The Mission Before the Mission

School ended in May, and James didn't have a lot to do over the summer.  It would have been lovely if he had found some high-paying job in construction which would have worked him 10 hours a day out in the sun, but we were still in the middle of the Jobless Recovery and it remains to be seen if the construction industry will ever come back to what it was in, say, 2007.  So when the Minnesota Minneapolis Mission put out the call for a few local young men to serve as "temporary" volunteer missionaries for two weeks, side-by-side with the full-time missionaries in various cities in the mission, we jumped at the chance to get James some practical experience and keep him busy for the last few weeks of the summer.  The Navy refers to this sort of thing as a "shake-down cruise."

This is James with some of the full-time elders, at the Minneapolis mission home in August 2010.

We delivered James up to the mission home (the headquarters) in Bloomington in mid-August, and they shipped him off to Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin for two weeks.

Here he is with Elder Hess, his companion for his "mini-mission."

He and his companion got along famously, which was a good thing.  They were both musically-minded and strong singers.  James thoroughly enjoyed his two-week taste of mission life.



Late is Better than Never - Background and Introduction

Hi.  Welcome to James Florman's missionary blog!

I'm James's dad.  Over the next year and a half, I'll be trying to post, with some regularity, the news and information we get from our son James on his mission activities in the Brazil Cuiabá Mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  I'm about 7 months behind on getting this started, which means that if you decide to follow us regularly, we'll be doing some catching up.  You see, it didn't occur to me to chronicle his mission this way until just recently, and then I figured I had better get his permission to post his letters.  I'll be doing some editing, and probably translating for you when he gets a little too enthusiastic and sends us a lengthy passage in Portuguese, but for the most part what you'll get is Elder Florman, straight as he sends it to us every week.

There may be many pictures - there certainly will be some.  His camera died, and he hasn't emailed us many photos, but I'll try to get the ones we have up here.  We have a few sound files, also.  We're trying to work out ways to solve the camera problem - package mail to Brazil is pretty safe but it can take awhile and sending fragile electronics isn't always recommended.

Elder Florman entered the MTC on 6 September 2010.  It's anticipated that he'll serve until the beginning of September 2012.  He was initially scheduled to train in the Missionary Training Center (MTC) in São Paulo, Brazil, but his visa wasn't ready in time so he ended up in the MTC in Provo, Utah instead.

This actually worked out for the best.  For a foreign language mission, a new missionary spends 2 months in the MTC learning the language and culture of the country he or she will be working in.  For James - uh, I mean "Elder Florman" (you'll have to excuse me; he's still my little baby boy), that put him in Provo over the weekend of the LDS Church's semiannual General Conference, a worldwide event in which the leaders of the Church gather in Salt Lake City and talks and music are broadcast to LDS congregations all over the world.  The music at one of these sessions was provided by a choir from, you guessed it, the Provo Missionary Training center, and James was chosen to be part of that choir.  He got to go to Salt Lake City and hear that session of Conference live, sitting in the Conference Center right behind the president and leadership of the Church.  (We scanned the choir during the broadcast, but the camera never showed James.)  Just a few days after Conference, early in October 2010, his visa came through and he and a group of other missionaries left to finish their last month of training in the MTC in São Paulo.