WANDERINGS to Giffordtown

What a wonderful "almost 9 months" this mission has been. Our mission had 407 baptisms in 2017. How wonderful it is to attend these baptisms, as each week there is at least one if not more friends baptized. Many of them my companion or I have helped teach, so we have a real bond with them. Our ward is growing by leaps and bounds. Our Chinese new members are strong in the gospel and continually invite their friends to join them at church. Most of them will return to China and being members there will be a real challenge for them. They have strong testimonies of the Gospel and I'm sure will influence many when they return to China.

One of our senior couples (The Winters) are finishing their mission this week so we will have another couple (The Helps) taking their places at the mission office. They were both born & raised in Africa and have fairly strong accents, although they have lived in the states for 30 years. It will be fun getting to know them. We actually have 4 new couples joining our mission over the next few weeks, but they will be in outlying regions of Scotland/Ireland serving in various roles.

WANDERINGS: We have visited some interesting places--New Lanark, Scotland was a thriving cotton processing plant in the 1800's. It is a whole village built on the Clyde River that has some fairly powerful rapids, which, of course, provided the power for the mills. Robert Owen was the founder of New Lanark and the cotton mills. He had a vision as to how people should be living and working. He opened schools, built houses for people to live in inexpensively, introduced the "8-hour workday, changed the age to 12 (from 8) for working at the mill and built shops that employees could shop in cheaper than in town. For those of us who have "Endicott Johnson" memories; kind of reminds me of the methods they used for their employees. We finished our day there hiking 2 miles along the river's edge, sometimes with steep dropoffs on the side of the path--scarey!
                                                                                                               
            Clyde River - New Lanark

Along the path of the river

                                                     

T

Village of New Lanark 

Our next WANDERING was to "The Scottish Deer Centre" It was just that! Lots of deer, but only so, so on our rating scale of wanderings. Here are a couple of pictures & you'll see what I mean--just lots of deer!! But as we left the deer park we saw the "SIGN" of all signs--"Giffordtown" to the right.