On November 9 we eagerly awaited the mailman. Dad and I could hardly stand the anticipation. At about 3:00 our kind mailman personally walked it up to our door and let us know we could have gone to the post office to pick it up ourselves that morning—we’ll have to remember that for the next time.
Dad wasn’t here when it came, so I started calling my children to tell them the news. Nobody was home! I was sad. I finally got hold of Cassie, and she spread the news via email. The family, minus Brian and Jeremy, gathered at our home for a quick dinner. Everyone had submitted their guess of where we would be serving, and we marked them on Cassie’s huge map of the world. There were a few guesses in Hawaii—that sounded like a good option.
Earlier that day we had gone to the temple, and dad had “seen” a picture in his mind of some dark-skinned people with hats walking down a dirt road. We were all wondering if he was a crazy old man or if there was something to what he had seen.
At exactly six o’clock we all gathered in the family room to open the envelope and see where we’d be spending 18 months of our lives. As soon as Bret and Cindy walked in the door, we opened it. I read ahead while dad read it out loud for everyone and felt overwhelmed when I read “South Africa Durban Mission”. “Oh my gosh!” were my exact thoughts, and there were a lot of those exclamations once everyone heard.
We know this will be completely foreign to anything we’ve ever done but we are thrilled for this new adventure. And as my daughter’s friend said, we had to be called to the other side of the world so we couldn’t come home for every “emergency” in our family’s lives.
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