Too Many!

In our entire married life, I've never known this many deployed people...EVER! The wards that we serve have many active duty personnel and the comings and goings are never ending. Just recently, we lost a good number of key leadership people. We have many, MANY families who have only mom sitting in church with the family. Last Friday, we attended the farewell for our beloved Ward Mission Leader, Brother Cale. Brother Gallegos and Brother Littlefield are now in Japan and Bahrain. Sister Corey and Sister Birk left a couple of weeks ago. Next Monday, we will say farewell to three more; Brother Stone, Brother Friel (whose wife is expecting their first child in June) and Brother Horrock. And those are just the ones leaving soon. In the next few months we will lose Brother Webb, Brother Kehr and Brother Rogers...that we know of! We have another from the YSA Ward in Wilmington; Brother Phippen. Who knows how many more are leaving that we've been unable to locate or meet yet.

On a brighter note; we had the opportunity to be witnesses for one of our YSA Marines as he and his wife were married on Monday.They are a great couple...and he deploys soon!

Our mission is going well, but we never feel like we're doing enough. So, after some careful consideration, we've added a Sacrament meeting to our Sunday schedule. We'll now go to Courthouse Bay after our Sunday meetings with the Jacksonville wards. We don't mind the miles we've traveled to make pickups there but we think... NO! We FEEL that we will better serve those kids if we take the meeting to them. As students, they have little time to travel back and forth to the traditional meetings. Some of them don't even try because they have to jump through so many hoops to leave the area. We just feel that if even one or two more members can partake of the Sacrament, their chances of staying strong in the Gospel are made greater.

The time is going too fast and we've already been out for almost seven months. We've witnessed many miracles and know that many more are waiting to unfold. We continue to have challenges with our YSA programs and attendance but we know we're on the right track. We've seen lives begin to change as our YSA members take hold of the principle of repentance and take full advantage of the Atonement. It's exciting stuff!

I'll post pictures later in the day.

Much love,

VZ

P.S. I realized there's an error in the comment about not knowing so many deployed military people...I completely forgot our own 144th Evac Hospital in Desert Storm; 400 plus!