Week 75 Arizona

Hey mamma!

So this week...big stuff that happened: I hit my 18 month mark on Wednesday, we had our Sister Training Leader Conference, and the picture reenactment. Actually, those are the three most exciting things that happened this week...and they all happened on the same day...and it was a rough day.

Background: my mission is ending very quickly (11 days.)

Tuesday: Last week I received the most feared thing in every missionaries life...their trunky packet. It is the infamous manila envelope that contains all the information that you could ever want about going home - your travel itinerary, your "it's time to send home your bike" papers and lots, lots more. I got mine a week ago and on Tuesday night...I finally opened mine. At that opportune moment, Sister Clemens starts talking to me about marriage and families and mother/father roles.

Wednesday: we had a Sister Training Leader Conference and it was not at all what I thought it was going to be. There are 10 Sister Training Leaders in the mission so we got to have our meeting in the mission home. I was thinking that we'd be talking about how to have more effective exchanges and how to give more powerful trainings...but it was not any of that. We (Sister Clemens and I) arrived at the mission home at 1. The first thing that President Toone said was "we are not going to be talking about missionary work at all today, we are going to talk about marriage, family, and dating..." So the first hour was Sister Toone talking about the joy of motherhood and the next half hour was President talking about how grateful he is that Sister Toone knows and understands her role and his role in the family and that she has held him accountable to his duties. After that we got to go to the Gilbert Temple to participate in an endowment session...its such a beautiful temple. After the session, the Temple President and his wife talked to us all about...the joys of marriage and why we need to keep the temple always in our sights as a couple. After that...we all went out to dinner and we got to know President and Sister Toone on a whole new level. We talked about...mission gossip - well, it was gossip about missionaries who have already finished their missions...all in all it was a fun day, but SOOOOOOOOOOOO much marriage talk. 

The Last thing on the list is the photo reenactment. Sister Clemens and I decided to try and reenact one of my favorite pictures of Sister Smuin and I...it was pretty fun.

That's about it for this week. Love you 

Sister Raynor