3/30/24
At this point it was Saturday morning. We’d had our mission call for four days. I’d had one day of intense excitement, two days of sheer panic, one day a bit calmer with the small vaccination success. I was starting to feel better about things. Understand that Todd is an absolute rock. While I was freaking out . . . laughing one minute, crying another minute and another minute and another minute . . . he was solid and secure. He gave me a beautiful blessing. He reassured my fears and held me and helped me. I am so grateful he is my companion in every way. He wasn’t upset with my mood swings, but we were both glad to be to Saturday and feel things settling down.
We had two things to accomplish on Saturday. First of all we had to go to a UPS store that had this machine to do fingerprints for an FBI background check. Then, later that day, we had a phone meeting with another senior missionary couple who were going to do some mission orientation for us.
First, let’s talk about fingerprints. No UPS stores in Eugene had the machine to do the fingerprint scans. We drove to Philomath (about a 40 minute drive) to get this done. The nicest UPS employee got us set up on the machine and I started on my fingerprint scan. You’d think this would be easy, right? Well . . . I could not get a good scan. The computer would not accept my prints! The first scan was of the four fingers on my left hand. Every time it told me the prints weren’t acceptable, try again. We tried cleaning the sensor, cleaning my hands, cooling my hands, warming my hands, moistening my hands. Nothing worked. It would pull up a scan but the computer wouldn’t accept them. After a dozen or so attempts our friend, the nice UPS man, called customer service for the computer system. He was put on hold . . . for almost half an hour! I was sitting at this computer scanning, scanning, scanning and being declined, declined, declined. Todd was waiting his turn, there were other people behind him waiting their turns. I probably tried 4 dozen times to make it work and it never did.
Customer service was finally available and our friendly UPS employee just gave us his phone so he could help other customers. The woman on the phone was looking at my fingerprint scans and couldn’t see any problem with them, but she had to mark an excuse in the computer as to why the computer was unhappy with the scan. She chose “worn fingertips” for each one of my fingers. Once she manually entered my ten “worn fingertips” the computer accepted my prints.
Now, tell me why I am too young to have some vaccinations, but – apparently – so old that I have worn out my fingertips??? This makes zero sense to me! How do you wear out your fingertips, you might ask? I’ll tell you because I googled it. If you work with acids you can wear out your fingertips. Or, if you lay bricks for a living you can wear out your fingertips. . . Since I do neither of those things, who knows what I’ve done to cause this interesting problem! I do a lot of hand sewing, maybe that is the problem? Maybe I’ve spent too much time on my computer keyboard?? Anyway, I finally finished working with the fingerprint scan.
We kept the customer service woman on the phone while Todd did his scans. We thought maybe the computer wasn’t working well and he would have trouble with it too. He did not. It took him about 3 minutes total, one scan of each hand. The computer accepted his scans and sent him on his way. Later that night we both got emails that the FBI did not find our fingerprints in their database. At least they didn’t think I was trying to alter my fingerprints with acid or bricks or something like that!
You would like to think that is the end of this crazy day, wouldn’t you? It is not. There is more!
We got home and settled in for our training phone call with Elder and Sister Moss. They live in Florida and are serving a senior service mission. Their mission is helping other senior missionaries know what to do after they’ve received their mission call. They are lovely people and we were so grateful to talk to them. Our phone call started and after introductions the conversation went something like this:
Sister Moss: How exciting that you are going to Iceland!
Me: Are we going to Iceland? How do you know we are going to Iceland?
Sister Moss: We have your file pulled up and it says you are Icelandic member and leader support missionaries.
Todd: Can you send us a screenshot of that information?
After four days of thinking we were going to Denmark, in those few words from lovely Sister Moss we found out we are actually going to Iceland on our mission! We are called to the Copenhagen Denmark Mission, assigned to the Iceland area. Somehow, someone, somewhere forgot to mention that little detail. There is nothing in our paperwork that specifies Iceland. However, we are going there and we are so excited! (The visa mixup was not a mixup! Apparently everyone knew we were going to Iceland except for us.)
We had our training meeting with Elder and Sister Moss and then we began the process of readjusting our ideas about our mission. We let our family know of the change and we started wondering if we could ever learn Icelandic. While we were excited to go to Denmark, Iceland feels good. If feels like the right fit for us and, while it took another day or two to settle into it, we are happy to go and serve the Lord in Iceland.
In the picture below, the three red circles are where church buildings and branches are located in Iceland.
