Vancouver Report

http://www.lds.org/church/news/karl-tilleman-an-example-of-determination-and-endurance?lang=eng&country=ca

Family!

Well, it's only been a couple days since the last email, but the past couple days have been awesome. We saw a lot of miracles happen with the work!  Elder Smith knows the area really well, and since he is (almost certainly) leaving, I got a GPS, which is probably why the bank is wondering what's going on with my debit card. I haven't really used it too much other than that. But having a GPS will be nice, because Vancouver was not built in a grid system, unfortunately. You start to miss how easy things like "1290 E 200 S" are to find. It also seems like the tables have turned as far as weather goes! You are the ones that get to put up with snow and cold now. Occasionally it gets a little rainy, but that's about as bad as it gets. Everybody down here says "Oh, the temperatures may be higher here, but it's a 'wet' cold, so it's really worse here than it is up North". Those people have probably never been North. It's awesome down here. No complaints.

Miracle: usually at church, we will sit by one of our investigators attending, but this week, we were asked to help pass the Sacrament. As they were singing the Sacrament hymn, another two deacons showed up, and so we were no longer needed. Because we wanted to sit down quickly to not interrupt the Sacrament, we didn't sit by an investigator, we just moved to the back and sat in the overflow section, where we would otherwise never sit. When there was about 5 minutes left in the program, this man walks in and sits down next to us. I can smell cigarette smoke on him and so I know that he is not a member. My first thought is "I am going to baptize him." As soon as the program ends, we talk to him, and our conversation went kind of like this:
Us: "What brought you here?"
Him: "Uh... my path just kind of led me here."
And he went on to explain that although his dad was a pentecostal preacher, he felt like he had a lot of questions that just weren't answered. He had heard a lot of weird things about us, but he heard that we believed in prophets, so as he was walking past the church, he thought he would just come in to see what it was like. As soon as the service ended, he was about to leave, but because we were right by him were able to stop him and invite him to come to the Gospel Principles class. He really liked it, and now we're going to be meeting with him again this Tuesday. That was definitely a miracle.

Otherwise, the work is going really well! In the past, the Vancouver district has kind of been an anomaly in the mission because it has 2.7 million people in it and no investigators and not too much happening. The Lord has been really hastening the work in the past weeks though on the East side, and so I feel really blessed to have been able to see all of the progress and miracles happening. I'm excited for this upcoming month because, although there could always be more, there are about 4 people that are looking pretty solid to be baptized in February.

And transfer time is here! The call will come sometime today. Probably sooner than later, too, since they usually make the calls to the Lower Mainland first. My prediction is that I'm staying and Elder Smith is leaving, but I guess we'll find out for sure by some time later today! It's always a little exciting to figure out how the next 6 weeks of your life are going to be spent. You learn a lot from each area and companion. I think so far I have learned the importance of having patience and charity/ If you have contention in a companionship, you just aren't going to find success. Elder Smith had told me stories about how with previous companions in this area, they would get so heated that they would be too angry to go out and work, so they would just sit inside. If you get along with your companion, you'll have the spirit, you'll be able to work harder, and you will find success. If you can't, then you won't. Pretty simple.

Well, I certainly know that this is the Lord's work. We see so many different miracles each day that it is hard to keep track of them. I know that this gospel blesses lives, and I am so happy to be able to share it with God's children.

Well, I have got to write President Tilleman. Next week I will have to report on the transfer news and everything else that has gone on. I love you all, and I hope that you all have a great week!

Elder Blotter

Better Late than Never...

Well!

Hello, family! Sorry about this email being sent on a Thursday instead of Monday. This Monday, Elder Smith woke up with the flu, and he was pretty much in bed for 2 days. Kind of put a damper on the whole "missionary work" thing, but he's up and running now, so we're back in business! We have been so busy for the past couple days that we didn't have time to email until this morning. But, here we are! Better late than never. Sorry to keep you worrying, Mother. I am alive. Although I did have to travel through East Hastings (apparently, it's the AIDS capital of the world) yesterday to visit a hotel to remind Lee Reynard about the law of chastity. But we'll get to that later. The weather here is great! In fahrenheit it's usually around 40 degrees. It rains about... a third of the time, so not too bad. All in all, Vancouver is a great place to be in the winter.

It has been a pretty crazy past week and a half. We are finding a lot of people to teach, which is really great. We're teaching Norma, this first nations lady (who talks just like she walked off the LBN Reserve in Burns Lake) who apparently had a baptismal date years ago, but had to move away. We talked to her outside of a bus stop and now we're teaching her again and hopefully she'll be baptized in February! Our February is looking pretty busy. Today we have another appointment with Maria and 8 year old son, Gabriel. They are Filipino, but speak English pretty well. She has had a really rough life and is suffering from depression, so it is really a blessing that she works with a former bishop of the Spanish ward here, because he was able to refer her to us. We're also teaching this East Indian woman, Priscilla, who is looking for spiritual fulfillment. The list goes on, but I think the only actual Canadian person we're teaching is Frank, this old guy in his 70s who isn't keeping his commitments very well. We have definitely been blessed with amazing people to teach over the past few weeks. Elder Smith is annoyed that the work is picking up right as he is probably about to leave. (Transfer calls are this Monday already!) People seem to be coming out of the woodwork. We really do see miracles all the time. This church is so true.

Anyways, about Lee Reynard. It's a LaFawnduh situation. I don't know how else to describe it. The Sunday 2 weeks ago, he met a woman playing some online game. (He described it as one where all your friends and family can play and buy each other as "pets". Whatever that means.) And... now they're getting married this Saturday (...or they were). Her name is Pricilla, (he still always accidentally calls her Patricia). She is African, and probably weighs about 250 pounds, and is from Sasketoon, Saskatchewan. He bought her ring from Wal Mart for $38 (plus tax). We finally met her yesterday because he brought her to district meeting. It was very uncomfortable. And... they still are arguing about everything, like which city they are going to live in, but they claim that they are in love and that this is the right thing for them to do. We got a call this morning from Lee and found out that apparently he was married at some point in England, and he never got around to filing the paperwork for a divorce, and so now he can't legally be married in Canada. So the wedding for this Saturday had to be canceled. After Priscilla took a leave of absence from school (she's become a nurse or something) to come down for a honeymoon that they will no longer be able to take. The whole situation is very awkward. We will leave it at that.

And well, Mother, to answer your question on if we're "fed by the members", here is a case study: yesterday for lunch, a member took us to Burger King and made us eat 2 whopper combos. And then a different member took us out that evening for Ethiopian food (which is really good, but I think mine had raw ground beef in it. I haven't died yet, either way) and deep fried mars bars. So...
1) The members feed us.
2) I need to start dieting, or something.

Quite honestly, as far as the life of Elder Blotter, I am feeling quite spoiled. Really. That is what it is. The work is going well. I'm getting along with my companion. We're finding people to teach and many are progressing. The member work is going really well, and we're actually finding a lot of people to teach from referrals and things. Other missionaries call us all the time with potential investigators. We're working hard and the results are immediate, not delayed like it has been at previous times in my mission. In short, I'm thinking that there is going to be a change this week as far as transfers go, and something challenging is going to happen. Not sure exactly what, but I'm thinking this might be a calm before a storm. We'll find out Monday!

Well, I've got to write to President Tilleman. I hope that everybody has a great week! Love you all lots.

Elder Blotter

Hello

Well, hello!

All week the weather reports on the TVs in the SkyTrain stations said that "flurries" were in the forecast, but every day was just wet and cold. We were about to lose faith in seeing any snow, but when we opened the door this morning, we saw that some snow found Vancouver! Hopefully that means that we're in for a good week! What's the weather like in California? Maybe it's not all too different since it's all by the coast. Hopefully Disneyland has been a blast.

We had a really solid week! We saw a lot of interesting things happen on the streets of Vancouver. It really is such a privilege to be able to serve here because of how many opportunities you have to talk to people. They're everywhere. And they all are completely different. We were invited by a messianic Jew on the bus earlier to come to church and a free lunch on "Shabbat", which is when the "real day of worship is". We come across less active members who are just visiting Vancouver quite frequently. We're trying to work with an inactive member who converted to Scientology. When we do go tracting, it's with a mindset that the street that we're on won't be visited by missionaries for quite a while, as opposed to "Oh, they're not home? Well. We'll see them in two or three weeks, then". Also, the subdivisions and cul de sacs of Vancouver are filled with Asian people. I'm not sure where the other Canadians live... (maybe in their basements?). Either way, our days are just filled with traveling from appointment to appointment and just talk to as many people as we can as we go. It's great.

We're privileged to be able to work with investigators that start living commandments before we even teach them. Investigators exercise a lot of faith, and it's a testimony builder to see the blessings that come into their lives. Unfortunately, one of our baptismal dates, Cheryll, fell and hurt her knee and was in the hospital, so she wasn't able to make it to church this week. The Primary had us teach the Plan of Salvation, and there were a few kids that reminded me of Jed and Jacey in there! (Only the good kids, of course...) Later today, we're going to be teaching Family Home Evening at a member's home with a really promising member referral, and we are excited about that. There's a lot of potential in this area! It's weird to think that by the middle of this week I will have been here for a month already. Time is going by very fast up here.

One recent convert, Lee Reynard, who I might have mentioned previously, didn't come to church for the first time this week, because he thought he had a stroke (it turned out that he was just wearing his backpack too tight).   He usually comes to church functions at least an hour early, and wants to just go tract or street contact or teach with missionaries. We certainly won't complain about that, because we need members to come with us to appointments. He prides himself on being "the most active" member in the Vancouver ward and he aspires to be a general authority. He's quite the character. He speaks with a British accent because he lived there for about 20 years. Before that, he claims he was a bounty hunter in Florida. And before that he claims he was an extremely rich child who started and owned a landscaping business. Still not sure about that. Anyways, he said that he had like 40 missed calls from members and from the church at around 9:00, when church starts, and so the members are definitely supportive of the missionary work and the people the missionaries introduce to the church. Working in a ward just isn't the same as working in a branch though. You kind of become a family member in a branch. I'd love it if I got sent North again. I saw one of the young single adults from a family in Burns Lake this week! She's going to school or something down in the Lower Mainland. I told her to tell everyone hi from me.

Well, I know that the Lord looks out for his missionaries! There are some pretty sketchy areas on the East side of Vancouver, but whether it's calming down really agitated homeless people or having the SkyTrain doors close before the "4th Annual Ride the SkyTrain with No Pants" people can board when you're traveling back from church, I've seen it all. I'm grateful for the chance to be serving the Lord here. I am so grateful for the opportunities that I have had to build my testimony. I can appreciate now how valuable a testimony is. The church is true! Say woo woo! Have a great week everybody! I'm excited to hear how everybody's week was, and I hope that everyone had fun in California!

Elder Blotter

It's Raining, It's Pouring...

Well hello!

It's been another great week in Vancouver! We've seen a lot of interesting things happen and talked to a lot of interesting people. And been rained on. A lot. It's been awesome! This city is so big! The more time I spend here, the more I am struck by how many foreigners are in Vancouver. I would guess that only about half of the city here can speak English. Actually, it might be more than that, but it's easier for the little Chinese ladies walking home from the grocery store with dried chicken feet in their grocery sacks to say "I'm busy No Engliss" than to talk to us, ha ha.

It's good to hear that everything is going well at home! I bet the kids are great little skiers by now. I'm sure that the tots don't hurt anything, either. Sounds like some of the joys of missionary work are being experienced at home as well! It makes a missionary proud. :) I know that the Lord recognizes all of the efforts that we take to share the gospel with others, and I know that the blessings that come make it more than worth it. I am also glad to hear that Greenie is still around. I walked past a green maxima about as old as greenie is and it put a little smile on my face.

Today has been an interesting P-day! We got a call last night that there was this guy who needed some "service" in the morning, and so we canceled our plans, and then this random member from Saskatchewan picked us up outside our house. His wife lives in Utah somewhere, and while he is waiting for his green card so he can move there, he is planning on working as a stonemason in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. So... all of his belongings and his pet dog are in the bed of his truck, and all he has is a (slightly incorrect) address where he could pick up a truck bed camper in Vancouver that he had bought. So we help this guy find where it is, unload his truck, figure out how we can lift and secure the camper on his truck, and then load all of his belongings into the camper and then call some missionaries to find out the address of the ferry to Nanaimo, which he didn't have either. All of that was much easier said than done. He had no idea what he was doing, so it was good that we were able to help him. All in all it was a success, except the wheelbarrow we tried to tie to the top of his camper fell off somewhere in the streets of Vancouver. Hopefully not through a windshield. :) We didn't finish until about 3:00, and we had all of our P-day duties still on the "To Do" list, and so we called the zone leaders and they went on exchanges with us so we could get everything done. And fortunately, we still had some time to email home! This email might not be too long, though!

The work here is awesome. All of our potential investigators among the First Nations people in Burns Lake all seem to have the same... four names (Rhonda, Mildred, Charlie, and Wilford, if you were curious), but here, you get 'Ramakrishnans" and "Love Deeps" and things like that. We have a couple baptisms lined up for later this month that we are really excited for. Cheryll, who will be baptized in the next couple weeks, was feeling under the weather, so she couldn't come to church this Sunday, so that's too bad, but she'll still be able to make her date later this January. She's working on having her husband start meeting with us. We're teaching this 80 year old Jehovah's Witness guy named Frank, and I'm pretty excited about that. Jehovah's Witnesses believe some pretty weird things, so we have some interesting lessons with him. There's this street that I love walking down because it's by a bus stop where people coming from the University of British Columbia get off to walk home, and you can have some pretty awesome gospel conversations there. There are a lot of people who were raised Muslim or 7th Day or who knows what else that were religious, but are taking Biology courses at school and are having a hard time believing in God. Those are the people that you can have an awesome conversation promising them that if they read the Book of Mormon, they'll be able to know that God is there. Otherwise, we just have a blast talking to the millions of people that are everywhere. This place is kind of (worse than) Gomorrah, but if you sing 1 Corinthians 10:13 in your head, you can still have clean thoughts. Me and Elder Smith are getting along great! If you try hard enough, you can get along with anybody. That is for sure.

Well, I hope that everyone gets to Disneyland is one piece and that it's a bunch of fun! Life is well in Vancouver. It is a blessing to be able to serve the Lord here with Elder Smith. I love the gospel and I know that it is true. I love the Book of Mormon and I know that it is the word of God. I love being able to spend all of my time sharing that knowledge with everybody around me! I don't know why the Lord has blessed me with the knowledge and the opportunities that I have been given, but I am eternally grateful to Him for the chance to be here.

Keep the work in Vancouver (...and everywhere) in your prayers! Have a great week!

Elder Blotter

Well! Here I am. Vancouver. Happy New Years Eve!

Well, hello!

Sounds like it was a pretty good Christmas in Cache Valley, and pretty good skiing at the Beav! It was good to see the pictures of everybody and everything. I hope that Jed has continued to perfect his harmonica skills. He was already pretty good by the time that I talked with him.

It has been a great week in Vancouver! Whew. The days go by so fast down here. It has been a crazy! I swear, over the past week I have had more food from Phillipines than most missionaries actually serving there. There are so many people on the streets of so many different cultures and races and who knows what else. It has been awesome. It's quite a bit warmer here, too, which is nice! To get to the library from Burns Lake, we would jump in the truck and drive for like 30 seconds across town to the library. Here, we walk from our home to the Nanaimo skytrain station, ride that to Commercial-Broadway, catch a bus for a couple blocks, and walk to one of the only libraries here that is open on Monday. It's pretty intense here! Stuff is always happening. For example, in the past half hour or so we got a mormon.org referral (that comes in the form of a text on our phone) that somebody wants us to stop by and give them a Dutch Book of Mormon. Hopefully we will be able to communicate with them somehow. Just a minute ago, while we were waiting for a computer, this black teenager and this old white guy had an argument over some dumb thing about using of a public computer that sounds like it is now going to result in a civil law suit.

Anyways, the work in Vancouver is awesome! In an average day, we usually just take public transit somewhere to visit a member or a less active, and then knock some of the doors around their home and street contact in the area that they live. We have had a ton of dinner appointments over the past few days, because of the Holiday season, and so we've been eating way too much. We talk to hundreds of people. When we get back into our apartment, we have lots of other missionaries from other parts of Vancouver or that speak other languages or from areas in BC that have investigators move to Vancouver call us and give us potential investigators or referrals. It's a really busy just trying to get in contact with some of the people that are around. We have a lot of really solid people that we are teaching. One guy, Conrad, just approached us when we were sitting on the bus because he had heard some bad things about our church and he wanted to hear "our side of things", and now he's a really solid investigator. One of our baptismal dates, Cheryll, just kind of decided by herself that she wants to "be Mormon" after reading a book by Marie Osmond or someone like that. There are some people that have committed to be baptized just after we or some other missionaries talked to them on the street for a little while. There is this OCD recent convert named Lee who met missionaries because he was in the emergency room because he thought the end of a Q tip was in his ear, and he randomly asked one of the missionaries (who were there because one of them had an allergic reaction) who they were, and he got baptized a few weeks later. But he is obsessed with the church. Literally obsessed. He's unemployed right now, and all he wants to do is come with missionaries to appointments and tract and all that sort of stuff, which is awesome, because we need to have males with us to come to appointments. We carry pass along cards in Korean and Vietnamese and Mandarin. It's definitely different than Burns Lake here, but I am loving it.

My companion, Elder Smith, had previously served with Elder Epperson. Ha ha... actually, it's pretty funny. I spent 3 months hearing horror stories about Elder Smith. They did not get along at all. So, when I heard that I was going to serve with him, I just sort of committed to myself that I was going to love him and get along with him no matter what. And... so it's going to be a great transfer. Elder Smith is awesome. I will definitely be able to learn a lot from the transfer. When transfer calls came, it was pretty crazy.

This new area will be awesome, too. The East side is supposed to be the "sketchy" side, but it hasn't seemed too bad! There are lots of places to go and see on Preparation day. We're going to Chinatown today because we weren't able to last week. There are a lot of areas where we aren't allowed to be after 7:00 PM. Apparently there was a gang fight and a burnt corpse outside of the missionary's apartment in the morning a while ago, (we've moved since then), but that's probably just a missionary rumor. Ha ha. There are a lot of awesome restaurants that I want to try here. This East Indian style Chinese food place has caught my eye.

Well. Serving here so far has really made me appreciate how blessed we are as members of the church. There are literally millions of people here that don't have access to saving ordinances. We are so blessed! What a privilege it is to share the gospel with these people. I can truly see the Lord preparing people here, as well. So many people approach us and ask us questions. So many people want to hear our message. This truly is the Lord's work, and it is incredible blessing to be working in the vineyard!

Well. I'm out of time on this library computer. Love you all. Have a great week!

Elder Blotter

Re: Van City...

YES!!  That will be perfect. I am also pretty sure that will be 11:00 our time. We will talk to you then!!!   You white handbook missionary, you.  :)  Love, Mom

Van City...

Okay! So. I'm going to send this before writing an email, hoping to get a confirmation that this time will work for the fam. So, how President Tilleman told us it is going to work is we give you our cell phone numbers and tell you a set time to call us. I'm not sure why we're doing it that way, but it should work out fine! So... would it work for you to call at 10:00 AM (In Canada/Mountain West/whatever time zone I am in time)? That would be most convenient for us because it would be right after studies, and we wouldn't have to ride the transit home in the day to make the calls. I would google search and convert it into whatever time that would be for you guys, but I'm not allowed to use google, so that won't work. I'm guessing that would be like 11:00 or something for your time, but I'm not sure. The White Handbook says that calls should be "short (preferably no longer than 30 or 40 minutes)" and we're a white handbook following mission. So... no skyping. Ha ha. President Tilleman says that if calls go much longer than an hour, then you're no longer keeping them "short". Elder Smith's family will call him at 11:30 AM our time.

Anyways, our number is 1-604-644-2108. Hope to hear from you soon!

Elder Blotter