In case you're wondering what the cake is supposed to be, it's called an Ohm. It's a creature from one of Anne's favorite movies, "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind." Here's a clip
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Happy 8th Birthday, Anne!
In case you're wondering what the cake is supposed to be, it's called an Ohm. It's a creature from one of Anne's favorite movies, "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind." Here's a clip
Monday, July 21, 2008
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Completing our Last Days at the Institute
Mom completes her third and final picture book for the branch members and leaves it on the coffee table for them to browse through after we are long gone. View of our apartment at Candlewyck Dr. We are in the last one on the right, second floor. Shot with our new mission president who arrived last week, Pres. and Sister Jones from Sacramento, CA.
Mom begins to do her last meal for the institute class in our church kitchen. They will arrive in a minute for our last lunch together--Chicken Enchiladas.
Our last institute class where we finish with a lesson on the Second Coming and bid farewell to our teaching at KUB.Photo of Brad Harris one of our current investigators joining in to help clean the building on FHE night.
Another one of our investigators we are currently working with, Gabi Martinez, from the Dominican Republic cleaning the drinking fountain.
George Prakesh from Southern India, an investigator that Lindsey brought with her to church. He just enjoyed playing our FHE activity of capture the flag with tons of water balloons. We hope that George, Gabi and Brad keep coming and working after we leave and will be keeping in touch on their progress.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
More Birthdays!
Happy Birthday, Dave, Erin & McKay! We thought of all of you this weekend and wanted you to know how much we love you and miss you! We hope you had wonderful birthdays!
Saturday, July 5, 2008
A Sketch of Our Mission
A Sketch of Our Mission:
July 2007-July 2008
By Elder Ronald L. and Sister Barbara J. Schill
Michigan Lansing Mission
Eight of our nine children and eight of our nine in-law children served faithful full-time missions and enjoyed what they accomplished, but they never quite communicated to us, or we didn’t come to understand, the love that grows between a missionary and those to whom he or she has taught the gospel. We heard from them at their homecomings and in family discussions about the love they have for those they taught, and have had joy as they have returned to their fields of labor to visit or for sealings, but we didn’t feel within our own hearts what they felt. Now that we have experienced it for ourselves, we see what they meant. It is magnificent, strong, and powerful! We have been serving to do the work of the Lord, to build up His kingdom and all of our effort has been to do His will and what He desires, but, as the scriptures say, what we have done for the Lord is small in comparison with what He has done for us.
Sister Schill has prepared and served nearly 200 full course lunch meals during our mission, fixing them every day, five days a week. We have an average attendance of about 5 students around our institute table, (plus us) so that is over 1400 mouths that have been fed. But in serving these meals we didn’t quite realize that they would become family meals and that we would enjoy one, often two hours of peaceful and uplifting conversation around the table with the students, including our institute lesson. And from those many gatherings, discussions of issues and problems which individual people felt and cared about. In the process they have become our family, and what our missionary children didn’t quite communicate to us from those whom they taught on their missions, we have come to love our institute and branch students as if they were our children.
Then there are the many branch activities that we have been involved in. In addition to the Sunday block meetings and listening to all of the branch members teach lessons, give talks, perform musically, and join us in leadership meetings, we have had many institute firesides, and gatherings at the homes of branch presidency members on Sundays and many parties on Friday or Saturday night at homes of branch presidency members. We have had the many activities during the week—family home evening lessons and games lead by our students on Monday nights, activity nights on Fridays, Saturday service and community projects, trips to the temple for baptisms on Saturdays, and scores of e-mail communications, telephone calls, the sending of pictures to each other and other events that have occurred weekly.
We have had the privilege and blessing of riding to and from the Chicago temple with the branch members, of being there for an hour or so when they have performed baptismal services for the dead, and then joined them for an hour or so for dinner afterward at a favorite restaurant. In all of this we have encouraged them and witnessed their service to the Lord. But we never knew that it would bring such love for them and such deep and tender relationships with many, many wonderful young people. In most recent months we have had cottage meetings for investigators at branch members’ homes as part of one of our institute classes on Missionary Preparation.
Yet this still doesn’t include the many lessons which we had at our institute classes during the week: Marriage and Family Relations, Doctrine and Covenants, Doctrines of the Gospel, Missionary Preparation, taught each day at noon and on Tuesday and again on Wednesday or Thursday evenings. The many times during the winter when we have huddled together on a cold snowy evening in the institute room in the basement of the chapel around our little space heater, drinking hot chocolate together, singing hymns and having our lesson. It also includes the scores of wonderful prayers that the students have given before and after class, touched by the spirit and richly inspired from our meetings together. Our mission is also the memory of the night that the lock was frozen on the building, and we couldn’t get in. There was a blizzard raging outside, and we just all climbed into our car, sitting on laps, and had our lesson in the parking lot
That brings us to the main purpose of our mission. We have been CES missionaries, charged with the responsibility of teaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ to our little flock. Each day we have come to class with a few deep and probing questions about the lesson topic, and have had responsive and sacred discussion of these questions together with questions that the students have raised. Sometimes an evening class involved only one student, where we were able to teach him or her together one on one as we sat at the table over cookies, melon and hot chocolate. Of special importance is the many, many young missionaries who have been serving in our branch who have attended nearly every institute class, every BYU devotional and luncheon, and ridden with us many places. We have gotten to know and to encourage each of these missionaries as if they were our sons. We have seen each come and become acquainted and fellowshipped in the branch. We have served with them as the branch mission leader, meeting weekly to discuss their challenges, their efforts each week with investigators, seen their joys at baptisms, discussed their disappointments when a weeks worth of contacting yielded only two or three partially interested people.
Our mission has been about learning to love deeply, to contribute, but bless, to do the Lord’s work, and then about having to go home, to leave this wonderful service, and to return to our regular lives blessed from the efforts we have witnessed and the spirit we have felt. It is about learning to love deeply through the Lord’s service and then leaving people to go on with their own lives, hopefully, enriched by our experiences.
As we prepare to leave and complete our mission, we think back upon what accomplishments we have made. Those accomplishments exist in the lives, the testimonies, the feelings of acceptance and value which each person shares, in the memories of our lives together, in the memories of the many lesson discussions we have had, testimonies born, and hugs given. We have achieved our main purpose of teaching many gospel lessons in our institute classes, but of equal value are the personal relationships we have built and the joy that we feel for our little flock.
This has been service to the Lord. We have been called by the Prophet to be Senior Missionaries and were called to Kalamazoo, Michigan; and we have worked to fulfill that calling. But we have received so much more in return. We have memories that will last us the rest f our lives and friendships that will endure. Finally, as a bonus to our service to the Young Adults we have taught two Adult Institute Classes where we have worked with the older members of the Kalamazoo Stake, and we have additional memories, experiences and loving devotion to them. We have been to their homes or to lunch with them, have stayed after and talked about their families and children, about their struggles and challenges in life and have become very close friends with many of them. We have attended their children’s baptisms, rejoiced in their service as they have served and fixed meals for our Zone conferences, and had our hearts gladdened as we see them drive up for another institute class each week. Our experiences with them are somewhat different from that with the young adults, and we have talked about different things, and had a somewhat different discussion of the same lesson material. But these brothers and sisters have also grown in our hearts and minds.
It is the three large picture books that Sister Schill has done for the branch, and the pictures that she has taken, gotten enlarged and printed, labeled, collated, and placed in binders that have been given to the branch, and of the countless times we have enjoyed branch members sitting and looking through them, laughing, pointing out things to each other, reminiscing and loving the activities and associations that they have had.
It is about coming to know and love Michigan, not only for the wonderful friends and people we have met, but also the scenery and the outdoors which we have enjoyed on P days and vacation periods, including collecting Petoskey stones, the state rock, and visiting many of the coastal lighthouses. It is about photographing many of the red barns and silos, the beautiful leaves in the fall, and the deep snowy wintry scenes.
It is about sitting at a desk with an open lesson manual and blank pieces of paper, about praying for inspiration to create a lesson and a discussion that will touch the hearts of students and lead them to more fully love and serve the Lord, about taking of the resources provided to us by CES and creating lessons for our individual students. Something that will inspire, edify and lift them.
It is about the few days when we came to class and no one was there—no one came that day, Or about having a meal all fixed and waiting and waiting and finally one or two come down the stairs into the kitchen and we enjoy the meal together in the institute room. Thus, it is about working with the agency of others and the choices they make, not always as we would desire, but what they choose just the same. It is also about seeing a less active come to class, put his or her head on the table and struggle to pay attention, then, several days or weeks later shining with enthusiasm, active in the branch, serving in a calling and doing the work of the Lord in their lives. It is about having a less active bring an investigator with her to institute class, and about seeing a recent convert experience joy, feel the spirit and achieve growth at participating in and attending a missionary discussion with another investigator.
It is about the freedom to share our missionary experiences with our families back home through our family mission blog, through telephone calls, and through the visits of those who have come to see us and stay at our “mission home” and come to visit our classes and participate in our activities. So it has been about sharing our excitement each week with our children and family by posting our activities and our pictures on our blog sight, and about reading their comments in return. About receiving many letters and pictures from our grandchildren who call us Elder Grandpa and Sister Grandma.
It is about getting ready each morning together, putting on our missionary clothes and our tags, toting our meals and our lesson manuals, our camera and other materials out to the car, driving to the institute, and getting it all ready for students to arrive. It is about doing this together each day and spending time together serving as a couple 24/7. It is about attending and participating in each and all of the institute lesson discussions and the tremendous spiritual uplift and growth that comes from being in institute class all week long and hearing the ideas from others. It is about encouraging one another in serving in our mission callings, and seeing each other work hard and serve the Lord during this period of dedication and consecration of our marriage.
It is about days when we have been pleasantly surprised and fifteen people come to the lesson, and we have to add an extra table to the room and spread the food over more people. It is the joy of seeing people bring their friends with them who have not been attending institute, and having people surprise us and pop in unannounced and have them join in with us for the meal and the lesson. It is about the thank you’s and the “wonderful lesson… I learned a lot, thank you” received from grateful students.
It is about going to Zone Conferences and hearing inspirational talks by our Mission President and his wife, and by our zone leaders, of meeting in the cultural hall for a great lunch and singing “Called To Serve” along with all of the missionaries. It is about friendships with other senior missionaries and opportunities to share experiences and feel of their spirit and support.
So what has our mission been about? It has been about love and service, about working hard each day, day after day, about being a friend and a brother or sister. It has been about mourning with one of the sisters in our class when her brother was seriously injured in an auto accident, and she has had to care for him. It has been about comforting new converts when they were rejected by their families for joining the Church. It has been about seeking and enjoying the Lord’s spirit to bathe our thoughts and our feelings with inspiration and with beauty so that we could try to serve as He would serve. It has been a wonderful and marvelous twelve months that we have been in the Kalamazoo Institute and University Branch, or KUB or Kalama Zion as they call it. We have arranged and covered tables, played BYU DVD’s, fixed meals, cleaned up, replaced chairs, cleaned the building, taken out the trash, prepared lessons, lead discussions, greeted guests, reached out to less actives, fellowshipped new converts, loved branch members and made friends with adult students and linked our hearts together. This is what our mission has been about and this is the substance of the joys and blessings that we take with us, and, hopefully, leave behind.
July 2007-July 2008
By Elder Ronald L. and Sister Barbara J. Schill
Michigan Lansing Mission
Eight of our nine children and eight of our nine in-law children served faithful full-time missions and enjoyed what they accomplished, but they never quite communicated to us, or we didn’t come to understand, the love that grows between a missionary and those to whom he or she has taught the gospel. We heard from them at their homecomings and in family discussions about the love they have for those they taught, and have had joy as they have returned to their fields of labor to visit or for sealings, but we didn’t feel within our own hearts what they felt. Now that we have experienced it for ourselves, we see what they meant. It is magnificent, strong, and powerful! We have been serving to do the work of the Lord, to build up His kingdom and all of our effort has been to do His will and what He desires, but, as the scriptures say, what we have done for the Lord is small in comparison with what He has done for us.
Sister Schill has prepared and served nearly 200 full course lunch meals during our mission, fixing them every day, five days a week. We have an average attendance of about 5 students around our institute table, (plus us) so that is over 1400 mouths that have been fed. But in serving these meals we didn’t quite realize that they would become family meals and that we would enjoy one, often two hours of peaceful and uplifting conversation around the table with the students, including our institute lesson. And from those many gatherings, discussions of issues and problems which individual people felt and cared about. In the process they have become our family, and what our missionary children didn’t quite communicate to us from those whom they taught on their missions, we have come to love our institute and branch students as if they were our children.
Then there are the many branch activities that we have been involved in. In addition to the Sunday block meetings and listening to all of the branch members teach lessons, give talks, perform musically, and join us in leadership meetings, we have had many institute firesides, and gatherings at the homes of branch presidency members on Sundays and many parties on Friday or Saturday night at homes of branch presidency members. We have had the many activities during the week—family home evening lessons and games lead by our students on Monday nights, activity nights on Fridays, Saturday service and community projects, trips to the temple for baptisms on Saturdays, and scores of e-mail communications, telephone calls, the sending of pictures to each other and other events that have occurred weekly.
We have had the privilege and blessing of riding to and from the Chicago temple with the branch members, of being there for an hour or so when they have performed baptismal services for the dead, and then joined them for an hour or so for dinner afterward at a favorite restaurant. In all of this we have encouraged them and witnessed their service to the Lord. But we never knew that it would bring such love for them and such deep and tender relationships with many, many wonderful young people. In most recent months we have had cottage meetings for investigators at branch members’ homes as part of one of our institute classes on Missionary Preparation.
Yet this still doesn’t include the many lessons which we had at our institute classes during the week: Marriage and Family Relations, Doctrine and Covenants, Doctrines of the Gospel, Missionary Preparation, taught each day at noon and on Tuesday and again on Wednesday or Thursday evenings. The many times during the winter when we have huddled together on a cold snowy evening in the institute room in the basement of the chapel around our little space heater, drinking hot chocolate together, singing hymns and having our lesson. It also includes the scores of wonderful prayers that the students have given before and after class, touched by the spirit and richly inspired from our meetings together. Our mission is also the memory of the night that the lock was frozen on the building, and we couldn’t get in. There was a blizzard raging outside, and we just all climbed into our car, sitting on laps, and had our lesson in the parking lot
That brings us to the main purpose of our mission. We have been CES missionaries, charged with the responsibility of teaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ to our little flock. Each day we have come to class with a few deep and probing questions about the lesson topic, and have had responsive and sacred discussion of these questions together with questions that the students have raised. Sometimes an evening class involved only one student, where we were able to teach him or her together one on one as we sat at the table over cookies, melon and hot chocolate. Of special importance is the many, many young missionaries who have been serving in our branch who have attended nearly every institute class, every BYU devotional and luncheon, and ridden with us many places. We have gotten to know and to encourage each of these missionaries as if they were our sons. We have seen each come and become acquainted and fellowshipped in the branch. We have served with them as the branch mission leader, meeting weekly to discuss their challenges, their efforts each week with investigators, seen their joys at baptisms, discussed their disappointments when a weeks worth of contacting yielded only two or three partially interested people.
Our mission has been about learning to love deeply, to contribute, but bless, to do the Lord’s work, and then about having to go home, to leave this wonderful service, and to return to our regular lives blessed from the efforts we have witnessed and the spirit we have felt. It is about learning to love deeply through the Lord’s service and then leaving people to go on with their own lives, hopefully, enriched by our experiences.
As we prepare to leave and complete our mission, we think back upon what accomplishments we have made. Those accomplishments exist in the lives, the testimonies, the feelings of acceptance and value which each person shares, in the memories of our lives together, in the memories of the many lesson discussions we have had, testimonies born, and hugs given. We have achieved our main purpose of teaching many gospel lessons in our institute classes, but of equal value are the personal relationships we have built and the joy that we feel for our little flock.
This has been service to the Lord. We have been called by the Prophet to be Senior Missionaries and were called to Kalamazoo, Michigan; and we have worked to fulfill that calling. But we have received so much more in return. We have memories that will last us the rest f our lives and friendships that will endure. Finally, as a bonus to our service to the Young Adults we have taught two Adult Institute Classes where we have worked with the older members of the Kalamazoo Stake, and we have additional memories, experiences and loving devotion to them. We have been to their homes or to lunch with them, have stayed after and talked about their families and children, about their struggles and challenges in life and have become very close friends with many of them. We have attended their children’s baptisms, rejoiced in their service as they have served and fixed meals for our Zone conferences, and had our hearts gladdened as we see them drive up for another institute class each week. Our experiences with them are somewhat different from that with the young adults, and we have talked about different things, and had a somewhat different discussion of the same lesson material. But these brothers and sisters have also grown in our hearts and minds.
It is the three large picture books that Sister Schill has done for the branch, and the pictures that she has taken, gotten enlarged and printed, labeled, collated, and placed in binders that have been given to the branch, and of the countless times we have enjoyed branch members sitting and looking through them, laughing, pointing out things to each other, reminiscing and loving the activities and associations that they have had.
It is about coming to know and love Michigan, not only for the wonderful friends and people we have met, but also the scenery and the outdoors which we have enjoyed on P days and vacation periods, including collecting Petoskey stones, the state rock, and visiting many of the coastal lighthouses. It is about photographing many of the red barns and silos, the beautiful leaves in the fall, and the deep snowy wintry scenes.
It is about sitting at a desk with an open lesson manual and blank pieces of paper, about praying for inspiration to create a lesson and a discussion that will touch the hearts of students and lead them to more fully love and serve the Lord, about taking of the resources provided to us by CES and creating lessons for our individual students. Something that will inspire, edify and lift them.
It is about the few days when we came to class and no one was there—no one came that day, Or about having a meal all fixed and waiting and waiting and finally one or two come down the stairs into the kitchen and we enjoy the meal together in the institute room. Thus, it is about working with the agency of others and the choices they make, not always as we would desire, but what they choose just the same. It is also about seeing a less active come to class, put his or her head on the table and struggle to pay attention, then, several days or weeks later shining with enthusiasm, active in the branch, serving in a calling and doing the work of the Lord in their lives. It is about having a less active bring an investigator with her to institute class, and about seeing a recent convert experience joy, feel the spirit and achieve growth at participating in and attending a missionary discussion with another investigator.
It is about the freedom to share our missionary experiences with our families back home through our family mission blog, through telephone calls, and through the visits of those who have come to see us and stay at our “mission home” and come to visit our classes and participate in our activities. So it has been about sharing our excitement each week with our children and family by posting our activities and our pictures on our blog sight, and about reading their comments in return. About receiving many letters and pictures from our grandchildren who call us Elder Grandpa and Sister Grandma.
It is about getting ready each morning together, putting on our missionary clothes and our tags, toting our meals and our lesson manuals, our camera and other materials out to the car, driving to the institute, and getting it all ready for students to arrive. It is about doing this together each day and spending time together serving as a couple 24/7. It is about attending and participating in each and all of the institute lesson discussions and the tremendous spiritual uplift and growth that comes from being in institute class all week long and hearing the ideas from others. It is about encouraging one another in serving in our mission callings, and seeing each other work hard and serve the Lord during this period of dedication and consecration of our marriage.
It is about days when we have been pleasantly surprised and fifteen people come to the lesson, and we have to add an extra table to the room and spread the food over more people. It is the joy of seeing people bring their friends with them who have not been attending institute, and having people surprise us and pop in unannounced and have them join in with us for the meal and the lesson. It is about the thank you’s and the “wonderful lesson… I learned a lot, thank you” received from grateful students.
It is about going to Zone Conferences and hearing inspirational talks by our Mission President and his wife, and by our zone leaders, of meeting in the cultural hall for a great lunch and singing “Called To Serve” along with all of the missionaries. It is about friendships with other senior missionaries and opportunities to share experiences and feel of their spirit and support.
So what has our mission been about? It has been about love and service, about working hard each day, day after day, about being a friend and a brother or sister. It has been about mourning with one of the sisters in our class when her brother was seriously injured in an auto accident, and she has had to care for him. It has been about comforting new converts when they were rejected by their families for joining the Church. It has been about seeking and enjoying the Lord’s spirit to bathe our thoughts and our feelings with inspiration and with beauty so that we could try to serve as He would serve. It has been a wonderful and marvelous twelve months that we have been in the Kalamazoo Institute and University Branch, or KUB or Kalama Zion as they call it. We have arranged and covered tables, played BYU DVD’s, fixed meals, cleaned up, replaced chairs, cleaned the building, taken out the trash, prepared lessons, lead discussions, greeted guests, reached out to less actives, fellowshipped new converts, loved branch members and made friends with adult students and linked our hearts together. This is what our mission has been about and this is the substance of the joys and blessings that we take with us, and, hopefully, leave behind.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
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