch.   I helped several people have a good experience connecting with their ancestors.   I helped two different couples and a young man.    It is very rewarding to help individuals connect with ancestors and have them see pictures and historical records about their ancestors.   After helping one of the two couples the wife asked if she could take a picture of me and a small stuffed toy monkey that she takes with her.   So if you see a random picture of me on Facebook don’t be surprised. When not helping others finding their families, I did some indexing, personal family history, or helping other missionaries finding individuals to add to their families.  It has been a while since I had done indexing so I will spend some time each week working on indexing or reviewing when I am not busy helping those who come to the library for help. After returni...

Saturday and Sunday August 25-26 Saturday is our day off.   We got the apartment cleaned and straightened.   Sister Tolman did the laundry and I did the vacuuming.   David and Jacqui Price visited us from about 1pm to 4:30pm.   We just stayed in the apartment and visited.   We finished our visit with a game of Five Crowns.   David and Jacqui are not game players but we have played Five Crowns before with them and they have since bought their own copy of the game.    Five Crowns Game We attended a concert at the Assembly Hall on Temple Square.   It was a female barbershop chorus.   They were really good and better than last week’s concert.     We talked to a missionary couple who were seated in front of us.   She is frustrated with not being able to find family members to add to Family Tree.   We invited her over on Saturday night and I volunteered to help her and teach her how to find her cousins. ...

Wednesday thru Friday August 22 to 24 We continued our work on the 17 on-line training modules and we both completed them Friday morning.  We completed the assessments by just after noon Friday. We are so happy to have completed this training so we can start helping others next week. We thought that this might take two weeks but we finished in one week.   Our mission so far has been lots of training with our first week at the MTC, the next two weeks in the training center at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building and a week of training at the Family History Library.  Each of the trainings were different and we greatly benefited from each one.  We left home on July 28 and here we are four weeks later at our home (shown below) for the next year and a half.  Our address is 185 N West Temple Apt 508, Salt Lake City, UT 84103. West Temple Apartments On Thursday night from 6:30-9pm we enjoyed a dinner and get together at the Garden Park Ward (this was my ...

Monday August 20 Thanks to Michelle for sending us the mail from Tempe.  Included was our early voting ballots which we completed and mailed in on Tuesday. We had our weekly devotional at 7:30am.   The new missionaries were introduced.   All the new arrivals were the young Elders.   Many had their families with them.   President and Sister Fenn spoke to us attended Music and the Spoken Word this morning.    President Fenn spoke about the importance of prayer and how prayer helps us in our lives.   He gave several examples of how prayer and faith have helped him.   - With his first call a mission president to Chicago, he left a very lucrative job and it was difficult for him initially to decide to go.   - He almost drowned while as a leader on a youth outing to Havasupai in Arizona.   He was not a strong swimmer and was swimming in a deep pool and couldn’t get across. He yelled for help but no one heard him.   He f...

Saturday August 18 We cleaned the apartment.   I vacuumed the floor and Sister Tolman did the rest of the cleaning and laundry.   We worked on some family history and did some reading.   We had an adventure as Sister Tolman found a discount store called “The NPS Store” (National Product Sales, Inc).    We went there to check it out.   When we walked in I asked if we needed a cart and Sister Tolman said “Yes”.   We brought home a cart full of food at less than half the cost at a regular store.   You can read about this store at www.npsstore.com/about   Here is a quote from the website “NPS uses both brick and mortar and online channels to sell a vast variety of items from just about any category. The NPS Store located on 1600 Empire Road in Salt Lake City, Utah, is a bargain hunter’s paradise with great deals to be found on grocery, clothing, housewares, electronics, and collectibles 6 days a week. Across the street is the NPS Industri...

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 ...