Michelle and I have been planning to serve a mission together for most of our married life. We timed our application submission with the hope that we would be able to open our mission call at our family reunion. However, when Saturday, December 26 came along and we still had not received our call in the mail, we thought we would not have that opportunity. We also found out that the normal time to get a call for Senior Missionaries was 5-6 weeks, so we were not very optimistic we would get our call during the family reunion. But we kept praying that we would. On Monday, December 28, our neighbor called us at Bear Lake and told us it had come and offered to bring it to us. Paul met Adam and Amy Liscombe (our neighbor) in Logan that afternoon and we opened the call that evening with all of our children and grandchildren. We have been assigned to serve in the Nicaragua Managua North Mission. We enter the MTC on April 11 and will serve for 23 months. Michelle has been called as the Mission Nurse Specialist and I will serve as a Member and Leader Support Missionary. Paul and Steve were especially excited because they also served in Central America. They started telling us all about the area, the good, bad and the ugly. We finally had to tell them to stop telling us about the bad and the ugly because it was getting us concerned about our safety. 

We both were overwhelmed that we were called to a Spanish speaking mission. We had indicated in our application that we preferred an English speaking mission, but the Lord had other needs. Elder Swick of the Seventy had given me council three years earlier, when we were released as a Stake Presidency, to relearn Spanish. So I had been working on that a little by reading Preach my Gospel in Spanish, but I had not been very diligent in doing that. We asked our sons to give us blessings. Paul gave Michelle and beautiful blessing that reduced her anxiety considerably and John gave me a beautiful blessing that gave me great comfort. 

We are frantically studying Spanish. We are excited and yet nervous. My Spanish needs a lot of work and Michelle is just beginning to learn it. She is speaking Spanish with a French accent (she took several years of French in High School), which is very cute.