A Family History Mission: Being Involved in Preparation

No. 1

Introductory note

For those of you who either may be new to this blog or unaware of impending changes, a note of explanation is necessary. My wife and I have been called upon a full-time mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the Washington DC, North Mission. We will be serving as Record Preservation Missionaries in the Maryland State Archives located in Annapolis, Maryland. We have decided to use our existing blog as a report to talk about our mission experiences. I have chosen the above tagline to identify those blog posts particularly directed at her missionary experiences. Of course, I may also post other items as I have done in the past, depending on the time available.

Preparation can be complicated

Over the past two months, it has become abundantly clear that leaving on a full-time mission for a young missionary is rather simple compared to the complexity of serving a full-time mission as a senior couple. This complexity comes from our involvement in a local ward, and extended family and personal and property interests.

One example involves downsizing from a two-car family to a one car family. Since we will be driving across the United States to serve our mission, we felt it necessary to sell one of our cars rather than leave it sitting for a year. Selling the car turned out to be a rather simple process comparatively. What turned out to be the problem was the remaining car. In gathering important family documents and records, we discovered that we did not have a title to the car. When we purchased the car initially, we finance the car through a bank. The bank loan was paid off years ago but, for some reason, we had never received the title and the bank lien had never been removed from the title. This and other issues involving checking accounts and other financial accounts ended up involving multiple visits to our local bank. Once we got the lien issue resolved, we still had to obtain a title. The problem was that the title was in Arizona and we were in Utah. Conveniently, we took a trip to Arizona to be with her family for Thanksgiving and at the same time visited the Arizona Department of Motor Vehicles and got a clear title to our now very well used car.

If you take that experience and multiply it by a few dozen other issues that needed to be resolved, you can see that the idea of preparing for a mission can be complicated. However, throughout this entire experiencing, we have both felt that we were doing the right thing and are anticipating the opportunity we have to serve.

Another, rather sad, experience involves one of my wife's close friends. During our entire preparation time, my wife's friend's husband has been in declining health. As it turns out, one of the last things we will do before entering the Missionary Training Center is to help prepare for a funeral.

Fortunately, we have had excellent support and help from the missionary department and from FamilySearch. Another interesting development has been the rather extensive contact we've had with genealogists and other missionaries serving in the Washington DC area. Primarily, because of my blog and other genealogical activities, we have several contacts now in the area of our mission and likely a number of ways to serve.

We began the process of applying for a full-time mission back in July 2017. We received our mission call rather quickly and were somewhat surprised at what seemed like a long period of waiting before we had to leave. As it turns out, the length of time we had to wait was barely sufficient to take care of all of the details involved. Because we were looking at our personal affairs with the idea of leaving on a mission, we ended up with a long list of items that needed to be resolved that really had nothing to do with submission directly.

In many ways, deciding to serve a full-time mission has already blessed our lives. In a very direct way, our decision to serve a mission has become a catalyst for resolving all sorts of background issues and problems that should have been resolved in any event.

We now only have a few days left before entering the Missionary Training Center. Another interesting difference about our mission is that because we live so close to the MTC we will be living at home rather than at the MTC itself. This is commonly the case with missionaries who live within a certain distance of the MTC.

Stay tuned for further developments. Elder James and Sister Ann Tanner