The Last 2 Years

The title of this post is just a little play on words. The Best Two Years is a 2003 film, popular among the Latter-day Saint audience, portraying the lives of a few young missionaries, serving  in the Church's not quite obligatory 2 year mission program.

For the last 2 years, Margot and I have been trying to go on a mission for the Church ourselves. We've been called, but we've not quite made it in to the mission field yet.

About 2 years ago, following Stake Conference, Margot and I were invited in to the Stake Presidents office to meet with the Stake President and the visiting Area Authority Seventy, whose name slips my mind. I'm fairly sure he is Tongan and he served as a Mission President somewhere in Africa.

I had been keen to serve a Senior Couple mission for a few years. The time was never quite right, and it's fair to say that I was much keener than Margot. Our daughter Miriam served in the Sydney North Mission and I was keen to serve at the same time, but no-one else was keen then!

Margot and I had each served missions when we were young and single, many years before we met each other, and for me about 2 years before my first marriage, which ended in divorce after 5 years. So we were somewhat familiar with what it would take for us to go, although there are some significant differences for senior couples serving full-time missions.

To say that Margot had a change of heart after our meeting with the Stake President and the Seventy would be an understatement. I don't think Margot has ever knocked back calling in the Church, and while this meeting was really an invitation to prepare to be called, we both took it very seriously and we started to make some moves about seriously preparing.

We needed to fill in all the forms necessary to provide the Church with the information needed to assess whether we were ready to serve. A lot of these forms are to do with health conditions. We were both quite healthy at the time, and still are, but I had some concerns about my teeth. Following a visit to a dentist in Geelong, I decided it would be good to invest in getting some of my teeth crowned, and to save money we decided to go to Thailand to get it done. This was early 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic was just starting to rear its head. On the way back from Thailand and passing through Singapore, temperatures were being checked, although coming back in to Australia, there was nothing of the sort.

One major thing in going away for 12 months (you can choose the length of time you serve)  is that we needed to decide what to do with our house. We had a few choices. One possibility was for Miriam to stay here and perhaps have another young single girl come to share the house with her. Coincidentally (is there any such thing?)  a niece of a family from Church in Geelong was looking to move down here for work and wanted somewhere to live while her own house was being built. But in the meantime, Miriam felt impressed to move to Melbourne, into a share house with other single girls from Church.

Moving to Melbourne meant Miriam would have a much better social life than in Geelong, as there are just far more young singles in the Church in Melbourne than there are in Geelong. It gave her the opportunity to get to know a young fellow by the name of Taylor Rubinstein, who is now my son-in-law!

We hoped that Taylor and Miriam might have rented our home. The advantage for us would have been that we wouldn't have had to empty all our furniture and belongings out of the house. But our leaving for our mission has been delayed by another unforeseen event.

A few months ago, my oldest daughter, from my first marriage, told me that she had a lump in her breast. She, and the doctor who first examined it, were quite confident that it wasn't serious. But it did turn out to be very serious. It's hard to describe the feeling you have as a father when you know that there is a strong possibility that you might outlive one of your children. I know that many people reading this will know the feeling. It's not a good feeling, that's for sure. Devastating, would be the most simple way of describing it.

Leahannah has had surgery, and she has just finished chemotherapy. She will soon start a course of radiation therapy, which will be 5 days a week for 4 weeks.

Obviously we are not going anywhere while Leahannah is going through this most difficult time in her life. We are quite confident that she will get through it and come out of it a stronger person than before. It's hard to imagine someone going through this sort of trial without coming through it having learned some significant lessons.

So Miriam and Taylor have leased a flat in Frankston and we are now planning to empty the house and rent it out through a real estate agent. The upside is that we should get a much higher rent than we would have charged Miriam and Taylor, which will make our mission time just a little more comfortable than it would have been.

We are planing to leave for the Australia Brisbane Mission of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in February 2021.

But, there are other things that may delay us, of course. One of my best and longest friends, has recently been diagnosed with cancer. It's quite serious. I really don't know how long he might last. I think he'll either be gone by Christmas or he'll have a miraculous recovery and be on the way back to full health by February. I hope it's that latter result.

Preparing as a senior couple to go away and serve a full-time mission is certainly not easy. Obviously family comes first. The Church leaders have been very understanding and accommodating of our situation and our desire is to go, but not while we are most needed here by our family and friends. I did neglect to mention that my older sister also has metastatic breast cancer, and that we had delayed even thinking seriously about going on a mission while she was going through a very difficult time. She seems to be quite stable at the moment and we expect she will be fairly well and independent for the next couple of years at least.

If anyone can learn from our experience, I would say it is this - leaving home, to serve a mission full-time, is not an easy thing to do. But I think it is even more difficult as a senior couple than it is for a young single person. I now understand why there a really so few senior couples leaving home to serve full-time missions and also why the Church has instituted "service missions" and other opportunities to serve from home.