First Week at Fort Cove

This has been a great week!  We started the week by watching General Conference in the Conference Center with Wayne and Libby Clarke sitting right next to us.  We had lunch at Jenny’s house with her family and arrived in Provo in time to meet Cory’s family at our hotel to watch the afternoon session of conference.

Monday, we started our MTC training with just the couples that will be serving at a visitors’ center or historical site.  They invited us to go to Temple Square in SLC to take a tour with the sister missionaries.  The trainers wanted us to see what it felt like to be a guest on a tour before they turn us loose giving them.  The sisters that we were with did a good job.  The thing that I liked the least was when they asked for a referral and then didn’t say anything for 3-4 minutes – that was VERY uncomfortable.  Right along the lines of a very slow day at Fast and Testimony meeting.  After training, Stephen and I spent our evening at BYU in the family history section.  Cory had told us about the recent digitization of the Church’s Missionary Index from the beginning of the church to 1972, so we spent most of our time looking in it.  You may want to check that out to find information about your ancestors that may have served missions for the church.

Stephen at the MTC on Tuesday morning during the snow storm.

There was a big snowstorm on Tuesday in the Rocky Mountain areas including Utah and Wyoming.  It was so bad that the twenty couples going to the Mormon Handcart Historical Sites were told to wait to leave until Friday.  The area was snowed in and the water in the pipes was frozen.  Luckily it wasn’t that bad at Cove Fort.

At the MTC we practiced how to give brief gospel messages when you have just a short time with people.  This is a very hard concept for most people to grasp.  One to two sentences stretched into two or more paragraphs.  As some of you may be thinking, this was not a difficult assignment for Stephen and I.  One of the things that I learned that I hadn’t realized before was that Preach My Gospel was written by the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve.  The trainers quoted Elder Boyd K. Packer as saying that Preach My Gospel was “written from behind the veil”.  An interesting story about the book involves the bulleted portions on pp. 176 and 177.  Evidently Pres. Packer wrote them and gave them to the committee to include in the book.  When he saw a copy of the draft he noticed that they had changed his wording and told them to put it in exactly as he had given it to them.  This may just be Mormon Myth material but it was shared at the MTC so it should have some credibility.

The Tuesday Devotional speaker was Gerald N. Lund, former member of the Seventy.  He spoke on “How do you know if ‘that’ was from the Lord?”  Some of his thoughts were:

• What we receive from the Lord is more important than how it comes.
• The Spirit often gives direction without explanation
• Quoted Pres. Packer as saying “The Spirit caresses so gently that if we are preoccupied, we might not feel it at all.”
• Revelation comes according to God’s own time, in His way, according to His own will.
• “If you want to speak to God get on your knees.  If you want God to speak to you then open the scriptures.”
• God expects us to develop spiritual self-reliance.  We do NOT need to be told everything.

Wednesday we said farewell to the MTC and headed south to Cove Fort.  We arrived at the Fort just before five o’clock.  We met Elder and Sister Christensen, were given some information about the site and procedures, and sent to the trailer park to settle in.  We arrived at our trailer to find it already labeled with our name and surrounded with about a foot of snow.  We spent the night unpacking all the things that we had brought and settling in.

First day in our new mobile home

 

Studying in the living area

Our guest accommodations

The mobile home is really quite nice if you don't mind pink.  The place feels very spacious compared to some of the trailers that we have visited in with other missionaries this week.  We are excited that we do have a second bedroom so that        friends  and family can come to the Fort for a visit and have a place to stay.  The extra bedroom even has a matching extra  bathroom for added privacy.

The Fort had about a foot and a half of snow when we arrived, but it has slowly been melting.  We noticed today that the garden areas are completely clear so they may start planting the vegetables soon.  

Thursday and Friday were training days for all of the new missionaries.  We went on the tour of the Fort three times on Thursday and then the same amount the next day.  Stephen’s younger sister, Rosemarie Bergquist, surprised us by stopping by with her family to visit us Friday evening.  We headed back to the Fort and they became our guinea pigs for giving the tour for the first time.  It was nice to be able to practice on family before being turned loose on the general population.

Saturday was a VERY slow day at the Fort.  During our six-hour duty time we gave just two tours.  We took a picture of our first tour group that included a young man who had just received his mission call to Eugene, Oregon.  Both of the groups we took through today were active members of the Church from Utah.  I don’t think that we will be seeing their referral cards again but who knows they may surprise us. 

Our 1st tour group -- we didn't lose any of them!

We had our first Sunday meeting in the Twig this morning.  They named it that because we are too small to be a branch.  We have sacrament meeting and Sunday School lesson on Sunday and do the Priesthood/Relief Society lesson for Family Home Evening on Monday nights.  I think it is interesting that there are members from the Fillmore Ward who come down on Saturday morning and cover the tours while the missionaries attend their meetings.  It is nice to see the support that is given by the surrounding wards.

You must be tired of reading this by now so I think that I will stop until the next time. 

A fact about the Fort that we learned this week – there are only three original artifacts that are in the Fort that were here when the Hinckley’s lived here.  Stay tune in the weeks to come to see what they are.