Mission Leadership Council

We participated in the monthly mission leadership council meeting today.  It was scheduled for a beach pavilion at Fort Desoto Park.  This is a nice county park located on 5 small islands.  There was a fort built there in the late-1800s to protect the entrance to Tampa Bay.  It was on my list of places to visit on P-Day, so I was excited when I found out that is where the MLC would be held.

Unfortunately, the weather did not cooperate.  We started the meeting with strong winds and occasional light rain.  That made it difficult to hear was was being discussed.  Then the wind picked up.  The radar map on our phones showed a major storm front moving in, so we decided to move to the Gulfport Branch building which is 15-20 minutes drive away.  Unfortunately, we waited about 5 minutes too long, and the rain started as we were moving everything back to our cars.

We drove to the Gulfport building and discovered that half of the missionaries, including President Cusick, had driven to the wrong address.  When they figured that out and headed back to the Gulfport building, they were caught in traffic.  So it turned out that we had about a one hour break in the middle of the meeting.

The meeting itself was good.  President Cusick really considers this a council and solicits opinions and feedback from the missionary leaders -- the zone leaders, sister training leaders, and assistants.  One of the ideas generated by the missionaries was to have all the missionaries take a break from their cars for three weeks.  The idea being that if they are out on foot, on public transportation, or on bikes, they will meet more people.  So beginning with the district meetings on Tuesday, the missionaries will be asked to not drive their cars for three weeks (with some exceptions such as to drive long distances to district meetings and health challenges).  It will be interesting to see the results of the experiment.

It was good for us to find out the location of the Gulfport Branch building because we have an assignment there on Sunday.