Jetsetting, Learning, Choosing

Usually,  when a mission president is called, he and his wife start, in January, a series of 6 discussions with other newly called individuals and a couple of people from the church's missionary department and various resource people.  Each discussion is three weeks apart, with lots of reading material and things to do in between them.

We started those in January, hooked up via a web video feed with 7 other couples in the Philippines, Japan and Arizona.  They were helpful.

Somewhere in there someone realized something that we had been wondering about: that our assignment will start in March instead of in July, and that when we started we would have only been able to participate in two of these sessions.  So a crash course was put together by some very good people and Lewis and I flew to Salt Lake City to spend 4 packed-full days doing the next 4 sessions of discussion and reading and meeting with resource people and working with young missionaries.  It was extremely helpful and the two who took on the task of coordinating the whole thing and with whom we spent the most time were delightful, insightful people.

(And we were able to spend some time with Sam and Susan and their families on our last evening there too, which was great.)

And, also, this week,

Enter Felix,

whose entrance into the world we were alerted to as being imminent on Thursday and who was born in Seoul on Saturday morning.

So now I am in Seoul, and Lewis is in Hanoi.