Sunday, December 18, 2023
After being called as mission leaders, we eagerly awaited the letter that would tell us our assignment of where we would be serving. We were told to expect our mission call around December 15th.
Sure enough, we received an email on the Thursday, December 15th with an attachment of our mission call letter, and the following day (Friday, December 16th) we received a FedEx package with the call letter.
We wanted to gather both of our families together to open the call, but for a few different reasons, we couldn’t gather everyone we wanted to be there until Sunday, December 18th. It was a long three days waiting for Sunday to come, but it was great to have everyone from our two families there, as well as the Grahams, the Ivins, and a few of Samantha’s friends.
Watching someone open their mission call is always an exciting experience. There are currently 411 missions throughout the world, so the letter they are opening literally could be sending them anywhere. So you can imagine how excited and nervous a person is as they open their own call, and that was definitely true for us.
We had decided that Kimberly would open and read the call. She gave Samantha and I pretty strict instructions that we shouldn’t look at the letter as she read it as she didn’t want us to see where we were going before she read where we were assigned.
She was excited as I’ve ever seen her as she read, “You are assigned to labor in the Tennessee Knoxville Mission.” We couldn’t be more excited about this assignment and know that this is going to be a great place for us to serve.
I feel especially grateful for Samantha and her willingness to move to Tennessee. She will start her sophomore year of high school shortly after we arrive in Knoxville and will graduate weeks before we come home in three years. This last year she has been a student body officer and loved being involved in choirs at the high school, and now wonders how that is all going to work out at a new high school. She’s leaving a strong group of friends and a community that is familiar and comfortable. In the end, she is making the greatest sacrifice of all. We are so grateful for her and know that in the end, this will be a special experience for her.
There is a pretty amazing side note here…
Back in June, Kimberly and I booked a trip to Disneyland during the first week of December. It was a rare trip to Disneyland for just the two of us, but it ended up being perfect timing as we had just received our call as mission leaders two weeks before the trip.
When we received our call to serve, you naturally begin to wonder where you will be assigned. We looked back at the assignments made in 2020 (since mission leaders serve for three years) to get an idea of what missions would be open. We learned there would be 134 mission leaders assigned in 2023.
As Kimberly and I don’t speak other languages, we felt it was likely we would be assigned English-speaking, which narrowed it down to around 75 potential missions. As you can imagine, we all poured over that list and each of us had preferences of where we hoped it might be. Since I served in Hawaii, I predicted serving with the Polynesian people. But Kimberly had other ideas…
So back to Disneyland…
One night, after the fireworks had just finished, and the snow was falling on Main Street, Kimberly pulled out her phone to film the end of the fireworks and the start of the snow. As the snow finished, she turned the camera on us, and asked, “Where do you think we are going on our mission?”
Here are the predictions:
Yes, Kimberly called it! Keep in mind this was on December 6th and we didn’t open our call letter until December 18th. She’s clearly the inspired one in our family. She had impressions early on that we were heading to Tennessee, and she was right all along, which is pretty remarkable.
#WhatsUpInTKM
Barlows in TKM 