The Joy of Communicating

One advantage of being a senior missionary is being able to talk to our family often! For Mother's Day we used Google Hangout to have all of our kids and their families talk to each other and us at the same time.  It was really fun. But we've decided we also like to talk with each family individually.
     Because of a 7 or 8 hour time difference we have to pay attention to the time we call.  After church on Sunday we wanted to call Dad and Diane.  We ended up calling them at 6:30 am their time! They graciously answered the phone and never even mentioned the early time. They said they'd like to hear from us anytime! That's the love of parents!  We're really trying to stay close to our family even though we're far away from them.
     On May 17 and 18th we attended the Slovenia and Croatia Zone conferences. Now, we've been to all 4 zone conferences! The theme of zone conferences was languages--the five languages spoken in the mission, the language of love and the language of the Spirit. One thought impressed me "we will learn the language best when on the move. We can also receive revelation for our life best when acting on promptings we receive."  We were challenged to work at improving in all of these languages. We're so impressed with the maturity in the gospel of the missionaries in this mission!
      We've been slow to work on our Croatian thus far.  We have a terrific Croatian teacher in Provo, Rachael, who served in our mission recently.  We have "Zoom" sessions with her and while we're conversing she writes a Google doc for us to study afterwards.  And it's starting to sink in a bit. Perry's the best to try to use his language at the gym, bakery etc.