Highlights and hardships for December

Our newest grandson, Hyrum Nephi Williams, depicting the baby Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes. What a precious time to celebrate the birth of our Savior.

Our gratitude journal blessing page for December is filled to the brim, including the margins. Honestly, our biggest hardships seem to be technical things, like this blog. But Heavenly Father sure compensates for what we lack in knowledge. We see miracles daily.

We love going to our beautiful Perth temple.

Here's a picture of our new home from the outside. Tony found a picture of Christ in what they call the dungeon of the Dianella chapel, where they store tons of stuff like bikes and vacuums, to hang in our living room.

I titled December 5, Magical Monday. It started off with a wonderful chat with several of our children and a morning tea for the ladies with our dear friend - Cindy, Sister Stone, and Sister Grinceri.

Cindy showed up for her "preach my gospel" lesson with a beautiful little Christmas tree, lights and a star to add to the koala nativity scene that she had given us earlier. In spite of our resistance to her constant barrage of gifts, she stubbornly set up the tree. We gave in, broke out the sparkling grape juice, had a toast and named the darling tree, Cindy Lou Who. She let us record her reading "The Night before Christmas" for our grandchildren, so they could hear her marvelous accent. The spirit was warm and wonderful. It was palpable for days and truly brought the happiness of the season to our hearts, even being so far from home.

The next day we had a combined zone conference and Christmas party.

On December 8, we traveled to Albany which is about 5 hours away to speak in church. We were speaking in church a few hours after Janill, our oldest grand daughter was getting married in the Ogden Temple 15 minutes from our home in Pleasant Grove, Utah. That was kind of hard.

But we had a wonderful visit with Janill and Devin over zoom before the wedding.

We went to the ward party the night before. It was a wonderful dinner, but when we were helping with the clean up afterward, I tripped on a piece of carpet while moving a box and fell, hitting my arm on the box. This mission is beating me up.

We stayed in a quaint bed and breakfast.

We went a day early, took the Albany missionaries to breakfast, and were able to enjoy some beautiful sites. We took our first hike near the ocean.

Here's a close-up of one of the mob at Pinnaroo Cemetery, less than a mile from our home.

We played tennis 4 times in December for exercise, including on Christmas Eve, which was epic.

I was asked to accompany a few difficult numbers at our ward Christmas program. It took me hours of practice and I was so nervous. But a huge blessing came from it. Our dear mission president bought a piano for our home. Something hilarious happened on Sunday morning that I have to journal, because I don't ever want to forget it. The chapel was packed. We had our area seventy, the mission president and his family, an investigator that we had had to our home for dinner several night before and tons of visitors. Tony and I were singing in the choir. I was kind of sitting on the end so I could go down to accompany the last 2 numbers, before the closing number which I would have to come back up for. So they began the meeting with a special prelude number which included the piano, a flute, a trombone, a clarinet, and a cello. They hadn't practiced all together because the piano player had just come from the US. His name was Isaac and he was getting engaged to Sarah, the cello player. When he started to play the song on the piano, the air conditioner started to blow his music off. But the people playing the instruments didn't see it and just kept going. I was mortified for him, and tried to inconspicuously walk out of the choir seats to help him. As I was trying to get by the big instruments, my dress got caught on the trombone player's music stand and it tipped over. I couldn't get it uncaught very easy and I was dying. I finally got to the piano and helped the accompanist rearrange his pages. The lady told him to start over and skip the repeats. When he was so nervous and the music from the instruments didn't match each other and it was horrible. The poor lady in charge looked like death. But she still had to go on with the program. After that bad start, I was worried what would happen when I had to play my hard song. It turned out ok. But I'll tell you the ward sure got some comic relief.

We had a wonderful Christmas lunch with the Joondalup community who provide a wonderful meal and entertainment for many who have no family to spend Christmas with. There were over 400 people.

A professional musician that entertained the people. His name is Tim.

The missionaries provided a choir and all the set up and clean up. They were great!

Our sweet family from Russia who invited us for Christmas dinner.

Our wonderful friends, the Oates.

Sister McDonald, below (left) cuts the hair of us three other sisters every 6 weeks for free. We love her for this! And we have so much fun together

December 31, 2022 (by Tony)

This has been our first Christmas away from home while here on our mission. I didn’t think too much about the changes, but there have been many: (1) away from family; (2) hot weather (summer) instead of cold (winter); (3) no purchasing and exchange of gifts; (4) and a very modest, little Christmas tree, devoid of presents underneath it. All that said, it’s been a most wonderful Christmas! I’ve relished the focus on our mission assignments, time with missionaries and members, and freedom from the worldly, commercial distractions that have been so common in Christmases past.

One of the highlights of our Christmas was having Daniel and James (two brothers, age 33 and 27 respectively) over for dinner, accompanied by their father, Damien, who was visiting for the holidays from his home in Darwin. Daniel and James are both members of the Church, as is their middle brother (who also lives in Darwin but couldn’t be here). Damien is a very faithful Catholic who not only attends Mass weekly, but also hosts a Zoom-based Bible study class each week for friends. He is also a scientist, with a PhD and career in environmental science. It was unusual and refreshing to find such a well-read and educated scientist (outside the Church) who also is a person of devout faith. He attended our ward on Christmas Day, and will attend again this Sunday. His oldest son, Daniel, texted me after our dinner to express his dad’s pleasure in spending time together; and he (Daniel) also mentioned that he had given his dad a Book of Mormon, that he expressed interest in the Gospel, and wanted to spend more time with Sister Kahmann and me to learn more about the Gospel from our perspectives. We were thrilled with this development, and are excited to join up with Damien this coming week for discussions and lunch. I am often reminded that there “are no coincidences” (Elder Rasband), and that our Savior is the “master of intersections” of people (Elder Bednar).

On way home from Bunbury, after doing a training, we stopped at the Morris's home for lunch. They are the housing couple for the mission. We were absolutely blown away.

Brother Morris

Beautiful water for swimming. Safe from sharks, because dolphins scare them off.

Kangaroo's play on this little piece of land in the evenings.

Dolphins right out their back door!

Our friend Anouck's birthday dinner at a local country club.

Courtesy of Julia and Mark, dinner at a trendy restaurant.

We see lots of US companies in Perth.

We completed lesson 2 of emotional resilience training with all 89 young elders and sisters on "Managing our Thoughts." This is one of our most enjoyable and rewarding assignments. Here's a few of the groups.

I wanted to show these birds, our Australian parrots. When Hyrum and Bowman served in Korea, they brought home Korean ducks. Couples put them on a shelf. If the are mad, or not getting along they turn the ducks away from each other. If they are at peace, they turn the ducks toward each other. I was on a walk thinking about Janill and Devin getting married and I saw these birds. The birds started like this . . . .

and then turned toward each other like this: It was so cool!!!!

We love you all!

Our Christmas surprise