Amazing Week

This was a full week. We had to made two trips to West Palm Beach early in the week to arrange to get the water turned on in a new apartment by Wednesday. We attended a wonderful Transfer Meeting on Wednesday. About 80 missionaries were standing and singing "The Army of Helaman" when the 15 new missionaries (7 Elders and 8 Sisters) and their trainers walked into the chapel. The spirit was so strong. One of the trainers, Sister Magnusson, was signing to her new deaf and mute companion throughout the meeting so she could understand what was being sung and said. It was amazing to meet this new Sister and feel of her spirit. Missionary work is challenging, but to take it on with so many personal challenges is truly amazing.

President Hale asked Elder Black to train the other Senior Couples on how to work with the YSA branches so we had a meeting on Friday afternoon. The Assistants were their to give their input and the training went well. We also trained the missionaries in the Homestead branch on YSA Saturday morning. Sunday was a full day attending a missionary correlation meeting, Branch Council and the block meetings. Elder Black also taught the Gospel Principles lesson. During the lesson on the Creation, he was talking about the marvels of the human body and told them about the dissected nerves displayed at Ryan's medical school and also mention how long it took him to get through pre-med, med school and residency. One of the cute sisters raised her hand and hopefully asked, Is he still single?. She was quite disappointed when we told her he was happily married with 5 children.

We have another full week ahead of us with YSA training of the missionaries in the Miami Zone tomorrow, three days of apartment inspections and Sister Black will be attending a Sisters Conference on Friday. By the way, we finally got our car back from the body shop on Saturday and it looks great.

Halloween Week

We have been making the transition from the Coconut Creek ward to the Snapper Creek YSA Branch. We are so excited with the wonderful potential in the YSA branch and have had a flood of ideas on how we can carryout our Mission Presidents directions to us. We plan on doing a training for the full-time missionaries this week and next on how to work with the branch and our role in representing them at the leadership meetings, church meetings and activities. We had a full day on Sunday and enjoy our new assignment.

On Saturday night we had a Halloween party with the other Senior Couples and enjoyed visiting and playing games together. Elder and Sister Black are shown in their Halloween garb. Elder Black won the prize for the best look and Sister Black won or tied for first in the two games we played.

On Sunday evening, we were driving to take some food to a YSA fireside and got into an accident. Luckily, both vehicles were about stopped, but our left front bumper hit into the right front bumper of a large pickup truck. No one was hurt, but it ruined our front bumper and put a little bend in our fender so the drivers side door would not open. There was a little paint scratched off of the truck. This morning we went to a place that was able to get the door on the drivers side to open and close and we will get it fixed over the next three days and will rent a car. We are amazed that we went a whole year before our first accident. We drove to West Palm Beach today to arrange for the water to be turned on in a new apartment we rented. We had to show them our lease and they discovered that it had been signed by someone other than the property owner, so we need to gather more documents (power of attorney from the person who signed it) and make the hour drive again tomorrow. The missionaries need to be in the apartment by Wednesday. We have 15 new missionaries coming in tomorrow. Some of our Sister Missionaries are going to start riding bikes. One of our missionaries had his appendix out on Sunday. It is amazing all the things going on and what it takes to keep things running relatively smoothly.

Productive Week

We seem to get more and more going on each day. We have been surprised how involved the apartment inspections have been and how exhausted we felt the three days we did them this week. We started our work in the Snapper Creek Branch Saturday and Sunday. We enjoyed getting to know the Branch leadership and a few of the young adults. We are looking forward to helping them as much as we can in their missionary effort. We gave the last new member lesson to Dalton Rhoden and took him out for ice cream afterwards. He is a neat man and we have really grown close to him. We will teach the last new member lesson to Brother Ladden on Wednesday and then we are taking him out to dinner afterwards. That will wrap up our involvement in the Coconut Creek ward. Elder Black also took a Gospel Principles manual to Gary Francois Sunday morning and got to say goodbye to him.

The Pompano Beach Stake temple day was a great success with over 1100 endowments and a total of 1700 ordinances performed for the dead. The missionary work continues to go forward with great success. The week after next is Transfer Week and 15 new missionaries will be arriving and 6 departing. This arriving group includes 8 Sisters and 5 ASL (American Sign Language) missionaries. One of them is both deaf and cannot speak. I cannot imaging the faith and determination she must have.
We got to see some large Florida spiders today down by the beach. They are about 2 or 3" long and they make huge webs (see attached photos).