BON JOUR!

See the sign this old dude has on his tray…


Well it finally came…

We’re going to France
Our call is to serve in the Paris France Mission with our specific assignment to work out of Bordeaux as Family and Church History Records Preservation Missionaries. Our understanding is that we will be doing microfilm and digital records preservation plus whatever other assignments the Mission President and other local authorities would like us to do. Our call is for 23 months.

We went over to Laura and Allen’s house Thursday evening to open the envelope. Our daughter, Susan, from California was able to be here with her family. However, it arrived on a date and time when we had planned to be at our grandson's scout award ceremony so we went over to Laura's church with the envelope tucked tightly under my arm then after the Scout thing we went over to Laura's and everyone wrote their guess on a card and put it in a bowl

Then we opened the envelope. We have been called to serve in the Toulouse France Mission and assigned to serve in Bordeaux as Family and Church History Records Preservation Missionaries. Then we read on and found the shocker. We report to the MTC on April 2, 2007... HUH??? Well at least four of the 19 of us guessed France, but I nailed it... Bordeaux. Then as we were driving home JoAnn began to sing “April in Paris”


When we first started seriously thinking about going on a mission, our good friends, Don and Jill Urish, told us that the best kept secret for a perfect mission was in the temple in Cochabamba, Bolivia where they served. Don talked to the Temple President down there and told him about us. He said he would love to have us come down, but that they wouldn't have an opening until April. This was in August and we just didn't want to wait that long. Funny how the Lord works - we now are leaving for our mission to France in April.

Since we do not report to the MTC until 2 April 2007, there must be some time mitigating factors that we don’t yet know about… perhaps waiting for the end of someone else’s mission or perhaps visa considerations or who knows whatever else needs to drop into place before we depart. This gives JoAnn time to enroll in a French class at the community college. We have our vaccinations and passports all lined up and our wonderful niece Jean Woodruff will be staying in our house while we are gone. I told my Department chair at Desert Pines High School where I teach French about the call last Friday, and she said can’t you get them to put it off until the end of May so you can finish the school year… I replied “I don’t think so.”

Records Preservation must be similar to what our dear friends Rod and Barbara Couser did years ago on their mission to New England. We feel like were following in good footsteps.

Here’s a map to give you an idea of where Bordeaux is. There it is on the south-western coast near Spain.

ANXIOUSLY ENGAGED - WELL NOT YET - BUT ANXIOUS

We're still waiting for our mission call letter to arrive. It has been nine, (count 'em 9) weeks since our Stake President's interview at which he told us our call could arrive in as few as a couple of weeks. Ha... ha...!!!

I finally called Salt Lake a little over a month ago to see if they needed anything from us in an effort to determine the hold up. They said it would probably be sent out that next week. So we anxiously watched the mail and nothing came. That was three weeks ago. Then two weeks ago we got this interesting phone call from the MTC. We weren't home, so it was on our answering system. The message went something like this:

"Hello, Elder and Sister Miller, this is the MTC senior couples foreign language tutoring department. We can provide foreign language tutoring for your mission and would like to know if you are interested. If you are, please call us back at this number …… to let us know."

So I called them. They were surprised that we hadn't received our call yet. They apparently have had our paperwork since October 20th, but of course would not tell us anything. (Not that I would want to find out that way.) They gave me an 800 number to call the missionary department in Salt Lake to find out what was going on; so I called them and talked to Elder Troutman. He also was surprised that we had not yet received our call. He said he'd call me right back as soon as he could determine what was happening and excused himself.

About 10 minutes later he called back and said, "Here's the situation. Your particular call has a special compliment on it." "Compliment," Says I. "Oh that's missionary department jargon that only means that it requires approval of a certain department here at church headquarters." Says he.

So after another two weeks of delays we've learned that it will finally be sent next Tuesday, November 14th.

Our Stake president called last night and asked if we have received our call yet. He said he had gone on line to check and saw that our record says "Papers sent" but he hadn't received anything yet. So I went through the above explanation with him. He said that his son (whose papers were submitted right after ours) just received his call to Florida and that he reports to the MTC on January 3rd. But we’ve learned that Senior couples are treated differently than the young Elders and Sisters are.

So what do we know? It's apparently a foreign language mission that requires special approval from a “certain” church department. Well… so much for planning a family get-together for the opening of the letter. Right now we're aiming for next weekend... but with all that's happened... or not happened, we’re beginning to get a bit skeptical about planning anything. We do have our suspicions about the nature and location of our call but, we’re keeping that to ourselves for now. It is finally beginning to seem real though... at last. However, I suspect we probably won’t leave until after the Christmas Holidays.

Arnold and JoAnn / Elder and Sister Miller