One year older and wiser too...

Well hello!

Turning 20 in Northern BC was great! In Smithers, we had a dinner appointment with a less active couple on my birthday that was this 3 course gourmet Indian food feast. Seriously, if you let that guy move into a gas station in Cache Valley he'd probably have quite a successful restaurant going in not too long. Heavenly Father looks out for his missionaries. Ha ha, mother, you WOULD get members up here to make a peaches and cream cake. When she called us to find out if either of us was transferred, we asked her if there was anybody in town that she knew might be open to hear our message, and she told us to go contact somebody. (The guy that she wanted us to talk to told us that it would be better that millstones were hung around our necks and we were dropped in the sea... but that's okay. A referral is a referral.) And Amelia will be a fantastic missionary! What an awesome call. I'm super excited for her. The mission field is already changing a bunch. We had 5 sisters and 5 elders come into the mission this transfer, and over the past months we'd get maybe 2 sisters every other transfer or so.
This week hasn't been so cold, which is nice. We even had like... 6 degree weather at one point, and the rest of the time it was only a little below zero. Burns Lake is still frozen over, though, and there's still snow on the ground. When Francois Lake freezes over, the ferry's hull has been designed to break a really wide channel in the ice. People strip down snowmobiles and try to jump it, apparently. You can drive over it, though. There are pictures in members homes of them driving out on top of it and taking pictures.

   
Yep, this week we have a thanksgiving dinner scheduled with this kind of psychotic less active member who lives in the middle of nowhere on Southside. He (tries) to make a living my breeding dogs, and so he has hundreds of dogs on chains in his front yard, and they all go insane and try to eat you when you knock on his door. Thanksgiving in Canada is at the beginning of October, but most of the members at some point came up from the States, and so they just have two thanksgivings every year. It's pretty awesome. But without Thanksgiving, people don't know when to have Christmas season start... so somebody told us Merry Christmas like a week ago.

Well, it was another awesome week as far as missionary work goes. We started teaching this guy that me and Elder Neher found months ago named Dennis. He's a hermit sheep farmer, and the first time we went to knock on his door he came out brandishing a shotgun, but he actually turned out to be a nice guy. He met with missionaries when he lived in the lower mainland in the '70s and read the whole Book of Mormon then, and now we're reteaching him. Man. There are weird people up here. It's awesome. Vanessa is still doing well as a Primary teacher, and is still keeping strong. One less active member, Moneca Scheel, has pretty much become fully active again, and we're working with the Corliss family to try and get them reactivated. They're praying and reading scriptures as a family. It seems to be hard to get people to take the step of coming back to church once they haven't for a while, but we're doing everything we can to get them there.

Elder Blotter