Letter #80

Well, this week has actually been pretty busy.  The big highlight of the week was that we got to go to Zion's Camp out in Belfair.  We did a bunch of ropes course things that were supposed to be team building exercises because our mission president thinks that we need to do better at being united as a mission.  All of the activities required us to work with other missionaries in our group to do something that we couldn't do alone, like climbing up a ~15 ft wall, a trust fall, and getting through a net without moving the cords holding the net up.  We had a lot of fun with that stuff and it was really great to be out in the woods for a while (it rained a little while we were out there, but it was pretty dry for the most part).  I also got to see a bunch of my really good friends that I haven't been around for a while, so it was really exciting all around.  Probably the best part was that we got to watch Meet the Mormons at the end, 2 weeks before it releases in theaters.  It was really good!  I think they try to make it look like white people are a minority in our church, which is pretty funny, but I think it does a really good job at catching a lot of the cultural dynamics of the people in the church.

Lately we have been planning out a huge temple trip for the recent converts in our ward, so that has kept us pretty busy.  We are really hoping that we will get to go (we probabaly will, but we still have to get permission from our mission president), because then we will get to take the ferry to Seattle, which we would not get to take out here otherwise.  We are really excited to get to go to the temple though, and we are also super excited for our recent converts who have never been to the temple.

General conference is this next week, which is cool because I've been looking forward to this for a while now.  This will be the last general conference of my mission, so it had better be a good one.  Haha, Elder Muro thinks they're going to announce China opening for missionary work.  So we'll see, I guess.  We've also been trying to teach the members discussions that we normally teach to investigators, to get them more excited about finding people for us to teach, and so we have a good opportunity to tell them that they should be studying Preach My Gospel and inviting one person every 3 months to take the missionary discussions like Elder Ballard asked everyone to do last conference.  We've just started that, so hopefully that goes well.  

Anyway, I'm out of time now, but I love you all and hope you guys have a great week!

Letter #79

I don't have my planner this week, so I guess I'm going to have to try my best to remember what happened this week, but I this it was a pretty good one.

Oh, so the most exciting thing about this coming week that we just found out is that we get to go to Zion's camp again!  We went last year, and it was super fun, because we mostly just got to play outside all day.  We get to do that this coming Friday, and half of the mission will be there, and so I'll get to see a bunch of people, and we'll be out in the middle of the woods all day.  And it will be a spiritual experience or whatever.

Our investigator didn't come to church this week, but she is moving in with one of our members today!  So that should be a better situation for her.

We had zone meeting this week, which was really good.  We talked about how to better involve members in missionary work.  We have been trying to make that a focus anyway lately, especially in our finding, and as part of that, we decided that we want to start teaching members the missionary discussions.  PMG says that you should let your ward mission leader be in charge of making those appointments, which I was all for, since I was kinda overwhelmed with figuring out how to do that, and luckily, he seemed pretty excited about being told something more specific to do for his new calling, and so we ran it by the ward council yesterday, and everyone in there got way excited about that too, so we passed around sign-up sheets in church for people who would want to listen to us, and so we're starting to make appointments doing that.  And hopefully that goes well.  Our first member appointment is tonight, so we're excited to get started with that.

Wow, and I'm almost out of time now, and my letter is still really lame, so I'm sorry about that.  But hopefully this next week should be great.  Conference is coming up, so that's worth being excited about.  Women's conference is this Saturday, and the "real" conference starts next weekend.  Yep yep.  Well, I love you all!  Talk to you guys later.

Letter #78

Well, this week ended up being pretty eventful, especially this weekend.  Pretty much every person we planned to meet with didn't actually meet with us, so we spent most of our time walking around and trying to meet new people.

Well, the most exciting thing about this last week was stake conference.  We had President Worthen from BYU come up and speak to us, so that was pretty special.  We had a 2 hour session for the youth in our stake Saturday afternoon, and then the stake fed us all dinner, and then at 7 we had another 2 hour session, and then another 2 hour session the next morning from 10-12.  So we spent a long time there.  President Worthen was speaking for the entire youth session, which was almost entirely spent in Q&A format.  A lot of my notes from that section don't make much sense, but I think that session was good.  The adult session after that was probably the best.  President Worthen shared a story from Sheri Dew, who wanted to try out for the girl's basketball team at BYU, but didn't because she got too intimidated by her competition.  After she told that story the first time, the coach from that year, who had been coaching women sports at BYU for 42 years said that that year in that sport, she was 1 person short of a full roster, and that was the only time in her entire career that had happened.  I don't remember the point of that story, but it was kinda painful how he told it.  And then somehow, there was this overarching theme in the conference, where all the speakers kept bringing up the fact that time doesn't exist in eternity.  But the actual theme from the first presidency was supposed to be hastening the work of salvation.  The Sunday session started with the stake president saying that most of us would probably be offended by his talk, so we all knew right away that it was going to be a good one.  Basically, he told us all that we need to do a better job of observing the Sabbath.

Saturday morning I got to go back to Poulsbo for a baptism!  That was super exciting, and it reminded me how much I miss Poulsbo, especially my ward and district over there.  It was probably the best baptism of my mission too.  Everything was super organized and well done.  We also had interviews with our mission president, which was fairly uneventful, except that it was my second to last one.

Well, I am about out of time now, but I love you all!  Bye

Letter #77

Okay, well, I have a lot of stuff to talk about this week, and not very much time, so I'm going to try to make it through everything.

My new area is pretty great.  It's right in Port Orchard, and we don't have a car because the area is so small, but it's a cool place to be.  Most of the ward is pretty old, but they're all way nice to us.  We had a super good fast and testimony this week with no crazy people, which was really good, because we had an investigator there for her first time.  She is getting baptized in 2 weeks, and coming out to church was kinda the next big step she was having trouble with.  She's really shy,  So it was super exciting to have her there.  We also had this one guy show up to church that we just said hi to.  Turns out he was a less active member, and when we said hello to him, he had this feeling that he needed to start coming out to church again, and he showed up the next day.  So it was super cool seeing him there too.  That was really great, because the same day that we said hi to him, everyone was shouting at us and someone at a yard sale bashed us for like half an hour straight, and it was a little bit of a downer day before that.

Elder's Quorum is crazy in this ward.  Everyone was super rowdy, which I'm not used to in EQ.  The guys in front of me took a selfie in the middle of class, and I photo-bombed it, cause I thought it was silly that two 30-year-olds were taking selfies in the middle of class.

Every time you have to change an area, it's super crazy, because you have to pick up everything you own and start life completely over in a new place, and everything is completely different, but this transition has felt super natural for the first time.  Maybe because I've been out so long now, but it's been great here, and I love my new companion.  Well, I'm out of time unfortunately, so this is it, but I love you all!  Talk to you later, bye

Letter #76

Today is transfer day, and I got my transfer call to the Orchard Heights ward, so I'm heading out of Poulsbo this afternoon to go to Port Orchard.  I'm super sad to leave here, but I've heard a lot of great things about this ward that I'm going to from people who have served there already, so I'm excited to go there.  It's only about a 45 minute drive from Poulsbo to Port Orchard, so I'm not going that far, but I have to go all the way down to Tacoma for transfer meeting before I go there.  Also, this might be my last area, so that is crazy too.

Well, I'm the worst emailer ever, because I can't think of anything that happened this week.  We had a zone meeting, I guess.  And that was fun.  We have 2 missionaries in our zone who are going home tomorrow, so they shared their final testimonies there.  One of the missionaries going home in our zone is my trainer, so that's crazy.  He's my first companion to go home.  Well, go home on time, I guess.

Also, this is like the first ward that I am leaving that I think really liked me, haha.  People actually asked if I would be coming back after the mission, and Mark and Rebecca's family gave me this super cute candy poster, and I just felt really loved, which was cool.

I think we played piano and sang church music with an investigator one night this week.  It might have been last week, but I don't think it was.  I was the pianist, so the music quality was questionable at best.

Anyway, I want to email President Blatter before I run out of time, so I'm going to end this email here.  Love you guys!  Bye