Saying Goodbye

Cole was called to serve in the Minnesota Minneapolis mission on April, 2019. We were all shocked! There were guesses all over the map except that area!

The mission covers most of the state of Minnesota, parts of the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa and some of Canada.  

Cole's report to the MTC date was July 31st, three days ago. Feels like a year already........

We did a lot of things to prepare for Cole's mission that I will post about. As a reminder, we took a trip to Fl/Ga. Went to the temple, Had a farewell and made the arduous, fastest trip to Provo, UT ever known to mankind...and I didn't speed.

Cole gave such a great talk the Sunday before he left. He talked about sacrifice and a little bit about the comparison of the pioneers and missionaries sacrifices. He spoke of humility. I can't remember the rest, but will ask him for a copy of talk to put highlights.

We drove down and met Stephen for lunch at Station 22. Then we drove off to the MTC. We were really all doing pretty well. We drove to a park in between the temple and the MTC to say goodbye and surprisingly there was a good ole Florida downpour. We were able to gather under a tree and give good hugs. Then we continuted on to the garage. There were a lot of people The lady at the gate said there were 720 missionaries coming in, more than usual due to missionaries coming that were supposed to go to foreign MTCs but had visa issues. She said it was the most she's seen in her two years of working there. So we drove down to the garage and got out. There was an Elder there to meet us, took our picture and take Cole.

We all did farely well, but the girls and I had a hard time as we drove away. Really so surreal that he's not with us anymore, but we're dealing.

Cole emailed a couple of hours later and said that he was alive, The MTC was awesome and his pday is Tuesday.

We received a google photo email with the following pics.