Nov 17

November 17, 2006

We attended our first Family Services Staff Meeting in Snowflake. Family Services bought our lunch at a Mexican restaurant called Eva’s at noon. It was very good food and we met the secretary, Michelle, who is a very nice person and has social skills. Then we went back to the FS offices for our meeting. All of the couples in our mission, the Arizona-Phoenix mission and the Albuquerque mission were there, which made 8 couples. Of those 8 couples 4 of us were there for the first time.

They played a video of a talk by Elder Ballard. He said that if we were a business and we judged our success on our retention rate the business would be bankrupt. The leaders of the church are very anxious to figure out how we can retain converts. Without retention the work is meaningless. He spoke of creativity, saying that we will have to give up some of the old ways we’ve done things and find new ways to do them. We are thinking we should contribute to the creative process by taking another cruise where we can think more creatively than we can here. We’ll let you know what Pres. Buttars thinks of our idea. Then we talked about the ARP program and how to run the groups. It was really a good meeting and helpful for us.

After the meeting we spent the evening in companionship study, i.e., making phone calls and going to see Casino Royale. We rated the movie 5 on a scale of 1-10. It lacked the humor of the other James Bond movies and that pretty much left it with sex and violence. It wasn’t awful just wasn’t as much fun as the others. It reminded us a lot of the one Timorthy Dalton was in. Got home late again.