Of friends and their service around the world

We’re just back from several hours of whale watching out of Tofino, on the western coast of Vancouver Island.  There was a fair amount of fog, but we still managed to see otters and a couple of bald eagles.  Mostly, though, we followed a grazing gray whale for a considerable distance, getting several very good views.

That whale watching, followed by an excellent meal at The Schooner in Tofino, is the reason that I’m late in calling attention to a new article in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture:

“Isaiah 56, Abraham, and the Temple”

I hope that you’ll enjoy it.

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And here’s something else that you might find interesting — a rather curious story out of Church history with no little applicability to today:

“The Strange Saga of a False Prophet: Charles W. Stayner, Orson F. Whitney, and George Q. Cannon”

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My wife and I are here alone on the rugged western coast of Vancouver Island, a place of which we have very warm memories from previous trips.  This is a special time of the year for us, too, and we’re now here in commemoration of some past events.

Before we came over here, though, we were in Victoria with a number of friends.  And, as I looked around at them, it occurred to me what remarkable friends and neighbors we have and what remarkable service they’ve given, and continue to give, to the Church and Kingdom of God.  Several of the men have served as bishops, for example, the women have headed up various auxiliary organizations, and so forth.  But I’ll concentrate mostly on recent missionary service

One couple is just back from serving in Norway, where another of our neighbors had been called to preside over the mission.  When he was young, the husband in this couple served as a missionary in Japan.

Another couple recently served as missionaries, working with the youth, in London.

A third couple are set to leave, fairly soon, for a welfare mission in western Africa.  (He is a physician; he had served his own mission as a young man in Germany.)

The husband in yet another couple serves, alongside his Church responsibilities, as the volunteer bookkeeper for the Interpreter Foundation.

On the night that we all went out to Butchart Gardens, we had dinner there, by prearrangement, with friends of ours from Mesa, Arizona.  Not too long ago, they presided over the mission in a South Pacific island group, where they had earlier served as a senior missionary couple (and where, much, much earlier, he had served as a young elder).  They brought along some Canadian friends of theirs whom they had met when the other couple came to that South Pacific area as senior missionaries.

Anyway, as I thought about these people, I reflected that their stories are not altogether unusual among Latter-day Saints — and that the Church affords faithful Saints remarkably diverse experiences  and a rich variety of remarkable opportunities for service.

It’s a great thing to be a committed Latter-day Saint.

Posted from Ucluelet, British Columbia