The Call

Monday February 11, 2013

While at the Rib joint on Friday in St Louis, we checked our email on the phone and found that there was something from the the Senior Missionary Department.  The email was one of congratulations and telling us that a certain couple had been assigned to answer any questions we had about our call.  Also that we did not need to call them unless we had not received the call in the mail yet.  We of course had been checking with our daughter Leigh daily to find out if the call call had arrived at her mail box (she was our designated mail recipient while we are on this Retirement trip).  She had not received anything from Salt Lake so we give this couple a call.  He is not in the office and on the way home.  He tells me to give him a call the next day (Saturday) and he will hop on his computer, log in and check on our call.

Along with this email are a couple of attachments.  Both of them have to do with paying bills and handling financial affairs while serving in a foreign country!  We were excited before and were trying hard not to get our hopes up, but this certainly hinted that we had been called to a foreign mission.

Saturday morning I give this guy a call and patiently wait while he goes to his computer, logs on, and pulls up our information.  He then says "nice assignment".  I ask him what the assignment is and he says that he is not allowed to tell me over the phone.  He asks where we requested to go And I tell him Italy doing anything.  He asks where in Italy and I tell him that it does not matter.  I press him again for some indication where we are going and he says that we will not be disappointed.  He tells me that our call should have arrived and that if we have not received it in the Monday mail that we can call him and he will send us an email with a scanned copy of the call letter.

Now we have to wait another couple of days.  The wait was even more excruciating because we were both in pain due to the food poisoning incident.  This was not a good weekend!

Monday, we painfully left St Louis and headed south. Even though we were not feeling good, we needed to make some progress on our trip. By mid day Leigh had called a couple of times each time she went up the road to her mail box to check the mail and told us the mail had not come yet. We pulled off the road after 1 pm (noon Salt Lake time), to make the phone call request to have call emailed to us.  Of course they were not in the office (gone to lunch?) so I left a voice mail and also sent an email to them.  In another hour we pulled over again and gave them another call.  They finally reluctantly agreed to send us the email scan of the call letter. We waited - nothing. So we decided to drive on down the road to our hotel for the night.

About 30 minutes down the road Peg checked the email there was something there!  There was no indication in the email.  Perhaps it was in the two attachments.  As she struggled to read the extremely small print as the attachment came up on her phone, she finally deciphered that the call was to Milano Italy!  This is a dream come true.  This is the same mission that Peg severed in back in 1972 & 1973 before we ever met! It is too good to be true.  Our assignment is as "Office Specialists".

The tears were flowing!  Peg began to call family and others to inform them of our call.  I was trying to stay on the road and ended up driving past the exit for our hotel.  Wow!  What a day!