Elder Duane and Sister Tami Nelson Mission Blog

Australia Brisbane Mission – May 2025-November 2026

We invite you to share our experiences serving as missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Brisbane, Australia. We have the privilege of serving as Area Medical Advisor and Assistant for all of the missions in Australia and Papua New Guinea. From May 2025 to November 2026, we will share our fun experiences, growth, challenges, and the joy of serving our Savior.

Tag: christianity

  • 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!

  • The Call!

    Now the agonizing process of waiting for our call and wondering were we would be called to serve began. At this point, we had not yet revealed our plans to anyone, and we decided to spill the beans to our family. We had all the kids and grandkids over for Sunday dinner and a birthday celebration for a couple of granddaughters in mid October. We did not want to detract from the birthday celebration so we waited until after presents, birthday cake and ice cream, etc. and then said, “Oh, we forgot, we wanted to show you guys a couple of recent pictures.” We got everyone gathered around the TV in the family room and cast our mission photo up on the TV. Most of the family were somewhat perplexed, until we then cast a screen shot of the first page of our online missionary application with that same photo on it. At this point, everyone quickly caught on and started asking lots of questions about when we would be leaving, whether we already had our call, where we hoped to serve, etc.

    We explained the whole process up to that point in time, that we had just submitted our application, and were intentionally a little vague as to our location preferences, though we admitted that Australia was a possibility. The mood was mostly one of excitement, though with an element of shock, and some expressions of sadness that we would be gone so long, and that we would be greatly missed. We expressed a certainty that we had received an unmistakable witness that this was the will of the Lord, and an assurance that each member of our family would be greatly blessed as a direct result of our missionary service. In fact, we are absolutely convinced that our family will be blessed in ways that could come in no other way because of our mission.

    We also let several in our extended family, as well as a few close friends, know of our application submission. We had heard of calls coming in as few as four days and as long as eight weeks, with most arriving on a Tuesday 2-3 weeks after submission. We waited on pins and needles on Tuesday, October 29 for the much anticipated email, but to our mild disappointment, it did not come. Incidentally, we were in the temple that week performing sealings when Tam felt strongly and repeatedly impressed to tell our Sealer of our impending call. To our surprise, we learned that he was also a retired Ophthalmologist. He knew all about medical missions and in fact, informed us of an ongoing monthly continuing medical education Zoom meeting for medical missionaries and those who are interested in becoming medical missionaries. We were unaware of these meetings , and feel certain that this “random” encounter was in fact another manifestation of the Lord’s love and mindfulness.

    On the morning of Tuesday, November 5, which was also election day in the United States, we were again headed to the temple in Saratoga Springs. As we walked to the temple from the parking lot, Tam asked me to check my phone one more time to see if there were any important emails. To our surprise and delight, we saw the awaited email announcing that our mission call was available! We had a wonderful though somewhat distracted experience in the temple that day.

    Just as soon as we finished up at the temple, we started making calls to our kids, parents, siblings and others who knew of our plans. We set up a Facebook Live event for that evening and anxiously waited for the big reveal. We had quite a few come to our home, and a few others who joined us remotely. We each got separate call letters, so we decided to read Tam’s letter. I tried to play up the suspense by reading slowly, and even made a poor joke that we were assigned to labor in what some might consider a less desirable location. Finally, I read the actual call: we were assigned to labor in the Australia Brisbane Mission as Pacific Area Medical Advisor and Assistant with responsibility for all of the missions of Australia and Papua New Guinea, seven in total. We were to enter the Missionary Training Center in Provo on May 12, 2025, and depart for Brisbane on May 26, 2025, to serve for 23 months. Everyone seemed very excited and happy for us. We were absolutely overjoyed and excited beyond belief, not just to be called to Australia, but to be called to be servants and representatives of the Savior Jesus Christ. Now we could begin our preparations in earnest, knowing when and where we would be serving.