McMurray Scotland-Ireland Mission Blog

 What Is A Missionary? Missionaries come in all shapes, sizes, ages, ethnicities, backgrounds. Towards the end of this blog edition I'll give you a definition that we heard tonight from Sister McCrudden, one of our Mission Leaders. For now, just think about and noodle on that question. Our week hi-lites have been attending the Dundalk Branch Sunday worship services, last Sunday and this. As previously mentioned, the premises are leased from what had formerly been a shoe factory, and now re-purposed. The two peaked bays shown are the lease property - chapel, office, kitchen, classrooms. Last week there were about 40 in attendance and a few less today due to it being a long-weekend. We met some new people today, and a member of the Stake Presidency, Ian McManus, was the main speaker. In the Branch we have individuals from Honduras, Lithuania, Ukraine, Cameroon, Canada, UK, Ireland, France...it's an interesting cross-section. This smiling lady just returned from her very first tri...

 We Made It We made it to Ireland and what a nice welcome! It seemed so long ago that we set out on this journey - about 1 year to be exact. That's when we got serious and agreed that a mission is what we should be doing at this time in our lives. No, this was not a smooth path. There were potholes, and curves, and washouts along the way. We could not itemize all of the challenges or detours. As in life, we just kept our focus on the end goal, and took one small step after the other. And here we now are in Ireland, meeting the nicest people on the planet, and focusing our efforts on serving the people in our little Branch (congregation) in Dundalk, Republic of Ireland.  Our first photo after landing and awaiting our baggage at Dublin Airport. At this stage we had just been through the Border Security with an Immigration official, and had been given an initial Permission to Stay of 3 months. We now need to make an appointment with the Garda office in Dundalk, and present variou...

One day soon we'll walk the trails above these cliffs of Moher. Waiting is the Hardest Part Each day of this week, we have been expecting Mission Travel or the Mission Office to provide us our itinerary for departure for Ireland. We never considered for a minute that we wouldn't be on a plane within a few days of receiving our Pre-Clearance Authorization from Ireland Immigration. That was a mistake.  In the Salt Lake City Headquarters Mission, they are used to having 'visa waiters' amongst them. In each case that we have seen, once the ' visa waiters' have their visas the missionary couple are on their way within a few days - to Japan, or India, or wherever. In our case, we advised Travel and the Scotland-Ireland Mission President last Friday morning that indeed we have our Ireland papers, but a week later we still do not have our itinerary.  The steps in the process includes Travel confirming with the Mission that the Mission would like us to arrive on a cert...