Letter # 89

Well, I just made it to Tumwater this last week, and it is pretty nice here.  It's weird being back in the south side of the mission.  It really isn't that far away from where I was in terms of actual areas and stuff, but it feels like a completely different atmosphere over here.  And the weather got colder this week too.  We even had a little layer of snow on the ground Friday morning, so everyone got excited about that over here.  I think the coldest it got this week was around 20 degrees and windy, which is about as cold as it ever gets around here.  My companion is from Arizona, so we had to stop and play in every frozen puddle that we passed during tracting and street contacting. 

This week has been pretty crazy with transfers and Thanksgiving right next to each other.  I am now living with 3 other missionaries in a duplex outside of Olympia, which is infamous for being the craziest place in the mission.  It's the capitol of Washington, so you get a lot more liberal people here than in most places in the mission, which makes things pretty interesting.  The big focus of our week has been a new video that the church has put out this week called, "He is the Gift."  It's all based around Jesus Christ being the center of Christmas.  The day after Thanksgiving, we started sharing it with all of our members, investigators, and other random people that we meet during finding, and it has been pretty great so far.  The awesome part about Christmas is how easy it makes it to come up and have conversations with people about the gospel. 

For Thanksgiving, we had a pretty good day.  First of all, we played in the Turkey Bowl, which was probably a bad idea.  It was cold and rainy the whole time, and everyone except the missionaries had cleats.  It got pretty muddy a little bit into it, so we got kinda dirty.  But I caught the ball once, so it was a pretty good game.  We had about 20 people there, including 8 missionaries, so it was a pretty decent sized game, despite the inclement weather.  We got to have Thanksgiving dinners with 2 members, and then afterward, we visited a few other members.  So it was super nice having places to go even though I had only been in the area for 2 days. 

Church felt a little empty this week.  I don't know if it was because we had a holiday this week, or if this is just a smaller ward, but there aren't nearly as many people that go to this ward as we have had at all of my other wards.  We had some pretty good talks, an interesting gospel principles lesson, and a 5th Sunday discussion on covenants.  We have some really nice members here though, so it should be a really nice place to serve.

And that was my week.  I hope you are all doing well!  Have a great week.

-- Elder Prue