It has been a long time since we updated our blog. Sorry about that. However, we have been doing good things. Our daughter, Julie, and her family completed their visit with us the end of June and then our oldest son, Brian, and his wife visited us for 10 days earlier this month. We had a delightful time with all of our family who have come to visit but it makes keeping up with our missionary work a bit of a challenge. So things like blog writing definitely got sacrificed.

Let’s give you an update on the missionary work at the Hyde Park Chapel Visitors’ Center. Things have been going well and we marvel at the Lord’s hand involved in the work here. Our sisters continue to do great things here from giving tours in the VC, to working online, to finding success in their proselyting areas. We welcomed over 4,000 visitors to the Hyde Park Chapel for the second month in a row (July will definitely make three months in a row of over 4,000 visitors) and we were able to teach almost 1,200 of them. Teaching visitors who come into the chapel (giving tours) is our highest priority. When not giving tours our sisters are generally on our computers working online. They are picking up requests from people visiting Mormon.org and inviting all to meet with local missionaries and learn more about Christ’s restored gospel. They are picking up thousands of requests and sending over 1,000 referrals to local missionaries each month. Our sisters work six hours per day in the VC but are still expected to be productive missionaries in their proselyting areas. This is a challenge as their available time in their areas is very limited. But two of our four sets of VC sisters have had baptisms in their areas this month and a 3^rd companionship has a baptism scheduled for next Saturday. This is very gratifying for us to see them succeed not only in the VC but in their areas as well.

As we have seen our sisters succeed in many areas we have been asked by our leaders in Salt Lake to increase the number of sisters in our VC. They have asked us to increase by more than double but we have recommended that we just add one additional companionship and see how things go with that. So in just over a week that increase will take place. We have needed to make a lot of preparations for this change including figuring out schedules, storage space, living quarters, and so forth. We now feel that we are ready and look forward to seeing what our sisters can do with one additional companionship to help with the work. The big need for the additional set of sisters is to try and have four sisters online from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm our time. As mentioned in an earlier post, our VC is the only English-speaking visitors’ center in the world online from 10:00 am to 2:00 pm. In order to respond timely to requests made through Mormon.org it is essential that we have sisters online during those times.

We have been privileged to have a number of well-known people come to the Hyde Park Chapel recently. On June 16^th, Elder D. Todd Christofferson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles came to the chapel and spoke to all of the missionaries in the England London Mission. He was accompanied by his wife, Kathy, and Elder Patrick Kearon, President of the Europe Area of the Church, along with his wife, Jennifer. We have also enjoyed visits to the chapel from the Piano Guys (they just came to church, not to perform—they performed at Royal Albert Hall the evening before), Elder Ian Ardern, General Authority Seventy, Jimmy Osmond of the Osmond Brothers, Matthew Holland, president of Utah Valley University and son of Elder Jeffery R. Holland, and PGA golf great Gary Player. This is such a unique visitors’ center where we get to welcome so many different people from all over the world.

We were delighted with the time that we had with our kids and grandkids. Julie and Josh and their kids returned from Paris as scheduled and we were able to spend another week-plus with them. We got them tickets to attend the “Space Spectacular” featuring the London Philharmonic Orchestra at Royal Albert Hall and then another night to attend the Broadway Musical “Lion King” at a West End theater. We took a day away from the VC and went with them out to Dover and viewed the White Cliffs of Dover and toured the Dover Castle. It was a fascinating place with tunnels into the cliffs from medieval times as well as from World War II times. Julie and Josh went on an overnight trip to Belgium and left their kids with us. We had a great time with just us and four of our grandchildren—playing in the parks, going to museums, and watching videos in the VC. This was a real treat for us to be able to do while on our mission. The time came all too quickly to say goodbye but we enjoyed having them here.

A week after we said goodbye to Julie and her family, Brian and Sherrie arrived for a 10-day stay with us. Once again we toured them all around London. We went to most of the “normal” tourist attractions (Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Tower of London, Tower Bridge, Hampton Court Palace, Kensington Palace, Buckingham Palace, Notting Hill) and also walked by Wimbledon as the famous tournament was going on while they were here. We heard that you could go to the Wimbledon Grounds and sit on the lawn and watch the matches on the big outdoor video screens. What we didn’t know is that you still needed to buy tickets for 25 GBPs and the queue (the line) was over 6,000 people long and required waiting for hours. We opted for a walk around the outside of the stadiums and enjoyed the atmosphere of those with tickets going to the matches. We took Brian and Sherrie to the Broadway Musical “Phantom of the Opera” at a West End theater and took them through parks and alleys and passageways. London is such an intriguing city but you really have to leave the regular tourist stops in order to get a full appreciation of this city. We consider ourselves very blessed to be able to spend two years here.

The Josh Brunner Family with the White Cliffs of Dover

Elliza, Clark, Lily & Madelyn
with scooters at Royal Albert Memorial

Madelyn, Lily & Clark with a
Peacock strutting his stuff

Sherrie at the colorful Neal's Yard