baptism by fire

A week ago I was called to be the ward mission leader. That night, there was a Ward Mission Leader training with the Stake & Mission President. As part of the meeting, we were supposed to discuss our ward mission plan. Having been the Ass't Ward Mission Leader for the past two years, one would think that I was familiar with the ward mission plan. Being as it was distributed once for review a year and a bit ago and never passed around again, I really didn't know what it was about. But I tried anyway. Also at the meeting, the Mission President told us that for the first time in 15 years (since Trina was a missionary), the church will probably be below 50,000 missionaries next year. And the East Coast missions are near the top of the list to lose missionaries b/c we don't baptize that many people. I was concerned about this news, but figured that we had several months at the very least to prepare.

Then a week later (yesterday), one of our missionaries developed a sudden medical condition and is on way home for treatment. Because the number of missionaries is declining already, our mission was short-handed anyway. Since there wasn't a missionary available to put into our ward, they pulled the one that was left. At the very least, we don't have missionaries assigned to our ward for up to five weeks. So we're going to use this opportunity to rebuild our ward mission. But any way you put it, it's quite the baptism by fire.