Musser Mission Blog

Elder Caten "knights" his replacement AP before he goes home.  This week marked the beginning of the last full transfer we will experience on our mission. The next transfer day we get to be a part of, will happen 2 days before we return home. That is a sobering thought. This transfer will be different than any other one that we have experienced. We will be getting a new mission president and losing a rather large chunk of our mission during this transfer. Both of those things mean that we will be dealing with some significantly sticky logistical challenges to make sure things go smoothly through the changes.  The transfer day itself went fairly well, however, I had to feel sorry for poor Elder Smythe, our travel secretary. The transfer board was not finalized until late Friday night, and he just happened to go home sick right after it happened. To put that into perspective, they always try to have the transfer finalized early in the week, so he can get the travel arranged for...

 No, this is not a photo of Jabba the Hutt and his court, it is a photo of a going away luncheon for our dear friends the Evans. They're headed back to sunny California after being our senior missionary district leaders. It was fun to have so many of the seniors together. Sister Heckmann was pulled away before we were able to have the picture taken. The Evans leaving means that I will start trading with Elder Johnson in teaching Institute for the last few weeks I am here. I think that will be fun, but I will need to make sure to include lesson prep into my schedule.  This last week had some interesting adventures which reminded me just how different things are here. The first was a trip to the bank. We had a few missionaries who paid debts to the mission with cash, and so I needed to make a cash deposit in the bank. It was my first time for that. Going into it, I was more worried about the accounting type stuff that I will have to do in our missionary systems to get the deposi...

 Things are starting to accelerate. The Johnsons got here this week, and came into the office on Friday to start learning. It is great to really have them here. It feels like we will actually be able to hand off the mission functional responsibility that we feel. We want to make sure that we set things up for success as best we can. It also helps that the Johnsons are absolutely delightful. He sang for 20 years in the Tabernacle Choir. She was on a 12 year service mission to travel around to the temples to do all of their interior flower arrangements and has some wonderful stories to tell. Since Saturday was their first p-day here, they wanted to go and do something and we thought it would be fun to finally go up to Tibidabo. We ended up taking the Larrosas with us as well. It turned out to be a lot of fun.  Tibidabo is the tallest hill near Barcelona. On top is a church that took 60 years to build. I think they were afraid that attendance would be a problem since it is on the...

We finally got a picture with President and Hermana Heckmann!  As of today, we have exactly 2 months left on our mission. Those words carry a lot of meaning to me. On one hand there is certainly some excitement to be reunited with our loved ones. On the other hand, we have a ton of things to do to prepare! Just the logistics of getting the Johnsons up to Barcelona to start training them have a lot of moving parts. I have been mentally going through stuff that we need to go over and I am really scared that I will miss something vital. I really want to make sure they are trained well, because they will just have to turn around and hand it all off to the Lamberts when they finally get here. Then there is getting things ready in the office. This week I grabbed one of the mission secretaries to go down to the "pit of despair" and haul the rest of the boxes of old records that need to be shredded. In total there are about 40! That was a workout! I was super glad to have a young str...

 It is kind of hard to believe that we are already into the month of MAY! We literally have just over 2 months left. There is a new sense of urgency about what is left to be done before we start the next big adventure in our lives. We just aren't sure of what that adventure will be. Before we get there though, we have a lot to get done here in Spain. We finally have a clear path forward. The Johnsons are going to come to Barcelona to be trained in the office. That will start in the next few weeks. The new couple is supposed to get here on 8 July. If they do, we will have about 2 days to show them where they will live and give them what words on encouragement we can before we come home. The Johnsons will then need to train the new couple. This is the only way that we could guarantee that someone gets trained. If we had just extended a couple of weeks, and they do not get their visa on time, the mission would be in a rough place. This week we had zone conferences. It was fun to see t...