Greetings from the "Pacific Inland Coast"

Well!

It was a great week in Kitimat! Life is good. It's starting to get hot up here, finally. We used to wear short sleeves one day, and a coat the next, but it's finally getting warm. When I flew up to Burns Lake straight from Utah summer, when everyone was complaining about the heat, I thought it felt great, but a year in Canada has made me grow soft. Any hotter than 25 degrees (whatever that is in Fahrenheit...) is just too much. But, we're finding and teaching, (and hopefully baptizing this weekend) so we can't complain.

This week has been an interesting one. We finally were able to get Samantha and Wilfred (commonly referred to as Samfred), a young first nations couple, to church, and they loved it. Which is awesome, because we were teaching the Sunday School lesson and took the opportunity to teach the Word of Wisdom to them. And Samantha liked Relief Society even though that usually consists of one of the people who usually teach in Primary or Young Womens sitting down for some "one on one" time with whoever comes. Because the branch is pretty much all young families, it takes all of the sisters to handle teaching. It's also kind of awkward because for Sunday School, all of the women and children suddenly go downstairs after Sacrament meeting, so if we have female investigators, they are suddenly left in a room full of men. (Yeah. You kind of have to figure these things out.) In any case, the member who gave them a ride home and hit and killed somebody's family dog en route (of course that would happen...), but they still want to come back, so they must have liked it.

The Boysons are probably going to be baptized this weekend! It's taken some excessive missionary effort to get them to continue to progress because the mom isn't a member and not the biggest fan, but all things are looking good. We're following up today to be sure.

I had some interesting experiences this week, though. In one instance, this angsty semi-intoxicated Canadian cussed off of his porch, but, probably because he's Canadian, he felt bad and came out and tried to apologize to us. We had a brief conversation with him, and he basically expressed his belief that we were wasting our time because we're annoying and everyone just yells at us. We told him that it's very rare for people to treat us like he did, and he didn't believe us. So he decided to come tracting with us to see what it was like. Yep. We were just kind of followed around by this potbellied Canadian while we went finding. If it ended up that he got baptized as a result, President Monson would no doubt tell that story next Conference, but in the end, he just got bored when nobody else got mad at us and went home, so it probably won't be retold. But still.

The other experience was with one of our former investigators, a JW Portuguese family. Kitimat has a huge Portuguese population for some reason, and most of them are from the Azores, (which is where Heidi Fillmore lived for a while). But anyways, they usually were pretty stiff around us, but were slightly intoxicated and so were a bit more friendly. They actually fed us dinner, some Portuguese bean and sausage dish, and as we ate they sort of boasted about the different programs and things offered by their church. It really got me thinking about how blessed we are. "Oh, you guys meet together and hold conventions where you act about Bible dramas (pronounced dra-ma not drah-ma)? Very cool. We have a prophet and authority from God to act in His name to save His children." But really, all comparisons aside, it got me thinking that Heavenly Father would be quite sad if the people in His only true and living church didn't appreciate everything that we have, and make the most of it. We are blessed with so much. It really is astounding. We should do things like go to the Temple, prepare awesome lessons for classes we're teaching, etc.

The church is true! But, it sounds like it was a good week. Have a good next week, family!

Elder Blotter

Elder Atwood and Elder Blotter on a P day.