Birthday Week from Paradise

 


We hope you all had a wonderful Easter.  We were indeed blessed with a wonderful Sacrament meeting followed by a Zone dinner at the mission home.  If you recall several months ago, Doug had the opportunity to baptize one of the 5 Cox children--Brandon.  Well, Brandon gave his first talk on Easter to a standing room only crowd of 84 (at least) that day.  He did such an incredible job and really brought the Spirit followed by two other wonderful speakers on the life, atonement, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  When I say standing room only, I mean we had them standing and sitting in the hallways and other small classrooms because we can only fit about 60 people in our little chapel.  It was GLORIOUS to see so many faces at church.  Afterwards, we followed up with dinner at the mission home.  


The transfer is completed but in the above picture from Easter we welcomed the Johnsons' from Hurricane, UT who will be the new MLS couple on St. Lucia as well as 3 Sisters who went to the French side on Tuesday, as well as welcomed Sister Leslie from England.  It was a full house.  Orientation was great as well and gives us an opportunity to get to know these missionaries as they begin their service.....the sad part is that some of them we won't see again except on Zoom or in a Whats App chat.  

Sisters (back to front): Bickmore, Fuller, Ardon, Reis, Takapu, Soriano, Guzman, and Leslie

General Conference was also another highlight of our week.  What a powerful conference!  Our Zoom devotional this week was the sharing of our impressions from the Conference.  With a global conference, it makes sense that each of us comes away with different favorites and impressions that touched our hearts.  Doug's favorite was Elder Holland's talk and the powerful witness of his recent experiences.  Most noted his focus on prayer, but impressions on his witness of angels and miracles and his sense of urgency and consecration to the work in testifying of the truthfulness of the gospel and of Jesus Christ was indeed worth pondering.  I found "rays of light" in many of the talks and wrote those in my reading journal to ponder again as I study all of the talks over the next 6 months; however, I did find Elder Uchtdorf's talk to resonate with me and after he was done, I couldn't help but say....that was an excellent talk!  We all desire happiness, but many know not where to find it.  The peace that our Savior gives us is higher than anything we can imagine.  We were built to have joy and have it more abundantly, so here were the things that stuck out:

  • Let faith overcome fear
  • Draw near to Him & I shall find Him
  • Rise higher even during opposition (airplane analogy)


On Monday, we celebrated Doug's birthday!  Shout out to our son in law, McKay, on his birthday this week as well!  Happy birthday!  For Doug's birthday this year, we had planned to be in St. Vincent with the SV Ellis' but it didn't quite work out, so we are heading there tomorrow for a long weekend.  It's in the mission, so we have permission to work from there!  Sorry....tangent..... so Monday, we went to lunch with the office and the Halls who are heading back to Canada after completing their MLS mission on St. Lucia.  Sister Bickmore made him her special cookies!  I made him some brownies.  The sisters called him to sing to him!  He got lots of texts and FT with the kids/grandkids.  It was a great day!


We hope y'all are starting to unthaw from the long winter and would love to see any that want to venture down to Barbados and check it out.  Tourist season is wrapping up.  Apparently we have the World Cup of Cricket coming in June, so that should be exciting.  Oh and polo!  Apparently it is polo season.  Crop-over events start in June - August, which ends with a huge Carnival type event that is a cultural experience in the Caribbean.  Until November is the slow time.  We've stopped seeing as many cruise ships in port.  Most days there are 4-5 very large ships in the port, but lately it is more like 1-2 and on Saturday there were none.  The kids have a 3 week Easter break here and most of the snowbirds go home for Easter, so the island has been calmer of late.  We know it is harder to reach us here from the states with only Jet Blue & American flying here; however, Delta will start flying here again in November!  Nevertheless, it is always sunny and at least 85 degrees here, so there's that!  

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