Happy (Canadian) Thanksgiving!

Family,

Oh man. What a great week it's been. I love Vernon. We just went to this "Bee World" place that had honeybee nests or whatever you call them in between sheets of glass that connected to the outside world by little pipes, and they had a table where you could try like 20 different honeys made from different plant sources from like orange bloom to buckwheat. Then we went to this famous Davison's orchard, to get some apples and apple cider. And then, because we decided that we're only going to be in the Oke once in the fall, we paid some exorbitant amount for an apple pie. But we're excited for it. Once you leave the lower mainland, BC has a lot of farmland, and we're right in the middle of it, but it's beautiful country. It's Thanksgiving today, too! The first of probably two thanksgivings, because any excuse to eat Turkey, people will take, so we'll have an American Thanksgiving too.

The work over the past week has been great. We were on exchanges with other missionaries for the first half of the week. We were in Clearwater, a little BC town that recently reopened to missionaries. It felt a whole lot like Burns Lake, and there was a brand new missionary serving there. It brought me back to the good old days. I love the fall. It's weird, but I think it is my favorite time of the year. We also did some work in Kamloops with some other missionaries, and had a Zone Conference. It was a busy week, but it was great, and we had the chance to find some new investigators. We were able to set a baptismal date with one of the "eternal investigators" there. Miracles have not ceased.

Oh, and Mom, At the zone conference, President Tilleman told me that there was a recent convert in Prince George who has non-member family. He's preparing to serve a mission, and his family is just absolutely livid that they could only talk to him twice a year for 2 years, and so President Tilleman went to personally meet the family himself. He says that they were getting more and more heated, but he told them the story about how we had permission to meet together, and chose not to, and that was one of the things that finally called them down. President Tilleman thinks that that's why the situation happened. So, Mother, there you go. There was a reason, and it helped a young guy in Prince George.

Well, the work in Vernon is going great. We've been reflecting on a lot of different ways that we can "hasten the work", and after hearing a story about it, we decided that we were going to start running from house to house to talk to more people. The first time we committed to do it, we got out of our car and started running to a lesson across a parking lot. There was a man slowly making his way across the parking lot with a walker, and so we jogged over and started talking to him. Long story short, he's this delightful old man named David who is going to be baptized later in November. His brain runs a few seconds slow, and so we'll teach about something like priesthood authority being restored, and a few seconds later his face just lights up with this huge, sincere smile. We have a few more baptismal dates for the end of October, and then a few for early November, and so we have been really blessed here in Vernon. People really are just placed in our path. We were "ministering" on a street the other day, and we knocked on the door of somebody who was having a birthday party. Someone came out and started talking to us, and enough people were curious that at one point we just had 7 people on the porch listening to us.

Well, it's been a bit of a learning curve over the past week. We get humbled all the time by the things that we forget to do or the stuff we don't handle... ideally. But we're learning a lot.

Well, love ya, family! Talk to you next week.

Elder Blotter

PS- Mom, you are the only person including the whole Vernon ward that has actually asked us who is in our teaching pool. Way to follow the prophet. The names of our baptismal dates are Rose, Toni, Steven, David, and Vicki. If you could pray for them, that would be great.