Called To Serve Him... All the things we had to do to send my son on his mission...

Once my son received his mission call there was a lot of work to do.  Thankfully we had about 5 months to do everything.

This is a photo of the front cover of the book that is sent to the future Missionary.  Inside are all the instructions on what needs to be done to be ready to leave on your mission. I left the reading of the book to my son and husband. I wanted my son to be responsible for the preparations that needed to be done.  I did enjoy taking him places and helping him, but he was in charge of knowing what needed to be done and organizing it.
 The fist thing we had to do was get him a passport.  Which should have been easy, but because he never liked driving and did not take his driving test it was a bit of a problem.  You have to have a non temporary form of identification to get a passport, so his learners permit was not accepted.  So we had to go to the DMV and have him take the driving test and get his license before he could apply for his passport.  Thankfully it all worked out.  Once he had his passport he then had to get a travel visa.  These two items caused us a bit of stress, but of course it all worked out.

When you travel to certain countries you sometimes have to get special immunizations.  My son had to get immunizations for Typhoid.  You can't go to your doctor for this, you have to go to the state health department.  They gave him this box of pills which he had to take every other day for a week.

Missionaries are only allowed to wear certain types of clothing.  So there was a lot of clothing that we had to buy.

 My husband is not enthused about my wanting to take photos at the clothing store.  I think I annoyed everyone during the last few months with my wanting one more photo...

My son's favorite color is purple, so he got all purple ties for his mission.  While he is away I carry a purple pen in my work uniform so that I can think of him.

My husband is glad to see Skinny Ties are back in style...  It was fun and expensive to buy all the clothes my son needed.  We also had to buy suitcases to pack everything in...

The last few weeks before my son left I kept asking, do you need to pack suntan lotion, allergy medicine??  He kept saying I don't think so...Then finally opened the book of instructions and there was this list of things to buy.  We spent about 4 hours one day buying all the last minute items.  My son got a very generous tip at his work which paid for all of it.  I won't say how much the tip was or where he worked, but if you know him you will know where he worked and getting a tip usually never happens.  He felt very blessed by it all.  Heavenly Father provided for us in so many ways while preparing for this mission.  It was a very lovely and spiritual thing to live through.

When my son was in 7th grade he told all his friends he would someday serve a mission.  They all thought he meant he was going to be a spy and go on some top secret mission for the government.  While that is not the case, it seemed some days like that, with packages coming in the mail, and instructions on where he was going.  A few days before leaving he received this book to start practicing speaking Spanish... It seemed very much like he was leaving on some secret mission...
Looking back it seemed like the first few months went really slow, but the last month it flew by a little too fast for all of us.
G.G.