I get to see Aurora every day

Hey!

Well first of all I'll tell you that there aren't really going to be any pictures today. Sorry. I've temporarily misplaced the cable that connects the camera to the computer. But don't worry! I'll find it soon and then send you some pictures probably!

I'm curious about how the sister missionaries are doing the whole facebook thing. That's completely not a thing in our mission. I actually kind of hope it never becomes a thing, at least while I'm here. I think that'd be kind of weird. But maybe it'd be great, I don't know.

I hope everything's going good, and that people are getting adjusted to being back in school again. For us, this has been a pretty good week. Better than last week, at least. Things are going pretty well. It is a bit of a task to get used to the new area, but it's good. I think the biggest things that's harder is just going from an area where there was quite a bit of work going on to an area where there isn't a ton of stuff, and having to work on getting that I guess "picked up".

As I was talking about last week, we're trying to help the members to strengthen their conversion, and it's been going pretty well. Something pretty cool happened with one family--We were kind of demonstrating the way it works to study Preach My Gospel, and this guy just was pretty stoked about it. He was like, yeah, this is way better than just reading it. He said he was actually learning stuff! So that's good! I think when we just read through the scriptures, it's nice and all, we can feel the spirit, but when we really study a topic or something, we can be taught by the spirit, which is what it's really all about.

We've also been able to find some less-actives that have been kind of out of the picture for a while, so that was good. We were finally able to talk to this one guy who's been working on getting back to activity for a long time, and he came to church this Sunday! I don't necessarily think that it was because of us, he's got a lot of like personal willpower as well, but it was really cool to see his desire to act on the things he believes.

It was a bit harder with investigators this week, though. The investigator family that probably had the most potential dropped us this week via text, which kind of sucked. But we've been doing a lot of finding work, which was good! And we'll be doing a lot more this week. Yay!

Well, I'm sorry you guys didn't get to see the Aurora. If it's any consolation, I get to see Aurora every day :). Beyond bad jokes, I'm very jealous of the hiking and camping trips and stuff. I guess it's only when you're not even allowed to go camping, and there's almost nowhere to hike that you realize how much you like doing that sort of thing.

One pretty cool thing also: So this Saturday, we had something pretty cool called "Mission Tour", which is a thing that happens every year, where a general authority comes to kind of inspect the mission, and to train us. So Elder Lawrence of the 2nd Quorum of the Seventy came this year, and it was pretty cool. He gave a 2-hour training about how important it is to be obedient (One thing from that training was that serving a mission is really a Launchpad for the rest of your adult life. In the LDS culture, the mission really is the beginning of adulthood, and the kind of missionary you are will have a pretty strong influence on the rest of your life.), and that was pretty good. Another pretty dang awesome thing was that his wife also gave a talk, and it was awesome. She's been a seminary teacher all  her life (apparently she was the first woman to graduate from the religious studies program at BYU?), and so she gave a talk about the House of Israel, the Gathering of Israel, and how that applies to our work as missionaries. There were some pretty interesting, kind of deep-doctrine stuff going on there. Pretty cool.

Btw you should check out this talk, it's pretty great! It's by Elder Bruce C. Hafen, and it's about facing ambiguity, and it's great. http://speeches.byu.edu/index.php?act=viewitem&id=651

So anyways that was the week, it was pretty cool.

I hope everyone at home has a great week!

 

Love,

Peter