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!

We had a lot of fun and worked a lot.

Dear everyone,

First of all, our housing coordinator has also been complaining a lot about all the couches that missionaries pick up from members. So it's a worldwide problem, probably. Here's something you could ask the elders that I'd like to know: do most missionaries in the Oregon Portland Mission live in apartments, or with members? Here, it's mostly with members.

So it's been a pretty great week. Like you said, kind of crazy with having two companions going home, but honestly, it wasn't that weird, because they acted pretty much the same. We talked a little bit more about what their plans were at home, but we worked just as much, if not even a bit harder. Really solid missionaries. There were a couple things, like we went to our Ward Mission Leader's house Saturday night before our transfer meeting to say goodbye, and the Bishop invited us over to have ice cream, but other than that, it was pretty standard. We had a family from the Denver 4th ward invite us over Saturday night for dinner--we had carne asada, and it was really good.

With the 3 companions thing, yeah, the guy that joined us midway through the transfer sat in the back seat the whole time mostly. He was okay with it though.

Not a whole ton to report in terms of the missionary work--things are still a bit slow. One cool thing, though: We were able to get in contact with a less active that we haven't seen in forever on Sunday (I may have told you about that last week) so we met with her again on Saturday, and she had a really neat experience--she was reading the Book of Mormon on the bus, and she felt like the bus trip took way longer that it usually does, so she had time to read a lot more! She described it like she had her own personal "time zone" where time took longer! It was pretty cool.

Another cool thing: We went on splits on Thursday night--I went with a ward member to try potential elders, and the other elders went and taught a part-member family. I honestly wasn't expecting much to come out of trying the Potential Elders, but the first one we tried let us in, and we talked for about 45 minutes. He's a really cool guy. He joined the church about 6 years ago, but had some problems and left. He's going to some nondenominational churches right now. But he told us that the churches that he's going to just don't feel the same as when he was going to the LDS church, and that he wants to come back, he just has some doubts. Really cool thing: he said he hadn't had contact with missionaries in years, but that that morning, he'd been talking to some lady he met on the street who was LDS, and who told him he needed to talk to the missionaries. Then we knocked his door! Pretty awesome. So that was a really cool experience.

I guess there was more to talk about than I thought.

Transfers came, of course! I'm still here. My companion is also Spanish speaking and came out the transfer after I did. He's a great guy. So it's going to be a great transfer, I'm excited.

I hope everything goes great! I love you all!

Love,

Peter

Excerpt to a brother: 

...anyhoo, things went really well last week. Even with the triple companion action and zone leader thing and with being a missionary. We had a lot of fun and worked a lot. Pretty crazy. And now I have a new companion, who's great as well.

Imma just go ahead and talk a little bit about what it means that I am a zone leader or what it means I do:

-We go to loads of meetings. We go to all three districts' district meetings, we have a zone leadership meeting every week, and every month we have a 6-hour long mission leadership meeting called MLC. Try to guess what it stands for.

-We try to help missionaries if there are weird situations going on. For example, there was a companionship who had a missionary who had to stay inside for a while, so we went on exchanges with his companion so he could get out. 

-We give permission for things like: going outside the zone, calling people outside the zone, kissing girls, things like that (jk obvs on the kissing)

-We report a lot of things to the mission president and the assistants to the president.

Anyways that's basically what we do. It's fun. Lots of work though.

Anyways Love Peter

Trust that his plan is better than our plan

Hey!

It really does seem like you're having tons of opportunities to hear music. That's good! I haven't had any really in the last year and a half, so you know, feel lucky :).

Brother Nees! He's a cool guy. I'm glad he made it out to the concerts, it seems like he's always very supportive of the youth, which is cool.

Good luck with the home teaching thing. Don't give up on the guy. As a "regular member", you definitely have a perspective and opportunity that the full-time missionaries don't.

Things here are going great. Something kinda weird is that for the next week I'm in a trio with another elder whose companion is a little down for the count after breaking his hand. The other trio's doing well--they all get along pretty great so there's no problem there. And the guy with the broken hand has actually healed up pretty quickly after having surgery last week, so they've been able to work.

My companions are from Arlington, TX and from Virginia.

WELL! It's been quite the week! There has definitely been some craziness going on, but it's been good.

Big things that have happened:

1. Well so if you remember how there was that companionship that was having to stay in because one of them had broken his hand, well along with President Mendenhall we made a plan, so he went with the other set of missionaries in his ward, and his companion came with us! So now I have another companion. He actually also goes home at the end of this week. So that's gonna be really interesting. It's great though, these two elders are really hardworking and aren't getting trunky at all. And it's really fun being in a trio. And it definitely makes it easier getting into sisters' houses, which is a plus. We actually were tracting this week and we just knocked into this lady who was single, but really interested, and willing to let us in, and because there's three of us, we could go on in and teach her. That was really cool.

2. We had stake conference! That was pretty great. We have a really cool stake president, and he set it up really well. The temple president and matron came and gave talks, which was really cool. I really liked the stake president's talk, though. He talked about our personal life plans, and how we all have this perfect plan for how our life's going to go. Sadly, though, most of the time life doesn't actually go according to plan. So, we have to have enough faith in God to trust that his plan is better than our plan. Case in point: definitely wasn't planning on getting a second companion this transfer, but it turns out to be a great blessing. So that was a great talk.

3. We had Zone Meeting, which is like a 3-hour-long training meeting with the whole zone. It was really cool--my first zone meeting as a zone leader, and it was neat. We gave a joint training on planning for lessons during companionship study, and it went really well. As always, there were some people who were a little cynical about things, but all in all, people received it very well, and it was great.

Aside from the major events, we're doing a lot of work! Lots of finding, because we don't really have too many investigators right now, but that's okay. We were able to get in touch with a less-active member we've kind of fallen away from, and she was really grateful to see us and to have us teach her.

Love,

Peter

He taught us a lot about how to teach

First off, thanks for the pictures! I would totally reciprocate (I honestly was planning on it) but I accidentally left the camera at home. I'm sorry!

Cool that you've been able to work with the sister missionaries! Let me tell you, lessons taught in members' houses are the best. So I'm sure the sisters were appreciative. Have you noticed a trend in how long missionaries generally stay in the ward? I'm just curious if it's similar to how it is in our mission.

It's been a pretty interesting week! We've been teaching some cool people--There's this one guy (who we're going to have to hand off to the YSA pretty soon :/ ) who's doing really well. He was going to come to church on Sunday, but then something came up. He's like 20, and he's had a really hard life, and is like living with friends, but he's really interested in learning, and we're really excited for him.

On Monday, we actually had a lesson with him at a member's house, which was really neat.

There's been some craziness in the zone which we've had to deal with, which has been interesting. There's an elder who broke his hand at a P-day activity, and it's a pretty bad break, so he has to have surgery on it. While he's waiting for surgery, though, the mission nurse has told him that he has to stay inside basically all the time. So he and his companion are going a little bit crazy. So we've gone on a couple of exchanges with them to let them get out and do some work.

We had pretty awesome meeting on Thursday with all the Zone Leaders and Sister Training Leaders, plus a few random other missionaries. The Director of Proselyting from the Missionary Department came down and talked to us about a lot of things. One of the coolest thing was that he taught us a lot about having shorter, simpler lessons. He said people can't stand a complicated, 1-hour lesson more than once a week, and that that's a reason why a lot of people don't progress. So he taught us a lot about how to teach using pictures and the pamphlets to teach simply and quickly, which will hopefully help us to have more productive, more frequent lessons. Pretty neat.

One neat thing: This week we have a temple trip! It's been a while, because the temple has been closed for the last two months. I know we're spoiled, but it's pretty nice to be able to go back after a while.

Love,

Peter

Church!

Thanks for all the news. I'm glad it's been a good week, and I cannot believe James is going to be 15. That's completely insane and not allowed. I guess I kind of have this idea stuck in my head that everything is supposed to stay the same while I'm here on the mission. But I guess that's not really how it works. Craziness.

It's been a pretty crazy week, but a good one. We had a lot of meetings. Like almost one every single day. I'll make a list:

Monday: Not really a meeting, but we had zone-pday, which was really fun. We went sledding! The STLs borrowed some sleds from members of their ward. They were like plastic boat-type things. It was a lot of fun.

Tuesday: We had a conference for district leaders that President wanted all the zone leaders to attend as well, even though we didn't actually do anything.

Wednesday: District meeting, and district leadership council, where we get together with the district leaders and sister training leaders and talk about what we can do for the zone.

Thursday: 2 more district meetings (we go to all the district meetings in the zone)

Friday: Mission Leadership Council, we got together with pPresident, the Assistants, and all the ZLs and STLs in the mission and chatted about the needs of the mission.

Saturday: Nothing, except we took like an hour out of the day to get a bike from a different zone for a missionary in our zone.

Sunday: Church! (I gave a talk at church! It was pretty exciting, it was about how I prepared for my mission/how I wish I would have prepared for my mission. I had 4 main points: Read the scriptures, pay attention at church and seminary, gain a strong testimony, and practice! It was fun.)

So yeah aside from the meetings, we had a pretty good week as well. The meetings are usually really short, like an hour or less so that makes it easier to fit in missionary work. We found some new investigators--one family that moved here from South Sudan about a year ago, pretty cool, and a 20-year-old guy who's had a pretty hard life but who has a lot of faith. This guy has an unusual name, and he's American. It's pronounced "Jaw-spin".

It is odd serving in English, but not as weird as I thought it'd be. It's that gift of tongues!

And we do still get to talk to quite a few Spanish people. There's a lot of street contacting to do and the Spanish concentration is pretty dang high.

One little thing that might be funny: I am so happy about daylight savings time! Even though it's pretty annoying to lose an hour of sleep the first day, it's so nice that it's light outside at 8:00 now. Makes knocking doors a lot more comfortable. 

Life really is good. It's warm outside, my companion's great, and I'm a missionary! It's pretty nice.

I love you all a lot. Thanks so much for everything!

Peter