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Blessings of Serving a Full-Time Mission
Our hearts were filled with gratitude when on 22 December 2020, we received our mission call from the prophet of God to serve a 23-month member-and-leadership-support mission in the Enugu Nigeria Mission, 250 kilometers away from our home. For over two decades of marriage, we had prepared every needful thing including serving as senior service couple for BYU-Pathway Worldwide, waiting for a time that serving a full-time mission would be possible for us.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Lord inspired modifications in the full-time missionary service to include live-at-home, live-near-home and remote service options. In faith, we completed the missionary recommendation form with the encouragement of our dear stake president, Samuel Ekpolo, and we were called to the work. The missionary training center provided us with opportunities for interaction with other senior missionary couples, to learn from Preach My Gospel and other specifics necessary for our labors and safety in the field.
Following the training, we reported to our mission president who outlined our duties. These included supporting the Children and Youth Development program in the mission and working with the Area Office for another young single adult program—The Gathering Place. We became one of ten couples who pioneered the Gathering Place and missionary transition initiatives in the Africa West Area. This assignment was definitely an overwhelming task initially, but we are so grateful for understanding companions who encouraged us, especially Brothers and Sisters Mortensen and Elder and Sister Mondragon.
Ministering among our assigned 33 stakes and districts in three coordinating councils meant days of traveling and extensive work as we encourage the stake presidents to establish and sustain Gathering Places.
The missionary experiences and challenges of participating in pioneering the youth programs have blessed us immensely. Those blessings include the ability to live the law of consecration, standing as an official representative of the Savior, an expanded view and stronger testimony of the Lord’s work and Atonement, total dependence on the Lord to care for us and the families we left behind as we served, love and understanding of others and an understanding, a strengthened marriage as we served as equal companions, increased capacity to overcome challenges, renewed physical and spiritual strength, better understanding of Church administration, and having concrete evidence of our conversion for our posterity.
What a humbling experience when our only daughter decided to serve a mission for the Church during the same time that we were serving our full-time mission!
As a pioneer senior missionary couple in our area, we declare that the Lord truly has need of senior full-time missionary couples. Indeed, we believe the words of Elder Marcos A. Aidukatis when he said; “Serving a full-time mission may seem difficult to us. Perhaps it requires that we give up important things for a moment. The Lord certainly knows this, and He will always be by our side.”1
We have felt the Lord by our side and by the sides of our families as we labor in His vineyard with all our minds, strengths, and eye single to His glory. There is nothing we know of that can afford us as much good in this life and in the life to come than to help in the work and glory of the Lord.
President Russell M. Nelson has asked every young man and interested young woman to engage in the work of gathering Israel.2 How grateful we are that our missionary service provides strong persuasion for our children to answer this prophetic call! What a privilege that we can gladly and humbly say to our posterity, “In this family, we serve missions.”
We have just few months left in our mission; we sometimes ponder how well we served and if the Lord accepted our offering of service. It would be easy for us to look back at these years and reflect on how the Lord truly blesses, teaches, and supports His full-time missionaries. In very significant ways our lives shall never be the same again and as the gray hairs adorn our heads in the near future, the witness of the Holy Ghost that we are friends of God shall help us endure to the end.
Sweet is the work and the blessings eternal!