Another month is almost completed and it seems like we just finished last month’s report. The last couple of weeks have been difficult but rewarding. We have spent a lot of time at the hospital with one of our sisters who has had some serious health problems. Our mission president and his wife have been incredible with their love and time devoted to this sister. We have shared the responsibility with them in visiting the hospital every day. The good news is that she is improving and we are optimistic that she will be released from the hospital soon. In the meantime, our visits to the hospital will continue to take up most of the time that we are not serving at the visitors’ centre.

The past couple of weeks have been rewarding as we have seen several more people enter the waters of baptism. Our sisters have had online baptisms in Washington, D.C. and Uganda. Another was scheduled to happen in Holland today (we hope it happened). The baptism in Uganda is an amazing story. One of our VC sisters is from Uganda (Sister Apiyo) and she chatted with a man online some time ago who lives in Uganda. He was interested in the church and she requested that local missionaries go teach him in Uganda. It turned out that he lives in her hometown of Gulu and is in her ward there. She taught him online until local missionaries finally met with him. She stayed in touch and learned that he had scheduled to be baptized. She was excited but then the baptism didn’t happen. He set another baptism date but that one didn’t happen either. Last month he told her that he was going to get baptized along with nine other people in her ward. Once again she was excited only to be informed that those baptisms didn’t take place either. Sister Apiyo will be completing her mission in less than two weeks and will be going home. Last Friday night she learned that her online friend got baptized with three others and that the other six people were being baptized this weekend. What a way for her to end her mission! She will be returning home to these new converts that she has never met but has played a role in their conversion and baptism.

We have also had baptisms at the Hyde Park Chapel. Yesterday an 11-year-old girl was baptized by her father who had just been baptized two weeks earlier. We also had a man from Jordan baptized last month and this past month his older brother got baptized here. Now our sisters are teaching the older brother’s 14-year-old daughter and she is set for baptism next Saturday. It is such a thrill to see our sisters having success as they welcome guests and teach the gospel.

Our sisters are also doing incredible things with their online work. Since the church changed the process this past February for handling Mormon.org requests for missionaries or for receiving copies of the Bible or the Book of Mormon, our sisters have continued to increase the number of referrals that they are sending to local missionaries. The first full month after this change they sent over 100 referrals to local missionaries (before they can send local missionaries to someone our sisters have to make contact with the requesting individual and make sure that they are willing to meet with missionaries). In June they sent over 200 referrals to local missionaries and last month they sent 298. This month they have already sent over 400 referrals. That’s 400 teaching opportunities that are just given to local missionaries somewhere in the world without them having to do any finding at all. What a great work this is and what an honor it is to be a participant in it.

We have continued to welcome many guests to the Hyde Park Chapel VC. Last week Sister Julie Beck, former Relief Society General President, and her daughter stopped by. We had some great friends stop and visit us here as well. Dianne (Munson) Knight and her husband Lyle stopped by. Dianne lived in our neighborhood in Upland before she got married and was our ward and stake Young Women’s President. Then Miles and Jann Peterson from the Upland Stake came by for a visit. And today Carole Olson who used to live in Upland many years ago came by with some friends. Carole’s husband, John, was our first bishop when we moved to Upland. What a treat to have all of these great people come visit us here in London.

We can’t seem to keep up with reporting all of the great things that we are involved in and are seeing here in London. Hopefully, these occasional updates will at least give you a flavor for what we are experiencing here.

Since our last entry we have had another round of transfers in our mission. Until now, we have been blessed to have had relatively little change with our VC sisters from these past changes. In six months we have only had two sisters go home and two new sisters come out. However, this past transfer we had two more sisters complete their missions and two new sisters come out. So on Tuesday, July 26^th, we had to say good-bye to Sister Lung and Sister Wai. Sister Lung returned home to Hong Kong and Sister Wai returned home to Irvine, California. Both sisters were our Chinese (Mandarin) speakers and both served great missions. On Wednesday, July 27^th, we welcomed Sister Yau from Hong Kong and Sister Teng from Malaysia. Both speak Mandarin and Cantonese as well as English. Sister Teng also speaks Malay and Taiwanese. On their first day here they gave tours of our VC to Chinese guests and did it by themselves. Their American trainers could only watch and smile as they had no idea what their companions were saying. But they apparently did a great job as our guests took copies of the Book of Mormon in Chinese and gave us contact information so that we can help them learn more.

Some more changes for our mission were announced last week as we are one of fifteen missions in the Church to pilot “Online Proselyting.” Online proselyting involves finding, teaching, and following up with investigators using technology. Our missionaries have had ipads for about a year now. They are now authorized to use Facebook to find new investigators and teach them and follow up with them. They also can use Skype and Oovoo too for online video teaching. This change will not affect our VC sisters much as they have already been using the internet to contact and teach people all over the world. But it will be interesting to watch how the work goes forward here in the England London Mission with this change. The potential for reaching many more interested people is huge.

We continue to witness many great experiences as we serve in the VC. People come into the VC for all kinds of reasons. We had two baptisms last Sunday. One was a lady named Raquel who came into the VC on May 30^th with another lady who was befriended by one of the mission office couples. The friend who brought her has since moved and isn’t really interested in the gospel. But Raquel has embraced the gospel and acknowledges the Lord’s hand in how she found the church. The other baptism was of a Chinese young lady named Nicole. She came into the VC on June 23^rd after going to Mormon.org and requesting missionaries to teach her more. These two ladies took very different paths to find the church but both paths included our VC.

We have managed to take a few more walks and have seen some more sights of London. We walked through Battersea Park that is along the Thames River. It has lakes and ponds and more beautiful greenery. Another day we again visited the V&A Museum which is next door to the chapel. We went to the “Castings” exhibit which displays many casts of famous sculptures like Michelangelo’s David and Moses. We have walked through St. James’s Park, Green Park, and Hyde Park again and enjoyed the scenic views in all of those parks.