I have a fear.  I'm sore afraid of becoming old and non-useful.  Being needed is a basic human need, and I can see where the time might come when I'm either no longer useful or not able to contribute.

In thinking about that, I remembered our mission.  I have never in my life been more needed, depended upon, or used than during our mission.

We bravely submitted our missionary application without any preferences about where we'd be going or what we'd be doing.  It was a leap of faith, but we trusted that the Lord knew better than we did where we'd be most needed and most effective.

And, boy, did He ever!  He sent us to Vanuatu, a nation of 83 islands in the South Pacific.  If left to our own devices we couldn't have chosen a more perfect place to serve or a more perfect mission.

We loved every minute, and we were busy!  I'd leave our flat in the morning with two goals in mind to accomplish.  The Lord would put person after person and situation after situation in my way.  Time after time I tried to keep track of the number of things I accomplished that day, and I'd always lose track at about the number 24.  The Lord was using me, and it felt so good.  He knew who I was, and I was His hands and feet.

Ours was a Church Education System mission.  We were to work with the young single adults, teach institute, and to supervise seminaries on four islands.  But in reality we were everything else that any missionary anywhere could possibly be.

My wife, Marjorie, looked around and saw needs that needed to be addressed.  The seven sets of missionaries on our island were baptizing every single Saturday, sometimes as many as 24 in a day.  Marjorie was embarrassed at the state of the baptismal clothing.  The elders would often take the wet clothes back to their flats and leave them mildewing in a pile until the next baptism.  She gathered all the baptismal clothes up, and decreed that she was their caretaker.  She got them all whitened, cleaned, and organized, made slips for the dresses so that they'd be more modest, and had the clothing laid out and ready for each baptism.

Our chapel had a nice piano, but no one to play it.  With no piano to follow as they sang, the Vanuatu people had some very interesting tunes for the hymns.  She played piano for every meeting, and offered to give piano lessons to anyone interested in learning to play.  Sixty students signed up.  She ordered five portable keyboards from a foundation here in the states, set them all up in the high council room, and went around the room from student to student as they practiced and played.  Five pianos in one room all plunking out different tunes made an interesting sound.  Her 60 students quickly dropped to a dozen when they found out that learning to play piano was going to require lots of work, but in a surprisingly short time she had several of them actually playing for church meetings.

The women asked Marjorie to teach sewing classes.  Vanuatu dresses are long and loose, have colorful flowered patterns, and have long, loose sleeves that serve lots of purposes such as doubling as hot pads when handling a skillet, or as a hankie for wiping a child's nose.  She studied the dresses and made patterns.  I have no idea how she did it, but twenty-some ladies each went home with a new Vanuatu dress.  They were thrilled.

Marjorie also became the go-to person for the missionaries when they needed a haircut or to have the torn-out crotch of their trousers repaired.

I taught institute.  The young people wanted it twice a week.  They all wanted to go on missions, and depended on us to prepare them.  We sent 32 of them off to the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Guam, Salt Lake City, Paris, London, and South Dakota.

I was asked to be the speaker not only for church meetings, but for weddings and baptisms.  I quickly learned that it was boring to the congregations if I used a translator for my talks.  And even worse was having my talks translated beforehand and reading them in Bislama.  The translators scrambled everything up.  Bislama is a simple language, so I learned it.  The whole language only has 5,000 words compared to the 600,000 of the English language.  By preparing talks with plenty of stories in them I could channel my thoughts, keep the flow going, and was able to keep everyone's rapt attention.

The mission provided us with a pickup.  It was the only vehicle any church member owned on the island.  Our pickup served as the log truck for bringing bamboo poles for constructing new chapels out in the bush.  It was the church bus to gather people for church.  It was the transportation for our youth activities.  I once counted 27 people that got out of our pickup.  It was the means of getting the district president around to the branches out in the bush.  It transported many loads of the ladies' produce from their villages to the big market in town.  It was what we used to gather the firewood and coconuts and food and materials for the first-ever young single adult conference in Vanuatu that we sponsored.  We fed, housed, and inspired 100 YSA for three days.

Marjorie was the dance instructor.

We were the Church humanitarian representatives for several water projects.  We were always the dignitaries that got leis of flowers put around our necks at these events.  On one of those trips we got stranded on a neighboring island for a week because of a passing cyclone.  We hiked up to a branch high on the mountain and dedicated their new water tanks.  It was a dry hike up there, but going back we had to wade 12 fast-flowing, and dangerous, rivers that hadn't existed when we went up.

Whenever a missionary got sick, or when their refrigerators broke down, they called us.  I took Elder McCain to the (quote) hospital where it was determined that he needed to have gall bladder surgery.  I said, “Never mind,” took him to our flat, and in three days we had him up on his feet and back to work.

I actually spent several nights in that dingy hospital myself.  I stayed there to be the companion of hospitalized young elders.  It's a good thing that I was there.  No one came to check on them in the night.  I watched over their IVs, and got up to change the bottles when the medicines ran out.  Then I took them home where they'd get better care.

Elder Jhonny landed on his head from a fall of 12 feet onto concrete.  He was unresponsive, and bleeding from the ear.  We thought that he was dead.  We administered to him, and rushed him to the hospital.  We stayed overnight, and then I took him home, too.  He was also back to work in three days, without so much as a headache.

The people there had nothing, but they were the happiest people in the world.  They had fruit on every tree, and they had faith.  Because of the lack of medical facilities and supplies, the people depended upon priesthood blessings.  I have perhaps refilled my vial of consecrated oil three times in my life here in America.  There in Vanuatu I refilled it 11 times.  I saw miracles occur through my ministrations.

My favorite 11-year-old non-member boy broke both bones in his lower leg while playing soccer on Sunday.  He was going to be sent to the capital city to be put into traction for six months.  The missionary sisters brought me to administer to him.  Another X-ray was done before shipping him off to Port Vila, and the Australian doctor was astonished to see that the bones were back in place and already healing.  “I've never seen anything like this in my 22 years as a doctor,” he said.  “It's a miracle!”  “It was his priesthood blessing,” his mother replied.  “Do you belong to this church?” he asked.  “No, but I'm going to be baptized just as soon as I can”.

The boy, David, wouldn't let her be baptized until he could be baptized first.  I got to baptize him, and his mother got baptized the following week.  He said that while I had my hands on his head during that first priesthood blessing he felt something move in his leg, and that the pain went away.

I served in the district presidency.  I trained the branch presidents and youth leaders, and taught the priesthood holders how to administer to the sick.  They didn't know the most basic things, and it was a joy to teach them.  They were so eager and grateful.  When President Chadwick set me apart for my mission, the blessing said that the people would love us, and they did.  They felt sorry for us not being black like them, but they loved us, and depended on us.  We felt like deserters when we went home.  We didn't tell them when we were leaving because we didn't want the expensive going-away party and the gifts that we'd be given.

We baptized a number of our own converts, including our Chinese doctor friend who we sent back to China as an elder.  When we sent him home, we learned that there are 200 Church units in China.  We hope that Doctor Wang is being an influence for good there, but we don't have any contact with him.

It costs money to go to school in Vanuatu.  A family here in the United States pays the school fees, up to a certain year, for every member child who wants to go to school.  We administered that money, and dealt with all of the schools.

We enabled Marjorie's favorite piano student to graduate from year 13 at a boarding school in the capital city.  We were very proud of him.  He mastered calculus and physics, and speaks perfect English.  He left on his mission this past March, and was a district leader two months later.  Young people like him are the hope and the future of Vanuatu.  They go off on their missions, come home, and are immediately called to be ward and branch leaders.

I asked Marjorie if we should serve another mission, but she thought that we were more needed here.  Now they've called me to be stake patriarch, so I'm stuck here, and worrying again if I can continue to be useful and needed.