To Be A Pioneer...

Today is Pioneer Day and we were able to celebrate by attending church in our brand new Forest Grove Stake Center for the very first time this morning!  It is a beautiful building and such a long-awaited blessing to our area.  It's located just down the street from our house and the weather was beautiful today so we walked to church.  It was a lovely way to start the Sabbath.

Our new church building was a long time in coming, as our Stake is already four years old!  We've had many struggles over the years with locating land and getting approval and permits from the city.  It was almost surreal to finally be in the building after all the waiting.

One of the speakers today mentioned how we have modern-day Pioneers in our midst that have lived in the Forest Grove area for decades and forged the way to build up the Church here in Oregon. Their dedication to the Gospel and their years of service are a large part of the reason that the Church has grown so much over the years and led us to the building of this new Stake Center.

In Primary today we sang a song called "To Be A Pioneer".  In the song it says that you don't have push a handcart or travel thousands of miles 'to be a pioneer', you just need to have faith and courage and work hard for a just cause.  I hope I can carry on the tradition of both the original pioneers and the modern-day pioneers in our midst, by standing firm in my beliefs and continuing the work of building up the Lord's Kingdom in my own little corner of the world.