And she opened up the door...

Hey!

First off, I do remember singing Holding Hands Around the World in the primary program, and I remember standing with other kids, and it's definitely not our last primary program ever. You still have all the grandchildren that will hopefully exist, if any of us can get anyone to marry us.

I have been thinking about when I first got to Colorado. It's weird, because even though it wasn't very long ago, it's still surprisingly hard to remember. I guess you just get used to doing things some way, and forget there ever was a different way to do it.

Honestly, though, I think my companion is a lot more prepared than I was when I was new. So a lot of the freaking out experiences and stress aren't so much of a thing, at least for now. He's super great, I think I might be learning more from him than he's learning from me. I feel like my main responsibility here is to help him learn Spanish :).

To answer your other questions, it's pretty great being back in the ward, but a little weird as well. One thing that's pretty different is that previously, my other companion knew the area better than I did, so he made a lot of planning decisions. But now, I'm the one who knows the area, so it's like different, but cool.

We live in the same members' house that I lived in when I was here before. Yeah, it's the exact same area, living with the exact same members.

We do service at a couple of different places. There's this Oregon Food Bank-type place that we go to about once a week, and that's pretty great. There's also a couple of thrift stores that we can go to, but it's pretty boring there, so we probably won't be going there too often. And tomorrow, we're going to go help out this member to make Tamales for service! It's gonna be pretty dang fun, I think.

Pretty dang cool thing: my companion is actually from Fairview! So we've done a little bit of reminiscing, which is cool. Apparently Dad's cousin is in his ward, so that's kinda fun. And here in Colorado, yes, he's my first companion from Utah. One of my companions in the MTC was from Ogden.

Anyways, this week has been pretty sweet. We've been able to visit a lot of people, and hopefully we've been able to help them some. One really cool thing, is that when I was serving here before, me and my companion were teaching this really great part-member family. They were coming to church, they even went to someone's baptism! They seemed super cool. But then a couple weeks after I left, she (the investigator in the family), dropped the missionaries! She said she didn't really want to meet with them, so that was a huge bummer. But I remembered how cool she was, and so last Tuesday, I stopped by to try and see her. And she opened up the door and she was totally interested again! So that was pretty legit. What she said is that she was less interested in learning from the missionary who was my replacement. So we were able to teach her for reals yesterday night, and it's gonna be great, is basically all there is to it. I'm really excited. She's super cool.

On Thursday, we got a text from our zone leaders, with a referral! They'd just tracted into her and they said she seemed interested, but only spoke Spanish. So the next day, we went and tried it out, and we were able to teach both her and her husband, and they're pretty great. So that was something that was pretty cool!

Another super cool thing is that we had stake conference this weekend, and do you remember that one time we had stake conference broadcasted from Salt Lake? Well we had that here in Colorado! It was really cool. Craig C. Christensen, from the seventy, Cheryl Esplin, from the general primary presidency, and Elders Bednar and Scott spoke. It was super cool. One thing that Elder Bednar said really stuck with me, I'm probably butchering the quote, but it was something like "In the eternal sense, there is no such thing as sacrifice", because we know that everything we sacrifice in this life will help us to become a better person in the long run, and be worthy to live with God again. So it's not really a sacrifice! We get way more blessings than we could ever sacrifice in terms of things.

 

Anyways long story short it was a pretty great week. I'm glad to hear you guys have been doing good as well!

I promise pictures next week, I swear.

Love,

Peter