28 July 2018 - Saturday

28 July 2018 - Saturday

It was back to our missionary work, today, as we had the assignment to be in the Visitors' Center from 12:00 noon -7:00pm.  We had a very good nights rest, and were up by 4:30am for our morning prayers and scripture reading.  And we even had time to take our three mile morning walk before reporting to the correlation meeting at the Homestead at 8:30am.

The color in this picture is so bland compared to what we saw!

The bright red sun rays were not captured in this picture!

These are the growing baby antelope in their posse here at Missionary Village

Now the correlation meeting was a different story!  There was a tornado warning on Thursday of this past week.  As I indicated yesterday, the counselor in the mission presidency's wife got excited about the tornado and wanted some safety training this morning.  We were not supposed to be at the correlation meeting at 8:30am if we have a later schedule, but in this case they needed the awesome safety officer and his wife to come in for the 5 minute training and then wait three hours for our shift to begin.  So we did...

Several folks came up to us after the meeting to share tornado stories.  I have two that I thought were interesting enough to share here;

Elder and Sister Criddle;  They were living in Missouri, with their growing family, when they had regular tornado warnings.  It appears that they were so used to the warnings that when the siren's went off alerting the resident's of the impending tornado, Sister Criddle's response was to, "grab the children and the Oreo's and milk, and head to the tornado shelter for a party".  Elder Criddle grabbed the camera and went outside to film the action!

Elder Gilliland;  When he was married to his first wife, they worked the farm together raising grain.  She would drive their small truck, with loads of grain, and he would drive the big truck.  One day he was running the harvester, and focused on loading the trucks, when he saw his wife speed up to the loading area, do a complete 180 and head out of the field at about 90 miles per hour.  He thought that was strange but kept loading the trucks.  

When he finished, he jumped out of the harvester, and, for the first time, saw the tornado about two miles away.  In the harvester, his vision was completely blocked except for the area immediately in front of him!  As he looked at the tornado, it was standing still on the top of the reservoir and a small airplane flew too close to it.  They found the plane and the two occupants in the reservoir.  The occupants did not survive....  

We had a pretty busy day at the Visitors' Center.  The temperatures stayed very mild throughout the day.  We had folks from all over the country.  Mom had one group that she asked if they had a copy of the Book of Mormon.  They graciously stated that they had a copy, and that they had family who were seeing the missionaries, and they were sitting in on some of the discussions!  Mom told me later that she was not prompted to tell the Joseph Smith story to them .  Now we know why!

Here is the picture of the exploding thunderhead as we were leaving the Visitors' Center tonight;

This is the view of Rattlesnake Pass 

Mom and I got home about 7:00pm tonight and were ready for bed.  I am going to be behind mom by about 90 minutes, but will still be in bed before 9:00pm.  We have had a good day!  Thank you for joining us tonight!