Letter #31

 

 

Okay, well transfer calls came, and I will be staying in the Crescent Valley ward!  And I'm keeping the same companion.  And actually, everyone in the district is the same, except for our district leader, who will be going to the Lacey zone.  Poor guy.  Haha, just kidding, sorta.

So we have had some ridiculous rain this last week.  More so than normal.  Usually rain here in the Pacific Northwest is more like a constant mist, but we had some pretty heavy downpours this last week.  Like, the hardest rain I've seen in my life.  A little like when we get rain in Idaho, except for a couple hours instead of 5 minutes at a time.  And we drove from our church building to our home in it for half an hour, and there were a couple accidents, and you could barely see out of your windshield, and people were hydroplaning/drifting.  It was kinda like the scene in The Testaments right after Jesus dies, and the guy gets blown back by the wind.

Well, this week was pretty great.  We met with a bunch of part member families, and less actives, and a bunch of them are opening up to us a lot more.  And so that's been pretty exciting.  We had dinner with the Roses, and we will probably be teaching their kids about the gospel.  Sister Rose is a member, but Brother Rose is not.  Their kids were going to get baptized about a year ago, but they sorta fell off the radar for a while.  So we're going to get back to working with them again.  We also had a dinner with the Robinsons, who are the ones who told us last week that they have a goal of getting sealed in the temple, and they invited a bunch of family along too, so we didn't really have the environment for a discussion, but we shared a message with them from the scriptures, and I think she will get baptized either this transfer or next.  They are a really awesome family.  And then Aaric was at church again, and he kept giving super awesome comments in lessons, and our dinner appointment that night (who were also the Gospel Principles teachers) invited him to come along with us, and they connected with him super well, and it was an awesome experience for all of us.  So yeah, dinner appointments are where things happen.  Haha

Letter #30

Well, the end of another transfer is coming up already, so I will find out this Saturday if I'm going to be staying in the same ward or moving on somewhere else.  There's a pretty good chance that I'm going to be staying in Crescent Valley for another transfer though.  We had a pretty awesome week this last week with Zion's Camp as well as with our regular missionary work and such.

Zion's Camp is this church campsite thing in the outskirts of our zone where surrounding stakes will do girls camps and stuff.  Our mission president took the mission out there for a day (actually, half the mission each day), and we had some ropes course type activities that turned into scripture object lesson things.  So, for example, there was this one activity where there was a wall that was probably about 10 feet tall, and we had to get all 18 people in our group over the wall, but everyone can only use 1 hand, and no talking allowed.  And so we had to use teamwork and creativity to do these things.  Anyway, we did a bunch of those type of things, and talked about the scriptures and stuff like that.  And then we had dinner together, and President and Sister Weaver talked about car safety for a while, and then we had a testimony meeting together.  And so we had a pretty good time.  There were 107 missionaries each day, so we have a lot of missionaries in the mission.

On Sunday we finally got Aaric to come to church.  That was pretty awesome.  He grew up in the church, but he hasn't really been since he had an ugly divorce, so he was pretty nervous about coming back, but he met a bunch of awesome people, and actually contributed in gospel principles class, and he's planning on coming back next week, so that was pretty exciting for us.  It is really hard to find new investigators in this area, so a lot of the work we do is with less-actives, but that is just as rewarding as working with non-members.  We also got invited out to dinner by this one part member family in the ward who has not been out to church in quite some time either.  He is a member, but his wife is not.  And they recently told us that they have a goal of getting married in the temple, and so we are going to help them work towards that, and the first step is to get her to baptism, so we're excited to start working with them too.

I can't remember if I've mentioned this previously or not, but there is a stake center being built in our area right now, and we are going to be moving into it in the middle of November, and it's a pretty big deal in our area, because it's the biggest building for a couple of miles around.  So it's been really exciting to watch it go up, and people ask us about it all the time when we go tracting.  Because of boundary changes in our stake over the last many years, we haven't had a real stake center in a while, but we're excited to have one.  And it is a 25 minute drive to the church building we are currently going to, so it is such a blessing to have beautiful church buildings to meet in that are near your home.  I'm pretty sure this is the farthest I have ever lived from a church building.  So that is going to be really nice when it's finished, if I'm still around this area.

Letter #29

 

 

This week was pretty good.  The whether has been better than everyone tells us it should be (rainy most of the time, instead of all of the time) at this point in the year, so that's pretty nice.  Also, General Conference is coming up super soon, which is exciting.

So this week, we did a lot of exciting things.  Most of them involve not finding investigators, but some weeks are like that.  But we picked blackberries.  And turned them into some pretty memorable smoothies.  It was not the good kind of memorable though, so we won't be doing that next year.  Also, Elder Wilson ran over a traffic cone that was sitting in the middle of the road, so we had to pull over and pull it out from underneath the car.  That was a much more exciting event than it sounds like in writing.

Anyway, we are 2 weeks away from transfers, and our Mission President made a goal for every companionship to baptize in the month of September (since our new transfer starts on the first of October), but that isn't looking like a super likely prospect for us right now.  We're working with a ton of awesome people, but most of them are people that are already baptized that we are trying to get to come back to church, or they aren't really in a position to get baptized this month.  So that's been a little bit hard to work with, because we've been working hard and everything, but none of our plans or efforts are yielding what our mission president says we can all receive.  So that's been a little bit discouraging lately.  But the less active work in this ward is actually really great.  Better than most wards, anyway.  The second councilor in our bishopric was inactive 3 years ago, so that itself is a testimony to the work being done there.

Oh yeah, and we had an awesome service project on Saturday that we did in our ward.  We helped clear out a graveyard that was super overgrown so that people could see the gravestones again.  It was pretty fun, because we got to tear out a ton of bushes, and we had most of the ward come out to it.

Well, that was about it for this last week.  This next week, we are doing something called Zion's Camp, which I don't know much about, but the older missionaries say it's going to be pretty fun.  So I should have plenty to say about that next week, and there will be plenty of pictures on the blog if I know Sister Weaver.  Anyway, I miss you all, and I'll talk to you later!

Letter #28

So, this week was pretty great.  It was pretty full anyway.  We had a zone conference, and exchange, and stake conference for the whole state (also Alaska.  It was one of those broadcast ones).  So yeah.  Basically, we've been in meetings all week.

This was my first zone conference in the Northern Conference, so that was pretty cool.  We met up in the Mullinex building in Bremerton with the Port Angeles, Silverdale, Bremerton, and Gig Harbor zones, and spent 7 hours in trainings.  So that was a long time.  But we talked about all sorts of good stuff.  And I don't really remember what that was, because I didn't bring my notebook with me, and it's definitely blending together with the 6 hours of stake conference that I went to.  But we got to see a bunch of other missionaries, and we all ended up on the blog, so it was a party.

We spent a bunch of time this week inviting less actives and part member families out to stake conference, and we got a couple of people to show up!  So that was pretty exciting.  Robert D. Hales and L. Tom Perry spoke to us.  From Salt Lake, but it was still cool.

Some missionaries from my zone ran the Tacoma Narrows bridge this morning.  That was fun, because we were on the other side of it this time compared to the last time I ran it.  It was super foggy this morning, so it was a super epic run.  Like you probably could only see about 100 feet in front of you.

I saw a bald eagle out my back window the other day.  There are a lot of bald eagles around here.  Also, I smell the ocean every day when I leave my apartment.  Gig Harbor is a pretty nice area.

So for the priesthood leadership portion of stake conference, we did breakout sessions.  And so the missionaries and ward mission leaders talked about some things about how working with the members is, and how it should be, and he guy leading the discussions showed us this pretty cool pyramid diagram about a behavioral pattern that shows experiences on the bottom that leads to beliefs that leads to actions that leads to results at the top.  And so I don't really know what my purpose in telling about this was, but we talked about beliefs, and it was interesting, I guess.

Well, things are getting rainy here again.  Which means that we aren't seeing much of the sun anymore for a while.  And people are saying that we are going to get more snow than normal this year, because our summer was so nice.  And for the most part, everything is going just fine.  I miss you all! I hope things are going well!

Letter #27

The rains are coming back to Washington finally.  People here are saying that this is one of the longest summers that this area has ever seen, which means that it's been pretty dry lately, but we've started getting some rainy days, so now we aren't going to really see the sun until next summer.

It has been pretty slow in the Crescent Valley ward, because there aren't very many people, and the houses are so far away, so it's hard to find people to teach, and we don't have too many people here that are progressing toward baptism, but the sisters in our district just had a baptism this last weekend, and there were several baptisms in Tacoma, one of which was the mom of someone that I baptized while in the Stadium ward.  So that was pretty exciting to see on the blog.

Our mission just started reading the Book of Mormon all together on September 1.  We're going to finish it on December 10, so that's a rate of about 5 pages a day, which seems fairly fast.  But this last week, the Young Women in our ward did a 2-day readathon where they made it through from beginning to end in that time.  They had guest readers, group reading time, personal reading time, and during meals, they listened to audio recordings of it being read.  It sorta reminded me of watching the LOTR trilogy back to back, but I guess it's a little different.

This week we have zone conference.  That's always pretty exciting, because we get to see a bunch of other missionaries and have awesome trainings.  Speaking of which, we had a spontaneous training this last week on working more with the members.  There were some pretty cool ideas in there that supposedly make it so you spend less time knocking on doors and more time teaching, but I guess we'll see how well they work in the next couple of weeks.

Well, nothing too exciting happened this last week for us.  We've had a lot of construction going on before the rain comes in too hard, and the guy that we were so excited about finding last week sorta dropped us this last weekend, so that was a little disappointing.  But we've just been moving right along.  In my last ward, there weren't that many priest-aged young men, but here, there are several who are leaving on missions, and getting ready to leave on missions in the next couple of years, so that's really exciting to see in this area.  Haha, they're all going to "exciting" places though, so it's funny being from one state over.

Anyway, I love and miss you all!  I hope you are doing well, and I love hearing from you when I can.  Talk to you later!