As we transition from Thanksgiving to Christmas, we want you all to know how much we love you. This celebration of our Savior’s birth is a special time…and a busy one for these two Singapore senior missionaries. We marked our one-year anniversary in Singapore this week ....while actually in Malaysia! Here are three highlights of our very busy week.
New Apartment - The lease to our apartment ends December 15th and the mission decided to have us find something closer to the office. While we definitely support that and like the new place we found, change is always hard and there are tradeoffs in any such decision. We made the actual move on Monday with the help of the church’s great contractor Desmond and his team. We had to make two trips from old place to new, along with a side trip to get a sofa and bed frame from another apartment. There were many elevator trips, a lot of train rides for Vivian and cramped moving van rides for me, but we got everything done and in the new place. Vivian has done a very nice job arranging it to make it feel like home and this morning before church as we studied and prepared, it actually felt that way.
Watch for Vivian's post coming soon on moving in Singapore. It's quite a different experience!
Farewell to Kuching - As noted in a past post, the zone conference schedule for our mission alternates between cities, in large part for visa renewal reasons. This was the last conference while we are here that will be held in East Malaysia. We normally would have had four there, but during both of the first two we had emergency trips back to the US to make. So this was just our second trip there and we again found it very nice. It is very different than both West Malaysia and Singapore, but unique and special.
The best part, as always, is the people. We loved seeing all and for Vivian to meet with several of the wonderful missionaries gathered there. The zone conference program was also very nice with the focus of course on Christ and Christmas. We also were able to bid farewell to several junior missionaries and one senior missionary couple who return in the next couple weeks before our next conference.
Singapore Nativity - Every two years the Singapore Stake has an amazing Nativity activity for members and the community at large. We missed the first night while still in Kuching, but returned in time for the second and served as tour guides for three groups of a dozen people. It reminded me a lot of temple open houses…there was so much preparation, organization, and selfless commitment in bringing light to those that came, including many visitors of other faiths. Our Young Single Adults hosted two of the ten vignette stations and they did a great job, bringing the warmth of Christmas in both their words and beautiful singing which they repeated more than twenty times each night for hundreds of people.
In other news we are looking forward to family visitors over the next couple of weeks. We look forward to being with them and celebrating Christmas together.
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