Week of Mar 18, #2 Multizone Conference

The mission headquarters and mission home are located in Birmingham, AL, about 150 miles east of where we are serving. We travel there about once per month for conference or meetings. This month, we had a multizone conference - about half the mission was in attendance. With an 8:30am start, we have to leave at 5:45am - yawn.

To save the young missionaries miles and expense, we take a pair of them with us. They use the drive time to get some additional sleep. In fact, everyone in the Jeep gets to sleep except me. This is where "5 hour energy" is really useful. One shot of that, and I am wired for the day. Needless to say, I don't drift off during the meetings - avoiding a jab in the ribs from Sister Johnson.

The conferences are always very informative and uplifting, and the senior missionaries get special recognition and attention, which we appreciate. This meeting had a special emphasis on the Book of Mormon, and we will be reading passages from that with our investigators, friends, and members whenever we meet with them.

The conference runs nonstop, except for a lunch break, from 8:30am to 3:30pm, then we load up the elders and make the 150mi return trip. This evening, we had a dinner invitation from a lovely member family in our branch, and I had to delay it 30 minutes since the conference went long, but it was a very enjoyable end to a long day.

The mission has installed a "TIWI" device in each of the mission cars. This is a 2-way, GPS based, G-force device that detects speeding, fast turns, hard bumps and most everything else that young drivers are notorious for. It is the ultimate "big brother". If a car is speeding, accelerates or decelerates too quickly, etc, a live voice will come on the speaker and ask what's going on. The device is activated by a coded card, so the guilty party is immediately busted. More than a couple violations, and driving privileges are revoked. Having had responsibility for the mission fleet during my prior mission to Canada in the 1970's, I can say that this is a great advance, and is designed to save lives and abuse to the vehicles. Luckily now, since we have our own vehicle, we are not subject to the TIWI restrictions - or else I would be busted for sure - on the speeding at least. Some of the country roads we negotiate would set off the bump detector as well.