The Pacific Post

Longing For Home  Week 7 29 September 2024 Kelly and I are pretty melancholy today, thinking of all of my family together celebrating the life of my sister-in-law, Shelley Ray, who passed away of cancer last week. It's hard not to be with everyone at the funeral today and feel of their love and support. We feel like we said our goodbyes before we left but it is still hard to miss out. I hope you feel our love and prayers. What a sweet picture of Launette's brothers during the funeral.  Sweet brotherly love. Speaking of brotherly love I don't think we have mentioned how much K.C. and Judy have done to help us adjust and get settled. Not only were we surprised when we got called to the same area, but we were surprised how easy our NZ and mission adjustment has been and much of that credit goes to K.C. and Judy This week we covered a story of President Lund, the YM General President, visiting Tonga and speaking to members. He visited along with President Meurs and President Wa...

Fire Alarms and New Friends  Week 6 21 September 2024 This woman made 6 amazingly beautiful arrangements for the celebration. I asked her to show me how.:) Hello All, Our days are getting busier and that is such a blessing. Neither of us do well without a check list to feel productive. This week we hosted a training with out of town visitors and we traveled north to cover an event.  The three pictures above are from an event we covered. It is the 170th year anniversary of the Church in New Zealand.   It is also Maori language week.   The church produced a children's history book of the Church history in New Zealand and the pictures above are from the event.   It was held in the only Maori speaking ward in the Church.   We went with a production team, Elder Jaggi of the Area Presidency and his wife, to video and report on the event.  It was an inspiring and impressive event.   Also a very beautiful Maori closing prayer was ...

Happy Birthday from New Zealand Week 5 Happy Birthday to President Nelson. This is the conference room on our floor and some of the senior couples we serve with in the Area Office.  We gathered to watch the birthday celebration.  Afterwords, the Area Presidency arranged to sing him happy birthday, blow out candles on a birthday cake in his honor, and then we sent the video to the Prophet.  It was a wonderful tribute to our prophet and we loved taking the time to watch it together.   We don't know if we have explained this or not but our floor has the offices of Area Legal Council, Area Health Advisor, Area Mental Health Advisor, Area Auditing, the Area Presidency and Mission Leaders In-Field rep. There are 9 full-time employees and 9 senior missionary couples.  All the other floors of the Area Office are full-time paid employees.  This week we spent time on Press-kits, improving our media contacts, writing a couple of stories (one about a senior missio...

Peanut Butter Creamy Style Week 4 Some of you may be saying, "Look, they match."  That was a total accident, but at least it was a good looking accident. Scary thing is, it happens a lot! I dress first, it's his issue.:) (It looks like we are going to prom together.) Some of you have asked what we do, so here is a list of a few things we did this week. We wrote articles for the Church Newsroom on a humanitarian project in Tonga that provided nursery's for two cities.   An article on Tonga missionaries driving world dignitaries to a special inter-island conference.  An article on a youth concert.  We wrote a press release for the 170th year anniversary of the Church in New Zealand to distribute to media outlets in NZ.  We provided talking points to the Area Presidency for a church book release on New Zealand Church History and will drive 3 hours North and cover that event that Elder Jaggi of the Area Presidency will commemorate.  We made arrangements fo...

Office Life is Getting Easier Week 3 Well, it is week 3 and the office routine is getting easier. We still eat our lunch at our desks to catch up and cram everything we can in a day. I hope we can relax a little more in the coming weeks.  In all honesty, we are still trying to figure out how we can be most effective bringing others to Christ. We are trying to lift where we were planted, but it will just take awhile.  This is our office and it's kind of fun to wheel backwards to say hello to each other anytime I would like. I think Kelly gets tired of all of my computer questions. Yesterday I reminded him what he felt like when he first purchased a Mac. I have never worked on a PC so it's a double learning curve for me. We have both been working on our first publications this week. They usually give missionaries a month to do so but we are eager and they have time to teach us now. I wrote an article on the New Zealand's national family history month. Kelly is writing an arti...