As a territory, Puerto Rico has United States mail, but you wouldn’t know it. We ordered a rug that was supposed to arrive on Thursday, Nov. 30, but all we got was a notice on Amazon, that USPS had tried to deliver the rug at 5:04 PM, but that we weren’t home. Since we had been home at 5:04—and, in fact, home until 6:00 that day, we were curious. No note was left for us saying that anyone had attempted a rug delivery.

The rug didn’t come on Friday and not on Saturday, and by Monday we had visions of this box landing somewhere in a warehouse like the Ark of the Covenant did in the first Indiana Jones movie. Gone and forgotten and totally lost. Is there anything deeper or wider than the dead letter pile? Only the dead packages pile.

So, on Monday, we finally jumped in the car to head to the post office. In this big city, there are so many post offices you can’t be certain which is yours, but we asked our GPS for post offices near me and went for it.

Then as we were just turning off our little street, a postal carrier truck was coming our way. It was like a movie. Set up the conflict. Enter stage right, the hero.

Yet, there was something so much more about this man and this truck. I knew that he was a plant, someone put right in our path by the Lord who would talk to us. I knew this in a way I can’t explain. I just knew long before we saw him or heard his voice. I knew that Scot felt it too.

Scot jumped out of our car, waved the postman down, and told him about our missing rug. This man said, “I will go back to the post office, find this box, and bring it to you by end of work today. I promise.” I felt the integrity behind that promise and to make it even better he and Scot shared personal cell phone numbers so we could stay in touch and confirmed we were on our way to the right post office.

We found the rug, and Scot texted him a thank you note, told him we did family history, and sent him a quick background, from FamilySearch, about what his first and last name meant. He was immediately intrigued and texted Scot right back.

Scot said, “I told him that if he could share the name of an ancestor with us and an approximate death date, we could share more information about that person and provide more ancestors. He immediately responded with his father’s grandfather and said that his grandmother was born in Spain.

“It took me about two minutes to find both these people and get right back with him. He got so excited but felt badly that he was taking so much of my time. I told him that this is what we do. He thanked us and said to take our time. Within ten minutes, I found about six generations of his family and we can hardly wait to meet with him to tell him about eternal families and the purpose of the temple that is so close to our home.”

117 Steps

The temple is so close to our home, in fact, that we decided to count the steps from our front door to the edge of the temple lot. It is 117 steps. That means that the light of that spire overlooks and commands the attention of every soul in the 40 or 50 houses of our neighborhood.

We were talking to a special friend last night about family history. From her front porch, she has one of the best views of the temple possible. It was her glowing backdrop as we talked about family.

Since we asked her to tell us stories about her parents and grandparents a couple of weeks ago, she has arrived at our house with a few black and white photos of her family, carefully pointing out her beautiful mother, her grandparents and her aunts and uncles. People love their roots. It is an irresistible call.

Yet, she has also told us a tragic story. Six years ago, two robbers came to their home, and when her husband came outside to stop the robbers and protect his family, they shot him. He died in our friend’s arms. She lost her husband that day.

“Wouldn’t you like to be with him for eternity? That’s what takes place in this beautiful temple,” we said. Yes, she agreed, she knew about heaven and she could go there some day. That response did not acknowledge what we had just said about being connected to family, and we hope to have the opportunity to teach her more clearly.

The temple that offers that hope shined just behind her. I will always hold that image in my mind. She is so close, but doesn’t know it all yet.

A Family History Initiative

A major part of our mission call is to implement President Paul Horstmeier’s special initiative to use family history to find people to teach. The question that nags at every missionary’s heart is that we have a song to sing—the most majestic, compelling, intimate, caring message that could come from the lips of a person, and so few listeners.

Many people will not immediately respond to the question about whether they’d like to know which church is true. They don’t ask the question that a young Joseph Smith asked in a grove of trees in 1820.

In fact, Gary Lawrence, a national pollster and author of the recent book “Millions Believe as We Do But Haven’t Found the Church—Conversation Ideas from a National Poll” asked people to pretend they were reporters at a news conference and they could ask God anything they wanted.

He said, “The ‘reporters’ in this pretend news conference volunteered 1378 questions they would ask.

  • A third would ask “why” questions: Why all the suffering?  Why do bad things happen to good people?  Why is there so much hate?
  • A fourth would ask “what” questions: What is Thy plan for us?  What is the meaning of life?  What is my purpose in this world?
  • And one in six would ask “how” questions: How can I please Thee?  How soon is Jesus coming?  How can we save the world and have peace?

But there was only one – ONE – question that began with “which.”

’Which religion has it right to the best extent?’

But out of 1053 Christians in the sample, only one person would directly ask the same question Joseph Smith did.

So how can you start a conversation with someone and do a real act of service for them? Puerto Ricans love their families. During the temple open house late last year, FamilySearch used the theme “My family. My people.” That’s who they are, and they want to talk about family.

We will be developing a portable family history booth, to travel to the markets, festivals and everyplace there is a gathering of people with an offer to them—with the ultimate offer being to find as many as a hundred relatives for them and let the missionaries deliver their fan charts. Now, that’s compelling. Starting with this initiative, perhaps we can make the steps for them to the temple less than our 117. They can find their way there because they love Jesus and their families and the temple is a promise of living together in this sweet communion.

Spaghetti

We have always been good about navigating our car and ourselves around in the most obscure and difficult of places in the world (Cairo, New Delhi, Bangkok, Manilla, etc)—and still Puerto Rico is challenging for us sometimes. When we talked with other missionaries about this, they gave us the perfect description of why it is so hard. If you were to view San Juan and its surroundings from a map view or a bird’s eye view, the road system looks like spaghetti that has been randomly thrown up in the air and then it lands. The exchanges, the exits, the cloverleafs intertwine and weave quickly. The exit you thought was alone just ahead, turns out to be with two other exits that come immediately off of the same road. Surprise. You can’t tell which of those exits to take, because the GPS track on the map extends over all three—and you can’t find the sign that indicates which exit you want fast enough.

We find that we have done many long turn arounds to get back on the right freeway that are as long as 8 kilometers. And in the middle of a complicated GPS routing, Rosarita (our name we have given the voice talking to us) will say, “Stay in the left 5 lanes”—then she will say, “Take the exit,” then she will say, “Re-routing,” then, “Stay on the 17 for 4 kilometers. Then she will say “Take the next exit on Avenida Juan Ponce de León and then go right on Avenida Dr. Jose N. Gàndara.” By the time Rosarita has said all these names, we have missed the exit again that we never saw altogether.

Whatever happened to the two rugged pair, we once were, making it along an unmarked sandy road in the middle of an Omani desert?

Surely, we will learn the what and where of this very soon. We can feel it.

Another missionary couple told this story. As they were driving in the traffic, she was screaming “Take the salida! Take the salida!” Her husband passed the exit and he was saying to her, “Speak English!” and she answered, “I am.”

(Salida, of course, means exit in Spanish). We have quoted that story at least two dozen times while driving and laughing all the way!

Flash Mob Choir in Old San Juan 

With these crazy roads and absolutely no available parking spaces, we were surprised that we could actually pull off doing a flash mob choir in Old San Juan, the charming old late 15th century part of town where the cruise ships pull in every day and tourists and locals roam for the sheer fun of it.

When you see flash mob choirs online, they are usually well-rehearsed and have multiple cameras recording the event. We had three cameras and, given the short time we had, we gave only about a two-sentence explanation to our singers. These were the missionaries of the San Juan zone.

Our flash mob choir started with one singer’s lone voice at the top of the stairs: “Angels we have heard on high.” Then another voice added: “Sweetly singing o’er the plains”. The third voice was added, and then the fourth, and then all the 30 missionaries walked up to the steps singing, “Gloria, in Excelsus Deo.” People stopped where they were and some recorded it, including some Latter-day Saints in from a cruise ship for just a few hours. It was a great experience for the missionaries in this Christmas season and for a the few hundred people who witnessed it.

New Converts to the Temple

We did not realize until we were in the MTC, that the church hopes to get new converts to the temple to do baptisms for the dead as soon as possible after their baptism. This happens in our mission once a month, and the goal is for these new converts to bring their own family names for these sacred ordinances.

We felt honored to be with this group who had so recently made the decision that would change their lives forever. At one point in the baptistry, Scot counted 29 new converts and their missionaries. It was a glorious moment and he whispered to one of the sister missionaries, “I want you to memorize this moment and never forget what you are seeing right now.”

I talked to one woman in pink, a shiny new member of the church, clutching a bunch of cards of her ancestors in her hand. She told me she was worried that if she did the work for her grandmother, she would be mad at her.

“Nobody in my family has belonged to this church before.” I thought about what faith she had that her grandmother still lived in another place, and I told her that her grandmother would be so happy if she were baptized for her, and if she was mad about it, she didn’t have to accept the ordinance.

“Oh, I don’t know,” the new convert responded, looking troubled.

At the end of our session doing baptisms for the dead, she emerged from the temple so happy. “I did it,” she told me. I was so glad and I’m sure her grandmother was as well.