Report from Vernon

Well, hello, family! 

Oh goodness. The last week has been one of the most awesome weeks of my mission. It has been super busy, and time has just been disappearing it's gone by so fast. I love Vernon! It is a little bit different than the Hong Couver area, that's for sure. I haven't seen mostly grass-covered mountains since... the MTC, but up here it pretty much just feels like a colder and a little less dry version of Utah. And I love the people here. This is great. Since last emailing, there's been a lot of spiritual feasting. Wasn't conference awesome? There were a lot of great talks. A lot of revelation received. Transfer meeting and mission council were both awesome, and I feel like I have learned a lot about the principle of faith. When you have faith, you really can do everything.

My new companion, Elder Baker, is awesome. Totally awesome. He's from a little town in Alberta. (Mother, if you're planning on facebook stalking, his first name is Brad) We have just seen a lot of miracles over the past few days. So, our mission has reached a point over the past 3 months where we've had about 40 of our brothers and sisters join the church. Awesome. 3 years ago it was like... 12. This month, the goal is for every companionship to baptize (and then an extra 20 or so. Ha ha) and to reach a goal of 145 baptisms. Which is awesome, but it's going to take a lot of faith, work and miracles. I don't have a tremendous amount of time to write, so I am just going to type really fast because I have a lot that I wish I could write. 

So, after setting that goal in mission council, we were super excited. So, after mission council, we're staying with the zone leaders in Surrey, and we have a few hours to go out and work before the day is over. So the elders drop us off someplace completely random, and one of the Surrey elders, Elder Kennedy, who is a 6' 10'' full-ride-to-BYU-in-basketball-or-football-he-still-needs-to-pick kind of guy. He's been out for just 6 months or so and is a zone leader (President Tilleman doesn't really do "traditional" leadership assignments. We got Spanish speaking sisters for the first time, and there aren't any spanish-speaking sisters to train them. So... they're just training each other. They're in Canada, so they won't starve, but... good luck teaching lessons and speaking at church and stuff.) Anyways, he leans out the car window as they are driving away and just says "I promise you in the name of Jesus Christ that if you do all that you can this evening you will find 5 new investigators and set 1 baptismal date". So, we just went at it. 6th door that we knock on, a voice yells "Come in!" So we do, walk up a set of stairs, and find these two guys sitting there watching TV. Initially, they kind of want us to just leave, but we just sort of sit down and start talking with them, and in the end we set 2 baptismal dates with them. Boom. We walk outside, there's a guy walking home. We teach him the first lesson on the street. Boom. We realize that it's dark rainy, and we don't have a phone, so we walk back where they dropped us off, and they are nowhere to be found. We get a Serbian man to call them, and we leave a voicemail telling them to come back, and just hope for the best. We then start talking to this 17 year old black guy who met missionaries before, and read the Book of Mormon for 4 days straight after meeting them, and then didn't know what to do so just kept moving on with his life. Suddenly, the Surrey elders, who had gone home to do something lame like weekly plan came back to pick us up, and we set a baptismal date with him and taught him on the street. Then, we drive back to the street that the Surrey elders were on, and we both just start knocking on doors. And the Surrey elders found someone. 5 new investigators, and 4 baptismal dates. Miracles.

Anyways, we travel back to Vernon, and ever since then, we've just still been seeing miracles. It's been great. We don't tract. We just teach people that aren't investigators yet. And if you have enough faith, people will listen to you. Man. It's so good. We have a plan to baptize weekly, starting this weekend. But we'll see. It just seems like the Lord is placing people in our path. We taught a member's neighbor yesterday because the member just did their part of asking their sick neighbor if they would like a blessing. (That is so easy to do. Member missionary work is not hard to do.) We taught someone who was weeding outside of an apartment complex where we were going to contact an investigator who didn't have a phone. We stopped somebody who was jogging last night and he was a receptive less active guy. Heavenly Father is so good! There are so many miracles everywhere! We're teaching this guy named Steven who in a lesson, when asked what the meaning of life was, said "You guys might think this is weird... but I think we lived with God as spirits before we came here, and we're here to get bodies or something." Ha ha. Really. God is so good.

But, there have been some interesting challenges as well. I thought that calling for the results for the week would just include writing down numbers. But sometimes district leaders report that nobody in their district found a new investigator, or that they had areas that didn't teach any lessons, etc. You have to discern if it was a rough week and they need to be built up, or if they were lazy and need a bit of chastening, and you have to help them see what they need to do to help their districts improve. In the end, how somebody serves a mission is entirely up to them, and, because the Priesthood only works on principles of persuasion and meekness and love and righteousness and all those other good things in D&C 121, you can't really tell anybody what to do, and the only way somebody is going to listen to you is if they feel your love for them and they respect you. And there's challenges like for one of our investigators to get baptized by his date, he's going to have to quit cold turkey on smoking, and for him to do that, it's going to take a ton of following up. But we're out of our area for the first part of the week to go on exchanges with a two different areas that are struggling. And there's a zone conference this week, and we have to give a training on planning to two zones and President Tilleman. Whew. Pressure's on. But it will be good.

Oh man. I typed fast. I successfully got it all done. Another miracle! Well. Love you all. Hope you have a good week!

Elder Blotter

PS- I usually forget to add this. My address here is 4015 15th Ave, Vernon, BC V1T 8H1.