Sorry again for the short email. I really do love you.

Sounds like a lot of good stuff and some crazy stuff in the Oak Hills Ward! I'm excited to hear about a missionary heading to Argentina! Basically the Oak Hillls Ward sends out a lot of Spanish-speaking missionaries is the message I'm getting.

We're actually doing better with dinners being super far away, though. This week, we have three dinners in a row that are actually within our area! Exciting!

So, this week was pretty crazy for us, in a good way. Yes, there was a lot of rain, but I haven't noticed any intense needs where we are, stuff that would require service. The craziest thing was last night, as we were driving from our dinner to an appointment, there was a ton of rain, and the roads up where we were working weren't really designed for that, so there was a lot of flooding. We did fine, but there was one car that was stuck in the rain. Aside from that, just a lot of rain.

 

Aside from the rain, we actually had a really good week. Something kind of crazy is happening: people have actually been willing to talk with us. There have been like 6 people this week who when we've asked them if they have a few minutes to talk, they've actually said "yes". That's pretty crazy.

Other really cool thing: We're teaching this part-member family. I think I've mentioned them before. They've been coming to church the past two weeks, but they usually have soccer games on Sundays--soccer basically is their life. But we've been meeting them a couple times a week, and they are super awesome. The two youngest kids want to be baptized, so we're trying to figure out how we're going to make that work. Awesome: they cancelled one appointment we had with them, and we just stopped in on them Saturday afternoon. What we didn't know was that the UEFA Champions' League Final was going on at the time we came by. So of course, they were watching it. But when we stopped by, they just turned it off, and said "it's okay, we'll just record it". They're awesome.

 

Another cool miracle. There's another less-active family that we've been trying to contact for the last 4 weeks, but it's been impossible. But as we were just walking down the street, this lady in a truck shouted out "Elderes!" and had us come over. Turns out it was the mom of this family, and she really wanted us to come over! So we were able to meet them, yay. We have dinner with them tomorrow!

In terms of the college stuff, I've got it all figured out, I think all should be well. I sent in a picture that my companion took of me.

I'm missing the father-son campout! Hopefully next year it'll take place when I'm not at school or something. That's one thing that I miss being out here: camping.

Thanks for everything! p-day should get back to normal with me emailing everyone semi-extensively next week! I promise!

Sorry again for the short email. I really do love you.

Love,

Peter

It's hard, but I can do it!

Sorry, another kind of short email, also please apologize to everyone for me not emailing them these past two weeks. To start off, it's been a kind of crazy week, plus I've been working on these dang forms. But they're coming to a close, finally.

For us this week, it's been pretty great. Still struggling to find the right way to use our time as wisely as possible, what with all the driving and such, but it's getting better. And we've had some really cool success with some of the people we're teaching. There's this part-member family we're working with, where the members (the parents) haven't come to church in years, but they came this Sunday! And it seems like they really liked it. We're having dinner with them tonight, and we're going to invite the kids to be baptized, it's going to be awesome. One of the coolest things is that even though they hadn't attended church in almost 10 years, one of the members of our ward remembered them from when they were coming, and talked to them a lot. Really sweet experience.

Also, on Thursday, we met a really awesome family. They are probably one of the friendliest families I've met on my mission. We just street contacted them, and they were so friendly in letting us in to hear our message and listening with an open heart. We came back just a few days later, and after the lesson, they gave us a bunch of food. We'd just eaten lunch, so it was a little bit hard to eat it all, but it was awesome. The craziest part is, the husband is blind! But he's a really funny guy, and it's been a really neat experience teaching them so far.

We had interviews with President Mendenhall on Wednesday, which was great. It's kind of weird, that was my last "official" interview with him. One thing he talked about was how because I'm getting towards the end of my mission, I need to make sure that the various things I've learned before are applied in my work now. This should be the culmination of the previous 21 months of my mission, not just a time to kick back and relax. So that was something that really struck me, along with something our district leader said on Thursday at district meeting. So I'm striving to savor every moment that remains of my mission, and not take it for granted. It's not something I'll be able to redo.

Still working on the being critical and making fun of people :). It's hard, but I can do it!

I love you so much, thank you for all the support you've been giving me. And again, sorry for the shorter email today.

Love,

Peter

There's a lot of pretty cool things going on here in Denver.

Dear everyone,

When holidays fall on Pday, we have a normal Pday (so we got really sunburnt yesterday playing baseball :( ), and then also we get two hours to email on Tuesday, whenever it fits into out schedule. So that's what's going on right now. We're at a branch of the Denver Public Library System. There is a huge library like Multnomah County Library, but it's pretty far away from where we live, so we come here instead.

I wouldn't say Denver really reminds me of anywhere I've been before, but I think that's mostly because in the "big cities" I've visited before, it's been mostly to like see the sights, rather than to work. So it's a different perspective. It's pretty awesome here in downtown. One thing that's really interesting: in most areas where I've served in the past, there's like one huge apartment complex that has a ton of Spanish-speakers that we spend a lot of time at, or something similar. Here, it's not like that. The city is very heterogeneous, I guess you could say. So there could be one really rich apartment complex right next to a small little Mexican home, or a small apartment complex that's exclusively Hispanic. It's pretty fun.

 

There's a lot of pretty cool things going on here in Denver. We're kind of starting over--it's been pretty difficult to get back in touch with the investigators the sisters were teaching, but that's okay. We've been finding new people to teach! One lady lives at the very very top of our area, in a really sketchy looking house--we were up there trying a different house of a person who'd met with the missionaries before, but they weren't there, so we did a little bit of tracting. When we saw her house, it looked totally abandoned, and we honestly just wanted to knock it because it was so weird. But she answered the door, and we've been able to teach her, and she's really neat! She has a lot of good questions, and understands everything we're teaching pretty well.

Another family we're teaching were being taught by the sisters, but for some reason the sisters stopped visiting them. When we knocked on their door, the dad answered it holding the Restoration pamphlet! It was pretty awesome, and we were able to teach them yesterday for the first time.

There's tons of crazy street murals here, I'm going to have to take some pics.

The hard thing is driving: today we have dinner with a family on the other side of the ward, and we're going to have to drive for an hour just to get there. Yay.

One thing that I'm trying to work on personally is humility: for a while I've been thinking that I'm pretty dang humble, because I don't think I'm super awesome or cool or anything. But I've realized that the bad habit I have of being really sarcastic and critical of others is kind of a form of pride. So that's something to be worked on, definitely.

Anyways, I'm going to go work on those dang Stanford forms now. Fun!

Love,

Peter

The bigger email! :-)

Dear Everyone!

Okay, so here's the bigger email!

So it's super awesome to be back in this ward. There are a lot of members here that are super cool. As I was sitting in Sacrament Meeting yesterday, I just had this feeling of love come--there are so many awesome people here. And yeah, it's bringing back a lot of memories, but my new area's pretty awesome too, so there's not really temptation to go work in Aurora :), especially because we can go anywhere in the ward for dinner appointments, so we'll be able to see a lot of the members I miss anyways.

I saw a recent convert at church yesterday, and she's still super active, which is awesome!

Yeah, your experience with the sisters seems pretty similar to the daily life of a missionary. So much fun!

So this week was pretty crazy. Downtown is awesome, but there are some challenges--if we want to go anywhere else in the ward for dinner, we have to drive for like a half hour because of all the traffic. It's also interesting because we're "sweeping"--we're both new in the area, and the last missionaries to be here were sisters. So it's interesting getting to know all the investigators and members that loved the sisters so much. There may be a few investigators that we'll have to drop because they aren't so much interested in the gospel as they are in the sister missionaries.

But there's some really cool things going on. We were able to meet a part-member family who seem really cool. He is the nonmember, but he says he believes in the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith, he just works every Sunday, so it's hard for him to come to church. We were also able to meet a few of the less-actives in our area, who seem pretty great. One pretty interesting thing about the area is that there are only 4 active members in the entire area. But it's such a densely populated area that we can work hard anyway without a ton of member support.

We're doing service at this really cool place called Metro Caring, which is a small food bank. The people there are really nice and appreciate our help, which always feels good.

We're living in a pretty sketchy apartment building off of one of the sketchier streets in Colorado. I don't know the address, sorry :(. The apartment smells pretty strongly of weed :D.

Thanks for the updates! Have a great week!

Love,

Peter

Happy Day After Mother's Day!

Well, we did just talk yesterday, but I guess I'll email you too. It sounds like you've had a good week, sounds like the 10K was interesting :D.

Last week was pretty slow for my companion and I. Lots of appointments cancelling, all that good stuff. Plus we had to go up to the northernmost end of the mission three times for a few reasons, so that was fun. But we did have one really cool lesson, with an investigator couple. We read a little of the Book of Mormon, and they were just talking about how great they feel when we come over, and really saying that they felt the spirit when we were there. They were saying they've talked to a lot of missionaries and people from other religions, but they've never got the feeling they have when they talk to us. So that's really cool!

This week's going to be pretty dang interesting. We don't really know what we're going to do yet (in my new area), but we'll figure it out! I'm really excited to work in this area. It seems like it has a lot of promise.

Love,

Peter!

Miracle story o'the week

Dear everyone,

WELL! It's been a week! Like every week. Holy cow.

To get to the most important stuff first: This Sunday is going to 100% insane for us too. In addition to Mother's Day, it's the day before transfers, which means we as Zone Leaders get to drive one (1) missionary to the mission home so he can go home the next day. You'd think that wouldn't take too long, but because we have a pickup, we're also picking up two other missionaries' luggage and taking that up to the mission home as well, so we're literally going to be busy until probably like 7:15 or 7:30 our time, so that's probs when we'll be skypeing it up.

 

So interesting fact about Zone Conference: We actually didn't have to do anything except set up and attend. The trainings are done by the Mission President and the Assistants. But we did have to set up and that was a little stressful, especially because we had to call up one of the Bishops to unlock a closet last-minute so that we could get the key that lowers the projector screen in the gym. So that was fun. That was probably the most stressful thing. Also, we went to another one of the Zone Conferences to inspect cars (there are three Zone Conferences, 3 zones each), so that was kinda fun. At our Zone Conference our car won second most clean. Yay? Well so the thing is that everyone went to the car wash before Zone Conferences. It's a competition every Zone Conference to see who can get the cleanest car. We waxed it, shined the tires, and all that good stuff.

So we don't do anything except the usual like contributing at district meetings, but we plan and teach at a monthly zone meeting, and set up other events. So yeah, we're mostly just problem solvers.

Aside from Zone Conferences, this week was pretty cool. Miracle story o'the week: We had an appointment with this less active, so we went to his house to teach him. Turns out he's living with some friends of his from work. So anyways his English isn't that great (he's from Liberia originally), so when I asked if he was sharing with his friends (as in, the apartment), he I guess interpreted it as me asking if we could share the lesson with his friends. So he went and invited them and they totally came and we totally taught them about the restoration and it was great! They understood it really well, and we have a return appointment.

There were some stressful zone leader things going on, which was not great. but things seem to be resolved for now. We went on a lot of exchanges with some cool people, which was fun, including the Assistants on Saturday. Pretty funny--I stayed here in our ward with one of the APs and we had a lesson with this less-active who's kinda funny, and she told the AP how it really was, it was pretty hilarious. Lolz.

Anyways, that was the week! Transfers coming up, we'll see what happens! Scary. I'm hoping I get put back in Spanish, but I have no idea what'll happen.

See you soon!

Love,

Peter

Running the risk of sounding trunky

Well, it sounds like it's been a pretty interesting week for you. It's been really interesting for us as well. Like really interesting. Details will follow :).

With the whole "youth really don't know what missionaries do," it's totally true. I mean, to be completely honest, I had no idea what the missionaries did at home. Literally the only things you'd learn is the crazy stories in the church magazines or stories people tell you about from their mission. I don't necessarily think it's a huge problem (you figure it out pretty fast), but the best remedy to that would be having the youth go out with the missionaries, which we as missionaries like a lot, by the way.

So! This week! We had some interesting adventures, that's for sure. The beginning of the week was pretty boring, honestly. Meetings, tracting, meh. Things started to pick up on Friday, when just before going to dinner, we met this African dude who's apparently a pastor in Cameroon. He wanted to pray for us, so he grabbed our hands and like shout-prayed. We went back to teach him on Saturday and he just talked at us for like 40 minutes. Then we shared a 30-second Restoration and his son who was sitting there understood all of it, so that was awesome. 

Also on Friday we went out with a member to some really flaky appointments, but they actually both went through, which was very exciting. On Saturday, though, was when the most excitement came in. We were on exchanges, and at about 4:30, I got a call from another set of elders who were also on exchanges, saying they wanted to chat. So they came over after dinner, and we chatted. I guess they'd caught their companions breaking some mission rules, and were seriously concerned about what to do. So we talked it out for about an hour, and they decided they were going to call president. So they did, and then president called us. We're still not exactly sure what's going to happen, but it's no bueno. It's kind of funny--sometimes I feel really bad about myself because I'm not always the most focused, or I don't do all 30 minutes of exercise in the morning. And then I hear about other missionaries and I don't feel so bad about myself :).

And then on Sunday we ate some hot sauce that was incredibly painful to eat. It was seriously bad. Apparently it was 4 million SHU which I guess is how they measure hotness, and the hottest chile in the world is like 1.5 million SHU.

So it was just a crazy week. We have zone conference this week, which should be cool. Other than that, nothing too crazy planned. So, yeah.

I'm glad it was a good week! Sounds like the Utah trip was enjoyed by all. Running the risk of sounding trunky, I am definitely looking forward to seeing the extended family this summer.

Things are going well here. I've definitely been fortunate for the past few transfers, in having really solid companions. I'm really liking this area, but I'd also like to go back to Spanish before the end of my mission. We'll see what happens in a couple of weeks.

Love,Peter

P.s. The picture is of a baptism I went to on Sunday. It was an 8-year-old son of a less-active family I worked a lot with in my previous area.