This week like all the preceding weeks here in Hong Kong, was a great week to be a missionary with Sister Beckstead, the greatest Companion in Heavenly Fathers army of Missionaries.
We started the week with a coordination meeting with Annie, syncing calendars and checking for any specific needs for the week. We did not have anything specific this week so we reviewed the Opinion Leader Data Base, Country Fact Sheets, and Country Briefing Books. It was decided that we needed to finish the work we have been doing on the Fact Sheets, continue the review of the OLDB and begin the annual update of the Briefing Books.
Later in the week we were introduced to a new piece of technology, Meltwater News, which is a News Search Engine. Meltwater is a powerful tool that allows us to search for news stories in multiple news sources with key words and phrases. For example, we can type in the words, “LDS Church”, push a button and Meltwater within a few seconds will comb through thousands of news stories worldwide and respond with a list of any stories containing the words LDS Church.
We are now working with Corus, the software template used by the Church to publish electronic Newsroom Stories, Publisher, a Microsoft product used to publish newsletters, (fact sheets and country briefing books), Microsoft Dynamics, a CRM we use to manage our opinion leader data base, and Meltwater which we use as described above. Who would have ever thought that a couple old fogies like us would ever learn how to play with so much computer software.
We enjoyed another night at the Temple this week which is always a highlight of the week. The Chatterton’s have been assigned as our Temple trainers and we are excited to have them help us.
The hardest part of the mission so far is not being in charge, it’s more difficult than I expected to follow a leader, especially when you think you are smarter or have more experience than the leader you need to be following. I know this will probably come as a surprise to most of you but I thought I would share this challenge anyway. Humility and patience are virtues that are necessary as a missionary and if you don’t bring them into the mission field with you, you will, like myself, need to cultivate them while serving, which is an annoying distraction. I would suggest that if you plan on serving a mission, you hone these virtues now and bring them into the mission field as part of your pre-mission arsenal.
We love serving the Lord and there is no greater opportunity to learn to serve as a missionary than to be a missionary.
Have a great week!
We went for a walk today with our friends Elder and Sister Pett. This is the lobby of the Mandarin Hotel. The carvings on the wall are beautiful!
Hong Kong Marathon
We love the members of our Saturday Branch. They are making scarfs and having so much fun. The Filipino members are always so happy, their lives are tough, but you would never know it.
We love the Petts. They are from SLC. They serve in the Mission Home as the office couple for President and Sister Lam. We serve with them in the Saturday Branch and also in the Temple on Thursday evenings. We get together every Tuesday night with them along with Elder and Sister Orton to play games and visit. We have made wonderful friends here.
We walk past this Royals Royce Dealership quite often. Lynn always stops to get a good look!
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