Dearest Children,
I’ve attempted this type of format before for teaching, but have never actually sent you anything. This evening, I feel more compelled to share with you a simple lesson I was reminded of today from my mission experience.
As you all know, we’ve been searching for our van key for the past five days. Today, while I was mowing the front yard, I remembered that I had been placed in a similar situation before. In Costa Rica, at the time of my first transfer from Zapote in San Jose (the Capitol) to Cañas, Guanacaste, a dry and dusty town in the northwest region of the country, two and half hours away. When we got there, we arrived without my backpack, which contained many of my personal belongings, my scriptures, my camera, plus all my missionary teaching tools. Several phone calls to the mission headquarters proved fruitless.
Then I remember the phone call with my mission president. I was frustrated and out of sorts. How could I do anything as a missionary if I didn’t have the tools that I needed to teach, not even my scriptures? His council to me was simple: You’re just going to have to move on.
Today, I heard my mission president’s voice again in my mind as I thought about the mysteriously disappearing van key: You’re just going to have to move on.
So here I am moving on. I’ve ordered a new ignition locking mechanism and keys to replace the current one in the van. In the meantime, the house has gotten a over due deep cleaning. I’ve found missing hard drives and overdue vehicle registration notices.
My missionary bag showed up six weeks later on the other side of the mission with some sister missionaries. I fully expect the van key to show up in some random spot at some future date, but we must move on.
Can you see here how I have been blessed by my service as a missionary? Even 25 years later, lessons that I had learned that were unique to me are blessing me in my ability to keep moving forward. Whenever we do anything to serve the Lord, it may seem like a sacrifice at first, but He will always come back with a more profound blessing in return.
I love each of you. I pray for each of you individually by name on a daily basis.
Thanks for reading!
Love,
Dad