Letter #13

Sorry for not writing on Monday... President Weaver told us to email on Tuesday morning, since the libraries would be closed on Monday for Memorial Day. It's still weird how holidays work on the mission. They really don't affect your life at all, so you sorta forget about them until they happen.

Okay, so transfer calls came on Saturday, and I found out that I will be staying in the Stadium ward again! This was a really big one, because the mission will be splitting during this next 6 weeks, so everyone in the Graham and Puyallup stakes during this next transfer will be in the new Federal Way mission. So because I am staying in Tacoma, I will definitely be a Tacoma missionary still. I am also keeping my same companion, so Elder Burt and I will stay together. But Elder Burt will be a District Leader this next transfer, which is pretty exciting. Later this afternoon, the whole mission is going to get together in the stake center, and we are going to welcome in the new missionaries, and send the old ones out to the plane back home. I don't think most missions do this, but it's a really fun time to see everyone together, especially as you meet more people around the mission, and people move around.

This week has been pretty solidly back to rainy Washington. Not much sun, and a lot of tracting in the rain. You don't really pay attention to whether or not it is raining, but how much it is raining after being here for so long. According to the locals, summer starts on July 5th, and goes through Halloween, and those months are supposed to be relatively sunny.

We are going to have a baptism this next week. It's for a UBC (un-baptized child of a less active member), and so those aren't really as exciting, since they really can't understand the gospel at the same level as a real investigator, since they really haven't had enough life experiences for that, but it's still pretty cool. He is almost 10, and they are moving to Arizona soon, and the mom asked if we could look up to see if there was a ward in the area she was moving to, so hopefully this has had a positive impact on her. Also, we had 3 people (investigators) show up to church on Sunday, and that's way better than normal. Most of the time, people drop their commitments last minute here, so I've actually never had someone come to church because I invited them until now, so that was a really cool experience. We put all 3 of them on-date (committed them to a specific baptismal date), and so we are hoping they will all go through with that. There is definitely a lot of work that can be done here all the time. I can't remember if I've written this in a letter before or not, but I've been told that there are 1 million people in Tacoma, and based on how the area boundaries are drawn, there are probably a couple hundred thousand people in our area, and based on the nature of our area, we get people coming and going all the time.

Oh yeah, so we got a call from the Lincoln ward missionaries that they ran into someone who preaches at a soup kitchen, and they invited them to preach there sometime, and it's right on the border between our wards, and so they invited us to come with them, so hopefully that happens. It would be this Saturday, and we would be teaching about 150 people. So that's pretty crazy. Just standing up and preaching to a bunch of people. Haha, I'll have to tell you guys how that goes.

Anyway, I love you all! I hope everything is going well! Talk to you next week.