The past few weeks have been rather uneventful but have still been full of miracles and fun. Perhaps we are becoming casual when we say that miracles are uneventful. But it has been a great few weeks with nothing too dramatic to deal with or experience. We’ve had no evacuations or large groups of visitors to the VC and no recent visits to London from family or friends. We have had a couple of high profile visitors to the chapel but that has become somewhat common-place. Last Sunday Mark Madsen, former player for and now assistant coach for the Los Angeles Lakers, came to church with his wife. And Nancy Marriott, wife of Bill Marriott, came to church at the chapel last Sunday.

Our miracles mostly revolve around the number of visitors that we have seen come to the chapel and the number of those visitors who have taken tours at the visitors’ centre. January and February are generally much slower for the VC as fewer tourists visit London during those months and the weather is generally not very good. January had more visitors than expected but having 400 on one day due to the Science Museum evacuation increased those numbers. Our sisters set goals each month for the number of visitors and the number of tours. When we set goals for February they were all very optimistic about those numbers but we (Connie and Rod) were skeptical that we could achieve their lofty goals. But after just 20 days of the month we are nearly at the numbers that they have set. Last week alone we had almost 1,000 visitors to the VC.

Another area of miracles have been baptisms. Last Sunday a young Chinese student who has been meeting with our sisters since before we arrived here finally got baptized. She had been scheduled for baptism many times over the last two years but she finally did it. We’ve also seen three other VC baptisms this past month of friends that our sisters worked with online.

The online work that our sisters do every day still amazes us. They each have time to go in the office and use the computers to pick up people’s requests to get a copy of the Bible or the Book of Mormon or to be taught by missionaries or just to chat. They have widely varied experiences with these interactions but it is amazing to see how many requests there are every day and how many of those requests our sisters are able to pick up. Because we are really the only VC between New Zealand and the U.S. who are doing online work (the London Temple VC is also in between those locations but they apparently aren’t doing much online work) our sisters are the only ones in the world who are picking up requests for certain hours each day (like from 9 am to 2 pm our time. New Zealand is 12 hours ahead of us and U.S. Eastern Time is 5 hours behind us). Requests are coming into Mormon.org 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There are those who come online only as a joke. There are those who come online to try and make trouble. There are those who are members of the church who come online to ask silly things like “can you tell me what time church starts?” But there are a lot who are honestly seeking to know more. Our sisters are doing an incredible job handling the many, many requests that are received. As a result we get to see and hear about people being taught by missionaries all over the world.

We had a request recently from someone in the U.S. to send missionaries to his brother here in London. We gladly have done so and his brother is being taught. The interesting twist is that the person sending the request lives in the Rancho Cucamonga Stake right next door to Upland. Sometimes the world can be rather small.

We’ve managed to see a bit more of London having made a trip to Kew Gardens to see the Orchid Festival and a trip to Greenwich to see “where time begins" (Greenwich Mean Time). The Orchid Festival is housed in a large greenhouse at Kew Gardens but Spring flowers are also coming to London as the daffodils have started to bloom in many of the parks. We are looking forward to some days of more sunlight and the beauty of Spring.