A-Day-In-The-Life

You might think by seeing our many pictures over our first weeks here in England that we are on a fabulous vacation! And while it’s true that we are incredibly blessed to get to be in a place that is historic and charming and beautiful, I promise that we’re actually serving as missionaries, that we’re doing missionary “work”, and that not every day is filled with cherry blossoms and castles. ;)

So in an effort to “keep it real” we thought we’d share a little bit of our everyday life—the happy, the hard, the fun and the mundane.

As we’ve mentioned, our mission is a little bit different because we’re not serving under the direction of a Mission President. Instead, we’re under the direction of the Europe North Area Office, which covers Cabo Verde, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Jon’s assignment is as an associate area legal counsel in the Area’s Office of General Counsel (he has responsibility for Cape Verde and the Baltic countries) and my assignment involves reviewing missionary recommendation forms and also working on area family history projects.

So here’s a little “day in the life” (or a few different kinds of days):

Weekdays:

• Get up at 6:30 am to start our day. We wish we could say we get up even earlier and exercise, but we’re not there yet.

• We leave our flat around 7:45 and our commute to the office is only about 5 miles—but unfortunately because of traffic it usually takes us about 20-25 minutes, 15 on a really good day. And speaking of driving, we’re both FINALLY feeling like this left-side-of-the-road thing no longer terrifies us. Progress!

• Every Tuesday morning we have an employee devotional, this one was with a member of the Area Presidency, Elder Phillips, and it was fantastic.

• On other days, we have various other meetings—Jon has lots of legal meetings each week with employment/HR, real estate, finance, and missionary departments. I have occasional meetings with missionary or family history people. What’s an office without meetings? :)

• The rest of Jon’s day is filled with emails, phone calls, coordinating with attorneys in each country, analyzing opinions, advising church departments, etc. He has had a fairly high level of stress because there are SO many issues and there was nothing in his previous legal career that prepared him for some of the issues he’s dealing with here. The learning curve is steep! But with the help of the other AALC’s, a kind and patient boss, and lots of divine intervention, he’s figuring it out one email, one meeting at a time.

• I spend most of my time on the computer reviewing all the missionary recommendation forms that come from our Area and also working on family history projects focused on records in England. If you have family history from England, it’s a good chance someone in our group here is helping make it easier for you to find your family!

• At lunchtime we gather to eat with other missionaries and employees in the nice kitchen/dining area. And then I try to get Jon outside for a little walk around the neighborhood.

• We leave the office around 5:30 and head back home. Because Jon had been working from home for the last dozen or so years, this whole commute and long workday experience has been surprisingly tiring! By the time we get home, we’re knackered! (to use a fun British word, meaning we’re dead tired haha)

• We have the evenings to relax a little bit, though we also try to feed our local missionaries, attend ward activities, talk to family, get some shopping done, and do laundry (we have to do it almost every day because our washer/dryer combo is tiny and takes FOREVER!).

The sister missionary on the right is from our neck of the woods in Northern California. Fun to have a local connection!

Weekends:

• Saturdays are our “p-day”—known in the missionary world as “preparation day”, a day for missionaries to do laundry, send emails home, plan the week, etc. But for us, we call it “play day”! It’s a much-needed break to go out and explore this beautiful area and see what makes England so amazing. We don’t have quite the same restrictions that young missionaries do thankfully, so we can travel (within reason and within certain areas) to visit historic sites and see the beautiful countryside. This past weekend we visited a cute town just a few miles away called Marlow, located on the River Thames. Every town we visit seems to have a beautiful cathedral, a cemetery, blooming flowers, quaint streets, etc.

• We often have gatherings with other senior missionaries—this weekend we met at the Area Office to have dinner and watch a session of General Conference. It has been so wonderful to rub shoulders with these amazing friends who have welcomed us into their fold and already become a part of our hearts. ♥ (Sidenote: Our favorite General Conference talks are here [the Church’s General Counsel, who we interviewed with prior to our mission, an amazing talk!!] and here [a Brit, also amazing!] and here [this one resonated with Jon especially as he’s doing lots of trust falls!]).

We laughed one morning to see our matching senior missionary uniforms. :)

• On Sundays, we attend Church of course. We have already come to love the people we’ve met here and are happy to be able to serve in whatever ways we can while we’re here. I love the consistency and the community we feel when we attend church each week—no matter where we’ve lived or traveled, it’s the same sense of belonging and connection.

Here are just a few more pics that show real life (from the BeReal app, it’s been a fun way to connect with our kids) in all of its mundane glory—rain, dirty dishes, office work, etc.

It reminds me of this part of a song I love by JJ Heller called “Big Love, Small Moments”:

Big magic in the mundane
The big picture in a small frame
Everything is sacred when you take time to notice
Big love happens in the small moments

So we will keep doing our mundane things, we’ll do them with love, and we’ll notice the small moments that become sacred.

Big magic right outside our window.

♥ Until next time, we love you! Cheerio! ♥

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Words of the Week:

(Words or phrases we hear “on the street” that either delight, confuse or amuse us.)

Whilst - used interchangeably with while, but it just sounds fancier, “I saw the sign whilst traveling down the motorway.”

Bespoke - Originally, the adjective bespoke described tailor-made suits and shoes. Later, it described anything commissioned to a particular specification. In contemporary usage, bespoke has become a general marketing and branding concept implying exclusivity and limited runs. We see this on a lot of advertising signs, trucks, websites, etc.