THE SACRED GROVE

A few days ago we walked in the Sacred Grove together. There was lots of snow on the ground but the path was compacted where others had tread.

The path was icy and uneven and eventually became narrow. At that point Michele sat on a bench while Steven continued onward. We have walked in the grove several times (Steven more than Michele) and gather peace and spiritual strength each time.

It is wonderful to contemplate the sacred event that took place here, that of the Heavens parting and Joseph Smith seeing God the Father and His son, Jesus Christ. As we spent an hour in the grove it was quiet and peaceful. What a blessing for us to live so close to it. The days have been sunny and each morning we see the sun hit the tops of the trees and hear the birds singing as we step out our back door. On this day when were walking, Steven saw a deer. If you look closely in this picture (below) you may see it. Our very first time to walk in the Sacred Grove was the second day we were here in Palmyra. Our mission president and his wife, the Hemingways, took us there. We walked and conversed quietly from time to time and then the Hemingways left us alone for a time. I (Michele) felt the Spirit literally cover me like a warm blanket. Then, after praying and pondering, Steven gently grabbed my arm and pointed. There, 50 yards away, were three deer watching us. The Hemingways were approaching and we pointed out the deer to them just as the deer bounded away. We shared with the Hemingways, that during spiritually significant times in Elder Watts’ life, he often has a special experience with nature, particularly with animals. The Hemingways told us that they have walked in the grove on numerous occasions for the past 2 /12 years and have never seen deer. It helped us realize once again that God is mindful of us, even when we are far from home.

It is maple syrup time here in New York. When the Smith Family owned their 100 acres, they cleared much of the land, but left forty acres of woodlands. They tapped approximately 1200 to 1500 maple trees in a single season to produce an average of 1,000 pounds of sugar. They would have used wooden buckets, rather than the metal ones you see in this picture (below), but otherwise, they would have harvested maple sap the same way it's done today and then boiled it into syrup.

If you look closely at the above picture you can see the buckets hanging from the maple trees gathering sap. They will be left on the trees for several weeks.

IT'S SNOWING!

Starting on Thursday we had 4 days of LOTS of snow, according to the locals, the worst storm of the year. The first day about 15 inches fell and it kept snowing through Sunday. On Friday the schools in Rochester, Palmyra and surrounding areas were closed, the Palmyra Temple was closed and many incoming and outgoing flights at the Rochester and New York Airports were cancelled.

We bundle up in our winter great most of the time, including boots, gloves, scarves, and long wool coats, but no hats!

This is what it looked like out our back door, looking towards the Sacred Grove. This is a three rail fence but only the top two rails are showing. Eventually the middle rail was covered in places.

Steven even got a chance to shovel some snow. Usually our driveway is plowed and we don't have to shovel, but they couldn't keep ahead of the snow this time.

Where oh where are those yellow daffodils and the sunshine?

MISSION LIFE

Life here in the Rochester Mission has been, busy, rewarding, and spiritually uplifting. During the next few blog entries we hope to give readers a glimpse of what missionary life is like in the Hill Cumorah Historic Sites. This entry will provide a general overview of our life and the next six entries will go into more detail about the following:

The Hill Cumorah Visitors’ Center

The Smith Family Farm

The Book of Mormon Historic Publishing Center or the EB Grandin Building

The Peter Whitmer Farm

The Rochester 2^ND Ward

The Palmyra Temple

We have a monthly schedule, so that we work the same rotation of sites for one month at a time. Our schedule for February is:

MONDAY – 1:00 PM till 5:00 PM: The Smith Farm which consists of the Welcome Center (like a visitors’ center), the log home, the frame home, the barn, the cooper shop (barrel making shop) and the Sacred Grove. We have key messages and facts to learn about each of those locations within this site.

On Monday mornings we clean house, do laundry, grocery shop, etc. because we are busy working in Rochester on our preparation day.

Monday evenings are for Family Home Evening. Twice a month we meet with all of the Site Missionaries (12 couples) and often other missionaries couples for Family Home Evening. Besides site missionaries we have couples here on missions as Temple Missionaries that work in the Palmyra Temple and Facility Management Missionaries (3 couples). They often join us for Family Home Evening and other socials. There are two Senior Sisters that work at the Mission Home and they come also.

TUESDAY – 7:30 AM till 8:30 AM: District Meeting – The Historic Site Missionaries are divided into two districts. Our district meets Tuesday mornings and the focus of our meeting is missionary or site success stories and instruction from Preach My Gospel.

TUESDAY - 9:00 AM till 1:00 PM: The Book of Mormon Historic Publishing Site or EB Grandin Building where we give tours of three floors, the bookshop and EB Grandin’s office, the printing shop where the first 5,000 copies of the Book of Mormons were published and the bindery, where they were bound. This site has the most information to learn, but we really enjoy working at it.

Tuesday afternoon and evening we catch up on email, study and read, etc.

WEDNESDAY – 9:00 AM – 2:00 PM: The Hill Cumorah Visitors’ Center – This is where visitors to Palmyra typically begin their tours. There are films, a room with the Christus and a Resource room with interactive videos about the history of this area.

Wednesday evening we have a “Site Meeting” with all of the Senior Couple Missionaries and all of the Sister Missionary Companionships (nine total) where we receive training and inspirational messages under the direction of our Site Directors, Elder and Sister Lenker. The young sister missionaries assigned to the historical sites work with us on Wednesdays and proselyte the rest of the time until we get more visitors, then we will have young sister missionaries with us at the sites all of the time.

THRUSDAY - 9:00 AM – 2:00 PM: The Hill Cumorah Visitors’ Center – We work the same schedule as Wednesday. When we arrived on January 30, there was a display of bronze sculptures by artist Angela Johnson called “The Healing Power of Jesus Christ.” The exhibit came on October 25, 2009 and was scheduled to leave on January 31, 2010, but was held over until February 14. We felt so blessed to be able to enjoy the sculptures for 4 different days while we worked at this site.

Thursday afternoon and evenings are the same as Tuesdays. We study and prepare to proselyte in Rochester, NY.

FRIDAY – 11:00 AM – 5:00 PM: The Peter Whitmer Farm - The farm is not located in Palmyra, but is in Fayette and it takes us about 45 minutes to drive there. We usually leave at 10:00 AM. This site includes the (1)Fayette Chapel, which is beautiful and built in a Greek Revival style architecture, (2) the visitors’ center and (3) a replica of the Whitmer Farm. Again, there is a lot of information to learn at this site. At each site we have key messages, details, historical stories, dates, and related scriptures to learn.

Friday evening we go directly from the Whitmer Farm in Fayette to the Palmyra Temple to serve as Temple Ordinance Workers. We finish there at 10:00 PM

SATURDAY – We leave our apartment at 8:00 AM and drive to Greece, a suburb of Rochester, about 45 miles, to go to our Ward Missionary Correlation Meeting. After the meeting we go visit members of the Rochester 2^ND Ward that the bishop has requested we visit. So far we have found 3 investigators for the young sister, assigned to our ward, to teach. We spend most of the day in Rochester and usually get home about 4:30 PM. If it isn’t too cold we like to go for a walk in the Sacred Grove when we get home.

SUNDAY – We leave for church at 8:15 AM to attend Sacrament at 9:30 AM. After the meeting block we spend the rest of the day doing visits. We have to say that the people in our ward don’t really believe in shoveling the snow off of their sidewalks and steps. Every single place we have visited has an accumulation of snow. Thankfully we have boots and adequate shoes for tromping in the snow!

Sunday evenings we sometimes have dinner invitations from other missionary couples or firesides. Otherwise we catch up on life.

The site couples here are a social bunch! We have been invited to dinner 5 times and there have been to 5 socials and firesides in three weeks. These couples are amazing people and we love getting to know each of them. They have such faith promoting stories about their circumstances of serving missions.

General Information: The weather here is cold and it snows almost every day, though the roads are nearly always clear and our driveway gets cleared early each morning by a company that clears the driveways, parking lots and sidewalks at the Church Historical sites. The salt they put on the roads ruins cars and shoes.

This is an example of a rusted out bumper. Notice to the right of the bumper; it is being held on with bailing wire!

THE JOURNEY

January 26, 2010 - Tuesday
As we drove away from Provo and the MTC on our way to Palmyra, NY, we remembered how apprehensive we were about entering the MTC– not knowing what to expect. We found that everyone was kind, helpful and dedicated! Now we were starting our trip across the United States, with great concern about the winter weather. The words of a hymn came to mind. “The night is dark and I am far from home; Lead thou me on! Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see the distant scene-- one step enough for me.” We thought, "We are taking one step at a time on this mission journey and are going by faith. The first step was turning in our papers – which was a job! The next step was preparing to leave our family and home in two short weeks. We then entered the MTC. Now we are driving across the US, fearful of winter weather. Finally, we will arrive at our mission in Palmyra, NY. We go by faith!

We spent the first night in Cheyenne, WY and were blessed with good weather. We crossed the Rockies reaching altitudes of 8700 feet. The next day we drove through Nebraska and most of Iowa, spending the night in Ames, Iowa, just north of Des Moines.

January 28, 2010 – Thursday

It was -2 degrees when we left Ames, Iowa on Thursday morning at 8:00 AM. In the first 10 miles of our trip we saw many cars off the road with emergency vehicles trying to move them. It appears they ran off the road during the night. We were grateful we decided to stay in Ames instead of pressing on to Winona. We were too tired to drive further anyway.

We stayed Thursday night in Winona, MN with our daughter Meghan, her husband Ryan and their daughters. It was out of our way, but the granddaughters were tugging at our heartstrings.

When we left Winona on Friday morning our car thermometer read -6 degrees. Our poor PT had never been that cold before and the radio wouldn't work for a while.

We drove through Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana on Friday. Somewhere around Gary, Indiana we crossed paths with a couple we met at the MTC. After leaving the MTC they flew home to Pennsylvania and packed their car and started driving west to their mission assignment in Nauvoo. We were driving east to our mission assignment in New York. We thought we might pass each other on Friday, so we talked on our cell phones and waved at each other as we passed. Friday night we stayed near Cleavland, Ohio.

January 30, 2010 – Saturday
We stopped for about an hour and a half in Kirtland. We didn’t have time to see all of the Church sites because they were waiting for us in Palmyra, but we did take a tour of the Kirtland Temple.

At 5:00 PM we arrived in Palmyra at the Hill Cumorah Visitors’ Center and met our directors, the Lenkers. Elder Lenker took us to our apartment, which is about 2 miles north of the visitors’ center. We passed the Palmyra Stake Center and the Palmyra Temple. We can see the temple from the front yard of our apartment and the Sacred Grove is about 100 feet out our back door. Elder Lenker and Elder Kinghorn (our upstairs neighbor) helped us unload our car. We have been living out of suitcases for almost three weeks. Too long! Then we went to the Lenker’s apartment for dinner. Their apartment is at the Hill Cumorah Visitors Center.

We are blessed with a nice apartment. (See pictures below.) Our directors, Elder and Sister Lenker have been on four other missions, this is their 5th plus multiple local service missions. They said this is the best missionary housing they have seen. The down side is we don’t have a dishwasher. The up side, we have a heated garage, in this country that is way better than a dishwasher!
After dinner we returned to our apartment, unpacked and collapsed in bed.

This is where we live. There are three senior missionary apartments in this home. Ours is in the basement to the left side of the house. We can see the Sacred Grove right out our back door.

This is a very important picture; it is our spare bedroom, where YOU can stay when you come visit us in Palmyra to see the historic sites!