Preparing to leave

Now that we knew where we would be serving, we could get down to business with our specific preparations. First, just a week or so after receiving our mission call, we received an amended call, shortening our length of service down to 18 months. We don’t know the reason for certain, but suspect it is because of the growing length of the waiting list for AMA assignments.

One of the first orders of business was to apply for our visas, which took a lot of time and gathering of documents and filling out many forms. Criminal background reports from both the state and FBI needed to be applied for, and fingerprinting at the police station needed to be done. We had to send away for a copy of our marriage license which we tried to locate but could not be found. Working on our Visa application took several weeks and was delayed due to a previously planned trip to Paris and subsequent cruise to Spain and Portugal. Tam needed to renew her passport, as it was due to expire before our mission would be over, but we couldn’t send in her passport renewal until after we returned from our vacation in Europe.

We had been led to believe that Australian visas typically took 4-6 months or longer to be granted after submission, so we submitted everything literally the day the passport came back, which was December 17th. We were praying and crossing our fingers that our visas would not be a problem and delay our departure. We were thrilled and extremely surprised when we got an email 10 days after our Visa application was turned in notifying us that both of our visas had been granted! Miracle or just luck? You be the judge!

The other big thing was that we needed to decide what to do with our house. Our initial thought was to sell it and find something else on the conclusion of our mission. Though we love our home, neighborhood, ward, and stake, our home is really not practical as our forever home, since it has no bedrooms or full bathrooms on the main floor. But within a week or two, the tentative plan to sell our house just began to feel wrong, and we felt prompted that we should not sell right then but keep the house while we are serving. After lots of brainstorming and a few twists and turns along the way. we finally decided to rent out the basement to some extended family, plus have our son, Colby, stay upstairs with his kids, acting as our on-site property manager. Hopefully that plan works out to be a win for everyone involved.

Going on a mission as a senior couple is a wonderful thing, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is in a position to go, but I readily admit that it is a LOT more complicated than the decision to serve as a young missionary! Trying to figure out how to put your well-established life on hold for 18 months is complicated and tricky and involves a million little details that I had never really considered before. Things like medical insurance, Medicare, medications, finances, investments, powers of attorney, taxes, and even little details like yard care all must be considered and planned for.

We also needed to clear most or all of our stuff out of the part of our home that would be lived in by others while we were gone. This was a several month-long process that involved essentially packing up almost everything in the house and moving it to a different spot, mostly to our office, which became designated as our “storage unit.” It also necessitated a lot of clean out, sorting, and dejunking, which was much needed. As our neighbors can attest, we sold or gave away all sorts of stuff that we decided no longer wanted or needed.

I wish that I had kept track of how many dump runs and trips to Savers or Deseret Industries we made. It was a lot, including 2400 pounds of expired / rotten food storage from a long-procrastinated cleanout of our food storage room. That could be an interesting post in and of itself, but I will spare you the nasty details. Suffice it to say, that it involved lots of exploded cans, both dead and living rodents, and the stuff of nightmares!

We also began to participate in a lot of online medical and technology training to get us up to speed on the administrative aspects of the missionary medical system. This involved many hours of practical and mock exercises to help us feel comfortable navigating the various websites and reports we would be using.

We also began to participate in various Mission Health Councils via Zoom for the missions that we would be supporting. This gave us the wonderful opportunity to meet many of the Mission leaders and people that we will work closely with.

After going like crazy from dawn until late at night for about three or four months, we were finally at a point that we felt like we had all of the important things done and most of the less important things done as well. It seemed for while that for every item we crossed off our ‘to-do” list, we added about 3 more! We were getting so excited to finally go, not only to begin our missionary labors, but to be done with all of our exhausting prep work! While we know that our mission would involve long days and exhausting work, we were anxious to be in a situation in which our focus could be more singular and consecrated. May 12th, the day we entered the Missionary Training Center in Provo was finally in sight!