Our mission call

As many of you may know, Zane and I have been called to serve a mission with the Inner City Project here in Salt Lake. We are both so excited to serve! Since we both served our full-time missions Spanish-speaking, we have the incredible opportunity to serve this mission together in Spanish!

We spent the last 2 days in a training with other missionaries for the inner city. Many of the other couples will be serving with refugees from places such as Somalia and Iraq (among other places). We were unaware ther are over 19,000 refugees living in the Salt Lake area. I feel it is absolutely amazing that this inner-city project has been put together - to help all those in need of help. Not all the people being served by the missionaries are members of the church, and this is an incredible opportunity to share the love of the Savior to those who are in great need of being spiritually lifted. Most of the other couples serving in the project are retired, or older couples. One sweet couple had their 38th wedding anniversary today - and I'm not even that old! We feel extremely blessed to be able to work with these senior couples and learn from their wisdom.

After our training today, we went and met our branch presidency and a few other members of the branch also. There are approximately 80 members in the branch, and each of the members that we met have a beautiful spirit about them. As we stood there waiting, the spirit was so strong! I couldn't help but feel the love of my Savior as I saw these beautiful families - and tears filled my eyes.

To think, we have been given so many resources with which to help them! There is a way to help them further their education, find doctors that charge less (for those without insurance), find housing, assistance to pay the bills, legal aid... the list goes on and on. Our assignment is to help the families in our branch to become more self-reliant by teaching them how to set and reach goals, as well as better understand how to live within a budget, or get more education for a better job security. There are so many opportunities to teach, this almost seems insurmountable! We know that as we serve, the Lord will guide us in all that we do, in order to allow us to best serve the members of our branch. We are very excited to have been given this marvelous opportunity to serve the Lord.

We hope to write about some of our experiences as missionaries. We were asked to keep a journal. We thought it might be interesting to others to learn about our mission experiences as well, so we decided a mission blog would be a good idea. We hope to write at least once a week!