Yay!

Thanks for the update on everyone's week. It sounds like there's been a lot of cool stuff going on, and that everyone's been busy. Lots of excitement, I'm sure.

Here in Colorado, things have been pretty interesting this last week. I think probably something weird or cool happened literally every day this week:

Monday: We had to orchestrate an emergency transfer (I think I told you about that) It ended up being a lot less complicated than it was going to be, so that's fun. Hopefully all the parties involved are happier now. Also, I bought a portable digital voice recorder that I've been using as a journal lately. I can get a lot more motivated to just talk into a voice recorder for a couple minutes about how the day went than I can to write in a journal. So that's been fun!

 

Tuesday: Not too crazy, but cool. We had a lesson with an investigator, and he'd been pretty closed off to having members come with us, but we brought one and they hit it off really well. Yay!

 

Wednesday: Temple Trip! That was super great! Also we went to a district meeting, and one of the companionships had brought one of their investigators to the district meeting, so that we could answer her questions. The question my companion and I drew was "Why haven't we had contact with aliens?" So yeah we totes answered that from the scriptures.

 

Thursday: We taught a lesson in Spanish! That was a lot of fun, we just got let in trying a potential investigator and so we taught in Spanish! Yay!

 

Friday: We got let in by another potential (This doesn't happen very often) and we taught them and they seem interested! Yay!

 

Saturday: We were literally doing finding the entire day. No appointments. Yay.

 

Sunday: We had a linger longer with the ward, so that was a lot of fun! Also finding the entire day with no appointments.

 

So yeah that was the week! Lots of cool stuff. I love being a missionary, it's pretty great.

Love,

Peter

My companion sent me some pictures!

Well, it has definitely been a very interesting week, we'll say that! It's been good, and a little bit crazy, but that's basically the norm around here. I certainly hope we don't get any snow around here, but yeah it's definitely possible. You never know here.

I'm excited to hear what the Oregon Portland Mission STLs have to say! You'll have to hurry up and get that to me before email time is up :). For the record, our first step was to ask our zone's STLs. I was just curious what others thought :).

Like I said, it's been a kind of crazy week. Lots of craziness with the zone:

1. On Friday, just before we started our weekly planning session, we got a call from some sisters telling us that they needed us to go pick up a new phone for them. So we called the mission office and found out that we could literally only get it from there that day at that time, so we had to go all the way to the mission office, about 45 minutes away, to get the phone, and then come back and set it up for the sisters. So that took a while. Those are the things you don't really expect to spend your time doing as a missionary :). But it's okay. We're definitely lucky our mission is so tiny, too.

2. Everything was going pretty well this week until last night at 10:00 p.m., when we got a call from one of the district leaders telling us that some of the elders in their district needed help. So the district leader went out at 10:10 p.m. to pick up the elder.

With our ward mission leader

Some cooler things with our ward, much happier news:

1. We met this guy last Sunday between General Conference sessions, and he is super cool. We haven't even been able to teach him yet, because he's been sick (he's going through chemo), but he is just super awesome. He had a copy of the Book of Mormon from a while back, and he's reading it while he lies in bed recuperating! Who does that? He's already almost done with 2 Nephi!

 

2. We were walking around on Saturday night, going to try a potential investigator, when we randomly started talking to this guy in a parking lot. Turns out, he'd been investigating in a different ward that my companion served in previously, and almost got baptized, but lost contact with the church when he moved. But he wants to come back to church and was super grateful to us for talking to him, which was just a really cool experience. Sometimes, all you have to do is open your mouth, and the rest just follows.

 

We're looking forward to a temple trip this Wednesday, which should be great, and we're going to have a great week!

I hope all the exciting things go according to plan this week for you.

Love,

Peter

Well! Happy Easter!

I hope you all had a wonderful Easter weekend, because we sure did. I hope you also enjoyed general conference, because it was pretty awesome as well.

 

Favorites from General Conference - I especially liked a couple of talks:

Bishop Causse's talk about the wonder of the gospel

Elder Pino's talk about having an eternal perspective,

President Uchtdorf's talk in Priesthood session about not being "artificial disciples".

Obviously all the talks were great, and it was awesome to see that President Monson's still got a lot of energy, but those were probably my favorites.

Fun--we watched conference at the church building where all the Spanish members meet, so whenever there was a talk in Spanish, we'd run over from the English room to the Spanish room to hear it. It was pretty great. And for Priesthood session, our ward has a tradition that we should definitely implement in the Oak Hills Ward. An hour before conference, we went as a ward to 5 Guys and all got burgers there, and then went over to the church to watch General Conference. So that was a lot of fun.

For us, it was kind of a crazy week. In addition to General Conference, we also had a day-long meeting at the north end of the mission on Friday, which was good, but long. We talked about such things as how to involve the Sister Training Leaders more (maybe you could ask the sisters in Oak Hills about that, we're kind of struggling here), and whether or not missionaries should be allowed to have lunch together as a district. So you know, lots of excitement.

Other than meetings, we had a lot of appointments cancel, which wasn't super happy, but that's kind of how it is. One really cool experience, though: between sessions of General Conference on Sunday, we went out tracting. I was pretty apprehensive, because it was Easter and all that, but we went out and worked anyways. And we found this really awesome old guy! He's had friends who are members, has a Book of Mormon that he wants to read more of (even though he's never met with missionaries), and he wants to come to church! So Heavenly Father definitely blesses us when we show faith in Him, that's for sure.

Love!

Peter!