Carlos Mission--Philippines MTC

It seems like every few days another little tender mercy happens to us. We know that Heavenly Father is mindful of us and helping to make our ways just as bright and happy as possible. We are so grateful for these special experiences. Tender Mercy #1--The Lees For 19.5 years we lived in Salem, Oregon. We have such fond times there of wonderful friends, church service and watching our kids grow up and graduate from high school. From the beginning our dear neighbors Jim and Laurey Lee and their awesome six kids were an important part of our lives. Last fall as we were contemplating coming, we learned that we would lose the couple that serve as Executive Secretaries to the President in May of this year. About that same time Laurey (we moved away from Oregon way back in 2012) and I were catching up during a once a year phone call. She told me that she had retired and Jim was about to retire. She mentioned that he was set on going on a mission but she wasn't sure about it. A light bu...

One of the greatest blessings of serving at the Philippines MTC is that it is right across the street from the Manila Temple, which is always a gathering place for missionaries who served with us in the Philippines Cauayan Mission back in 2010-2013, the members that we learned to love, and visitors from the US. There is hardly a day that goes by without us having a visitor come and say hello. We love seeing each and everyone of them and unfortunately we don't always have our cameras handy. Here are a few of our special visitors. The Wooden Family--Stayed with us on their way to revisit their two sons Philippine Missions. We LOVE this family! The Bataras: Brother Batara was our night guard in Cauayan. He faithfully protected the mission offices, senior couple's apartments and the mission home almost every night for the three years we were there. Sister Batara is an amazing woman, an educator and fantastic cook! She shared her talents with missionaries on several occasi...

It's true we work hard at the MTC and so do the Eckerts, our MTC nurses, and the Lees, our executive secretaries (they both share the duties). But that doesn't mean we can't play hard too! We try to sneak away for a shopping or dining excursion a few times each week. Once in a great while we get away for the better part of a day (we have one day every three weeks where we are between batches--still we have our language training missionaries but the numbers go from over 100 to less than 20) And once in a while we whoop it up right here at the MTC. This was the case when we saw on Facebook that Elder and Sister Lee were celebrating their 49th wedding anniversary. We knew that even though it was Sunday we had to do something grand to help them celebrate it in style. The best we could do on short notice was to bake a lime/almond cheesecake and surprise them by telling them there was a meeting in our apartment. After we indulged, we played The Great Dalmute complete with cra...