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

Re: One more thing.

Okay! I'll have to shop around next week to see if I can find anything decent as far as GPS's go.

Good scriptures to share with people..

2 Nephi 31 teaches the doctrine of Christ really simply. It talks about why we need to be baptized, etc.

Alma 32 is a great one for teaching people how to develop faith.

3 Nephi 11 or Alma 7 are good ones for teaching people about the Savior or the Atonement.

2 Nephi 2 is one of my favorites because it talks about why we're here and the Plan of Salvation. Alma 11 and 12 are good for that too.

If somebody wants to know what happens when we die, then Alma 40 is the place to go.

Having people read the last two paragraphs of the introduction or Moroni 10:3-5 are good too.

It kind of depends on what his needs are! :) Preach My Gospel is a good place to turn to if you ever need to find a scripture for something.

Your firstborn,
Elder Blotter

To my firstborn.

Do you know how much you are loved by your family? Well, it's a LOT I can tell you that! Dad and I were just talking as we were getting ready for bed. We are thankful you came to us and are part of this family. We miss you and can't wait for his conference in October just to be in Vancouver. I'm SURE you won't still be there... so no need to worry about your mother stalking you.  Hee hee. How was your week? I am amazed at how different Vancouver is than your time in Burns Lake. I was fascinated by your e-mail last week and how crazy busy you seem to be now. And I would sure like to meet this Elder Smith. :)  You need to remember all the stories I'm sure you will have to tell. But I hope you are able to work hard together and have success. Speaking of success! Dad probably told you but we are having a little missionary work going on in our family. IT'S SO EXCITING. And you get to do this every waking minute. Having the Dubanowiches here was really special and I think it was meant to be. They were touched by the missionaries they met at temple square and the LOVED the Family History Center. They felt the Spirit at church. I think I told you Jenessa sent Griffin home with a B of M with her testimony in it. She got an e-mail tonight (5 days later) that he finished it. He has couple of questions for her, he wondered if Zion meant Salt Lake City and he wondered if the civilization left after Moroni were the American Indians? I just can't believe he read it so quickly and I so wish you could teach him! I told him he could write you if he had questions and I directed him to mormon.org. There is so much anti-mormon garbage on line. So let me know if you have an advice or something I could share with him.

     G and G Blotter have been in Armenia and are expected home Tuesday. Can you believe at 74 they are traveling the globe like they are? They are awesome. I get to go to the temple on Tuesday with your cousin, Jami. She is going through for the first time in the Bountiful Temple and then getting married the next week in the Brigham City Temple.

     What do you think about the GPS? I am more than happy to send one, but I would think you may want to pick it out and get one that is just what you want. Let me know what you think about that. Today was the first time I taught the new "Come, Follow Me" curriculum in YW. No lesson manual. It was on (probably my fave subject) the Holy Ghost and the YW did wonderfully sharing ways the Holy Ghost had blessed their lives. I think it is inspired and will be great. Dad and Ness taught Jed's primary class today and were so surprised he was the BEST kid in the class! I think Miss Smith has trained him in school to be good. She is an amazing teacher. Jed got a chinese checkers board for his birthday and we've been playing alot of that, along with Sorry and Uno. And Jacey got a long jumprope for Christmas. Because the great room is so big we've pushed the couches back and I tied one end to the door going downstairs so I can turn it alone for them. We are spending HOURS jumping the rope. On Sat. Dad took J and J to the Beav and when they got home the started jumping rope with Rachael and by the time they went to bed they were asleep before their heads hit their pillows. Life is rich and good and we are blessed. We love you. Next Monday we will be e-mailing you straight from Disneyland. Can't believe we talked Dad into it.  Have a wonderful week.  Love, Mom

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

Merry Christmas to us.

                         Presents from Elder Blotter in Canada!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

MERRY CHRISTMAS 2012

We LOVE Canada!

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