LIFE IN TRANSITION: SOME NEW CHALLENGES

We've been looking forward to serving a full time mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for more than a decade since Norm's retirement from full time employment with AT&T in the year 2000. With the arrival of our mission call with it's subsequent reporting date to the mission field, we have discovered that there are some new challenges that aren't covered in the missionary handbook or the formal training we received at the Missionary Training Center earlier this month.

Suffice it to say that some things are difficult to anticipate let alone effectively plan for when you are transitioning from being in a fully furnished home with all of the "stuff" you have accumulated over an entire lifetime readily at your disposal and then moving to the somewhat spartan environment of living in an apartment in a distant place with furniture that is mostly borrowed, well-used, and in some cases leaning in the direction of being worn out.

Now add to this equation something that is decidedly outside of most everyone's comfort zone: you can only bring with you whatever you can manage to pack into your automobile (if you are called to serve in North America) or just a suitcase or two should your mission assignment be to another country overseas. With our mission location in the Maryland Baltimore Mission being less than 400 miles from our home in North Carolina, Linda and I were provided the greater option (compared to close Church friends who have been directed to a mission in Japan with only a couple of suitcases to keep them company on the airplane). We were told at the MTC "blessed are the flexible for they shall not be bent out of shape!"

That extra weight makes the car sit lower to the ground!

It would be decidedly more accurate to describe the experience of selecting items to pack into the family car and the actual accomplishment of doing it as something akin to stuffing as many people as possible into a telephone booth, which was a popular college student diversion in the 1960's. I guess that I am probably dating myself with that analogy, because advances in technology might cause some folks to wonder what exactly is a telephone booth?

With the able and loving support of family and friends, everything essential to sustaining life (including our popcorn maker) was successfully shoe-horned into our vehicle; and my wife even allowed a place for me, so I didn't have to run along side the car or be strapped to the roof for the trip to Baltimore. We are beginning to understand even at this early stage of our missionary service, that most material things don't have the same importance in our day to day living if we are willing to stay focused on the spiritual reasons why we are enlisted in this sacred missionary calling to bring souls to Christ.