So I'm really excited for this week is basically what I'm saying.

Oh My Goodness I'm going to see you guys in a week! Is that not the craziest thing ever? Yes.

I am super happy I have had (and still have for another week) the opportunity to be a missionary. It has been so great. And don't worry, it's actually a mandate from President Mendenhall that we write him a letter talking about our feelings and remember the people we've worked with. So I'm working on that, and I'll make sure to make you copy of the letter.

It's kinda crazy, these last two years have probably been the longest time I'll be apart from you guys. I hope, at least. I am super glad to be able to see you all soon.

I guess I'll report on the week, even though I'll being seeing you guys soon enough. It was a pretty good week! We actually had an investigator come to church yesterday, which is the first time that's happened this transfer! She's 9, and basically the cutest thing ever. Her mom is a member who's been less active for a long time, but she wants to get baptized, and is really cool. We've taught her twice so far. Last time, she told us she had read the introduction to the book of mormon, but she didn't really understand any of it (because she's 9), so we showed her how to get the Book of Mormon Stories picture book via the Gospel Library app on her mom's tablet. She was pretty excited. We also had some less-active members come to church who haven't come in a while, so that was cool.

On Wednesday, we had my last zone conference, which was really great. President Mendenhall and the assistants gave some great trainings on being converted. Definitely a lot to think about.

Then, on Saturday, I went to the baptism of an investigator I was teaching in my last area, that part member family I told you guys about! That was really cool. He asked me to give a talk about baptism, so it was really neat.

Man, this coming week is going to be awesome, though. On Wednesday, the sister of the guy who got baptized this Saturday is going to be baptized (she had something going on this Saturday, or she would have been baptized then). Then on Thursday, I'm going to have my last interview with President Mendenhall. Interviews are always great. And then on Saturday, a member of Denver 4th Ward who I started teaching about two weeks after she was baptized is going to the temple for the first time, and she asked me to go with her, along with some other missionaries, so we're going! It's going to be so cool. So I'm really excited for this week is basically what I'm saying.

I think the last part of my mission, probably about the last 6 months, have definitely been the best. It's probably been the time when I've been happiest doing the work. I wish I'd gotten to that stage earlier, but I guess that's how it goes. I promise I'll keep working hard throughout this week.

I love you so much, and I'm so excited to see you all next week.

Love,

Peter

The gospel is pretty darn amazing

Well, this is kinda weird. This is the second-to-last time I'm going to send you email like this. AHHHHHHHHHHH!!! It's really weird let me tell you. But I promise I'm not getting trunky. At least, not too much. We're still working, and I'm still trying to do the whole self-evaluation thing to see how I can do better as a missionary.

So! This week in terms of being here in Colorado was pretty freaking interesting, that's for sure. On Wednesday, like I told you, we had an all-mission meeting. Yes, those are pretty rare; we've only had three other ones during my mission. So it was a pretty cool experience. Mostly it was just to tell us to shape up and work hard. It was interesting - after the meeting, President gave us a half-hour to just reflect on how we can be better and how we can be better missionaries. It was nice to have some time to reflect.

Cool experiences: We were tracting in a neighborhood, when we tracted into this young man. We were just starting to talk when he mentioned that he has some cousins who are members. I didn't think too much of it, until he told us where they lived, and I realized I knew his cousins! They're members of another Spanish Ward where I've served, and actually live in the Area my companion just left! It was pretty cool, as soon as we started talking about the cousins, this guy let us right in, and we were able to teach him about the Restoration. We have a return appointment with him tomorrow, which should be sweet! He seems pretty interested.

Other cool stuff, We started officially teaching this 9-year-old unbaptized child of a less-active we randomly tracted into, we randomly tracted into another less-active, and we had a less-active come to church and stay for all three hours! (Usually she only comes for the 3rd hour, weird, right?) Oh and also we had a less-active's Mom give us cake on Saturday! Pretty sweet.

And then something happened that was not so sweet too. I'll tell you if you promise not to freak out: We got in a car crash on Friday night--we were driving and this kid missed a stop sign and hit us. We're all fine, but it was a pretty crazy experience. We're totally healthy - my only injury was a bruise on my shoulder from where the seat belt was. My companion's fine. He thought he might have a concussion, so we took him to the ER, but he's fine. So that was an interesting night! Crazy stuff. I was like, come on, I only have two weeks left :). I'll send you a picture of our car after the crash, it was kinda crazy.  And yeah, the documenting was fun. Especially because it was a church car, so we had to do even more work filling out the church's required report. Fun!

Oh, and then on Saturday I got a call from one of the members telling me that they were supposed to give a talk on Sunday, but wouldn't be able to, so they wondered if I could give a talk instead. So I prepared a 15-minute talk on missionary work in about 30 minutes and gave that on Sunday. Fun stuff!

Aside from that, things were pretty normal. Working hard, seeing awesome miracles. The gospel is pretty darn amazing, how it can change people, but only if they let it change them. That's something that I've been seeing lately, is just the sadness I feel when people know something is good, they just decide not to do it. I know that if they would just try it, it'd be awesome, but they aren't willing to give it that first step.

I love you all so much, and I'll see you in a few weeks!

Love,

Peter

You know how much the gospel will bless them

Sounds like a pretty boring week--I guess we all need one of those every once in a while. We can't be going a million miles an hour all the time. Tom described the week as "eating Trader Joe's tamales and watching Band of Brothers." Sounds like a pretty good week for me.

Things are going well in Denver. The weather's been completely nuts--about half the week it was blazing hot, and the other half it was overcast and rainy. I kinda enjoyed that :).

In terms of the work, it was a really good week here, too. This area is just so cool! We have been working hard, and there are just so many Spanish-speaking people here that it's hard not to work! I think this week we taught more lessons than I ever have in one week on my mission (24). So, there are a lot of really neat people. For example, last Monday, we tracted into this lady who told us that she'd met missionaries before, a long time ago, and that she'd actually been to our church and met our Bishop! She said she'd lost contact with the missionaries, but that she wanted to learn more! So we set up a return appointment with her for the very next day, and taught her the first lesson! We're going back tomorrow, and we're really excited.

Or, for another example, yesterday at like 8:30 at night, we tried visiting this less-active. She didn't have time to meet with us, so we were kind of stuck. In that area, there were very few people in the area book, and most of the people that missionaries had talked to before had said they weren't interested. So we tried the one person in that apartment complex that hadn't said they weren't interested. (I know this isn't really making sense, sorry), but anyways we tried this guy, who we really didn't know anything about, at 8:30 at night, and he let us right in and we were able to teach the first lesson and leave him with a copy of the Book of Mormon! Super cool.

 

The only problem is getting people to progress. It's hard sometimes to respect other people's agency when you know how much the gospel will bless them, but some of the people we're teaching are just not going anywhere very fast, so we may need to stop teaching them, sadly.

We have a mission-wide meeting on Wednesday of this week, which will be cool. President sent out an email today telling us all, essentially, to get stoked. So it should be good. It's weird, though, thinking that this will probably be the last time I see some of those people.

 

I try not to think about how much time I have left too often, but it is really weird. Right now I'm just trying to force myself to do the very best I can, to "leave it all on the field," as they say. Being a missionary is great.

Love,

Peter 

He'll be a great member

So it sounds like you guys had a good week, a good 4th of july! I was missing the Oak Hills fireworks and the awesome seat we usually get :). Aurora did a fireworks display, and our Ward Mission Leader took us to it, but it was ridiculously packed by the time we got there, so we had to go really far away to watch the fireworks. It was cool anyways, though.

So here in Aurora, even without the 4th of July, it was a pretty dang sweet week. This area is pretty awesome. I've been reflecting on some of my misson experiences, and I've realized that I've been really lucky. For the past like year of my mission, I've had companions who have all been awesome. They've been hard-working, they've wanted to be obedient, they've been easy to get along with. Plus I've been in areas where there's a lot to do, a lot of people to teach. Of course it hasn't all been just super easy--I have had some struggles, and there have been some hard times. But it seems like generally Heavenly Father has been making it pretty easy for me to be a good missionary. I definitely feel very blessed. Even just the fact that Me and my companion are both new to the area is a really neat thing--it makes it a lot harder to slip into routines when everything is so new.

So I know you probably want to know what sort of cool things happened! Well here you go!

1. Our most progressing investigator has been worried for a while because he doesn't feel like God is answering his prayers. He's been hoping that God's going to send him some incredible experience proving that the Book of Mormon is true. But when we taught him on Saturday, he was starting to realize that God has been talking to him, just not in massive ways. He talked about a "joy" that he feels when we come, and a peaceful feeling he has when he reads the Book of Mormon. He's so cool. He probably won't be able to be baptized while I'm still here, but I know that he's going to progress so much in the gospel. He just seems like he'll be a great member.

2. Friday was just full of miracles. We had planned to just do some tracting in the early afternoon, but while we were doing our weekly planning session, I was just messing around with the phone and remembered a referral that the English Elders had sent us. They said he was available any time, so we decided to swing by and check him out. We did, and he immediately let us in. He is super cool. He actually requested that missionaries come, because his best friend who lives in California is a member. Apparently they'd always been super close, but they used to essentially be gang-bangers together. They led a really sketchy, dangerous life. But this friend of his learned about the church, and was able to completely turn his life around. So now he wants to know about it. When we got there, he showed us how he already has the gospel library app downloaded, and everything. He said he's been listening to the Book of Mormon for a few days, too. Super cool.

 

3. Another miracle on Friday: We stopped by a less-actives' house to see if they were home. They weren't, so we did a little bit of tracting in the apartment building. after a few doors, it seemed like the building didn't have very many Hispanic people living there, but we decided to knock a few more doors. When a Hispanic lady answered, we started off with the normal door approach: "Hey, we're missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Have you ever spoken with Missionaries like us before?" (in Spanish). Her response surprised us a lot: "yeah, actually I'm a member of the church!" We had no idea this lady lived there, she wasn't on the records or anything. But she's less active, she wants to get active, and she wants us to teach her 9-year-old daughter so that she can get baptized. Super awesome.

Iguana tacos - yum!

4. And then this wasn't a miracle, but pretty fun--they told us that either we had to be in at 6:00 PM on Saturday because of the 4th of july, or we had to be with members. So we had our Ward Mission Leader pick us up, and we hung out with him for a few hours, just talking about his mission, and other church stuff, and everything.

Being a missionary is great! I'm going to miss it a lot, so I'm trying hard to maximize these last few weeks of it.

Love,

Peter

You can tell they're converted.

So I don't know if it's just that you guys only ever put in the interesting things in your regular emails, but as always, it sounds like a fun week. Of course I'm jealous of the coast trip, and Salt & Straw--there's a member of the Denver 4th ward who lived in Portland for awhile, so we were actually talking about Salt & Straw just a couple weeks ago. That'll have to be a part of the program when I come back.

I read your talk, it was great! Your explanation of who I was was kind of weird to read--I guess I hadn't realized it, but the ward must have changed in the past two years. I really liked the idea of God's work being to create engines, opportunities to let us grow. We just have to decide whether we're going to use them! One other "engine" that I was thinking about as I read the talk might be the trials we face in life, the difficult times. We get to decide whether to use those engines to move us forward in the eternal sense, or not.

The new area is really neat! It's probably the 2nd-most ghetto area in the mission, so there's a lot of good times. Lots of less-actives, lots of Mexicans! Yay! It's kind of weird knowing that I'm guaranteed to only be in the area for one transfer. I guess it's good motivation to just give it my all, "leave it all on the field", as they say.

So things are going great here in the CDNM! Lots of really cool things are going on. It's been pretty hot, but I guess that's a nationwide thing or something? Global Warming's a hoax though, so it's okay :P. I guess there was a tornado here last week! We were driving from our dinner appointment to the church for a baptism of one of the other companionships, and there was a ton of wind and tornado warning sirens were going off, and we got a couple texts from the National Weather Service. Crazy! I guess it wasn't a very big tornado at all, but there were a lot of tree branches knocked down and stuff. Lots of fun.

Aside from the excitement of the tornado, it was a fairly normal week, in terms of missionary work. Highlights:

1) Being new in the ward, we're having to figure a lot of things out. The missionaries before us didn't leave us too much, to be honest, but there's one Awesome investigator who they did leave us! He's a member's son who's living with her while he's recovering from surgery. Because he's recovering, he can't work, so he has plenty of time to read the Book of Mormon! He's great, and is really interested and wants to know if the Gospel really was restored. So he's really awesome. We were able to meet with him three times last week, which is pretty unusual, but great!

2) My new companion is pretty great too. He's pretty new, which is helping me stay focused, which is good. I think if I had a companion who had as little time left as I do, it would probably be a lot easier to get distracted. But he's great, he has a lot of energy and is a lot less jaded about a lot of the realities of missionary work than a lot of missionaries are. We're working hard!

3) Like 5 hours of tracting Saturday. Not super fun, but I realized that my attitude towards those sort of activities has changed a lot. I used to really dread long periods without appointments and things like that. But now, it's a lot more enjoyable. Hopefully that's a sign of losing oneself in the work.

 

4) I found out last night that the part-member family I was teaching in my last area accepted a baptismal date! Super cool!

5) This isn't really a highlight, but on Thursday, we had a big meeting where they installed something called a "TIWI" in our cars. It's this device that keeps track of our driving, and reports to the mission office if we're speeding, or driving without our seat belts, or driving unsafely. Fun! I guess it's good, it'll help us be safer.

 

Not much else to report! The ward is cool; there are some really neat members here. We had dinner with one family on Friday, and even though we were eating at a restaurant, you could feel the spirit strongly when they talked about the gospel. You can tell they're converted.

I'm really excited to see you guys soon. Not in a trunky way, don't worry. But I am excited.

I love you a lot.

Peter

20?!?

Well, it's been a good week. A bizarre week, but a good one, and a good week for a birthday. I still don't feel 20, let me tell you, but that's okay. I'll adjust, I guess.

Interesting things that happened this week:

1. The Denver Stake singing thing took up a lot of time, between the practices (like 2.5 hours on Tuesday and Friday), and the actual performance. So there wasn't a ton of real missionary work going on in our area, sadly. But it was a pretty neat opportunity, and I did record it, so I'll try to send it to you next week. (I forgot my camera and voice recorder at home today. Sorry.) It was a lot of fun, with a lot of pretty cool music going down.

 

2. So I mentioned once in passing to this awesome part-member family we're working with when my birthday is. So I guess they remembered. So when we showed up for our appointment with them on Friday, they had a lot of food and cake there for me. It was pretty awesome, and kind of crazy. They are just super cool.

3. We ate iguana yesterday. Yes, Iguana. Like the reptile. Really. Our Ward Mission Leader is awesome, but he's also kind of weird, plus he's native (like 100%, not mixed with Spanish people or anything), so sometimes he likes weird things. I guess he was watching some movie where someone had an iguana for a pet, and it reminded him of when he used to eat them in Mexico. So, he asked his brother who still lives there to get him some, and his brother went out, caught some wild iguana, and sent them in the normal mail to our Ward Mission Leader. So, yeah. Iguana tastes like fish, but much chewier. Yum. I have pictures, don't worry. Next week, I promise.

Aside from that, it was a pretty normal week. Lots of driving to dinner, sadly.

 

So for my last transfer, I got transferred! I'm now in the other Denver Spanish ward. And my new companion is my grandson! I trained Elder C, and Elder C trained Elder G. He seems like a good guy.

I'm excited, it should be a lot of fun. *Semi-spiritual thought* I'd been in the other stake/zone for 6 transfers in a row--I'm sure it would have been a lot easier and more comfortable to just stay there. But I'm excited that Heavenly Father trusts me with a different assignment. It'll definitely make things interesting. Hopefully it'll keep me out of the trunky mode.

I love you all! Have a great week!

Peter

Sketch-tastic!

Hey!

I'm glad summer's off to a great start in Oregon. Here in Colorado, it's been (sort of) feeling like summer for a while. It's been hot for the last 3 weeks or so, but it's also been raining a ton. I kind of assume that's how it's gonna keep going. We'll see I guess.

I got the packages on Saturday, I have so far resisted the temptation to open them :). Thank you for thinking of me! It's weird to think it's my birthday. Holidays don't really seem like holidays as a missionary. It's just going to be a regular day.

So this week was pretty interesting. We still taught a lot, but we've been running into a problem known as flakiness. We keep finding these people who are willing to hear our message, but then are never willing to keep a return appointment. Like, we'll share the message of the restoration, and they'll seem really interested, but then when we come back, they're gone. It's kind of frustrating, but I guess that's how missionary work is sometimes. It's like, what are we supposed to do, not teach people? But I guess it's alright. Like it says in Preach My Gospel, "No effort is wasted."

Aside from that, things are going pretty good. This is a really fun area to work in, that's for sure. There are just so many dang people! Transfers are coming up, and I honestly don't know if I want to be transferred. Obviously it's not my decision, but it's weird to think about. Especially because this will be my last transfer(!)

Fun times: our ward had a Fathers' Day Activity on Saturday, and it was probably pretty different from any ward activity you've ever been to. We were enlisted to bring in the Giant speakers so the hired DJ could play his really loud Mexican music, so that was fun. And we ended the night teaming up with a bunch of the missionaries to try to get our Ward Mission Leader (single, in his 20s) to dance. We succeeded eventually, with the help of this super cute 9-year-old recent convert :).

Interesting thing happening this week: Without my knowledge I was drafted into this musical performance thing. I guess the Denver Stake is putting on a concert of missionaries performing this Saturday, and I'm going to be singing in a quartet with my previous companion and the two assistants. So that'll take up a lot of time this week--two practices plus the performance Saturday evening. So we might not do as much actual missionary work this week. But it'll be fun!

Here's some pictures of what it's like in our area. Pretty great!

1. My companion standing outside an investigator's house.

2. Legit street art

3. Driving through downtown

Do you remember my first couple of weeks, when I was pretty down and couldn't believe I could possibly make it through 2 years of this? Well, it's pretty crazy, but you were definitely right when you told me I could. And it's gone by way too fast.

Missionary work is great! That's the feeling I've been having lately. Even when we're tracting at 8:30 at night, and we have some drunk guy tell us about how all the (people) come from this giant space battle, and that Lucifer and Jesus are basically the same, but Satan's evil, missionary work is awesome! I really wish I'd come to that realization earlier on in my mission, because I only have a few more months to enjoy the work now. But it's just great.

Thanks for everything. I love you a ton.

Love,

Peter