The Week

Elder Blotter, BC Wonder,

Sound like things are rocking in Burnaby.  Burnaby sounds like it should be next to Liverpool in England or something, but I guess it fits for Vancouver as well.  It looks like a very beautiful place to live.  I have always thought that the earth must reflect some of God's thoughts and ideas.  It is really some of the best physical evidence that there is of His handiwork.  That makes BC easy to understand, but Nevada?  When you think about it though each place is beautiful and unique in its own way.  Sounds like  you have a great companion and are in a fun place.  Kitimat strikes me as a tough place to be a missionary, but never doubt the Lord, his wonders to perform. 

I hope things are going well with your investigator.  As we learned in medical school, tobacco is an evil weed, which from the devil doth proceed.  I am very much into limited government.  Especially federal government and that is because I am a wise fellow.  One of the most shocking things in the universe is that the US government subsidizes tobacco farmers.  Children in Africa starve, we subsidize tobacco production.  Wow.

Sounds like you have good members, and those are key.  That is huge for missionary success and enjoyment.  The members were always may focus as well and that is a great strategy but they can only do so much and you still have to get out there and find people to teach out of nowhere.  We live in a very secular and wicked world that is ripening for destruction where the earth will be renewed and receive its' paradisical glory. 

Well, yesterday was Lotoja and I rode in the race.  Alway a big day that reflects months of training.  I had a monster day on the bicycle and it was the best race that I have ever done in my life.  I finished in 9 hours and 12 minutes.  This might not mean much at first glance but here are the details.  My average speed was 22.25 miles per hour over 206 miles.  This includes over 10,000 feet of climbing mountain passes.  The all time course record for Lotoja is 8 hours and 58 minutes.  Therefore, I am 15 minutes off the all time course record, which has been raced by pro riders who have competed in the Tour de France.  I didn't know that I had it in me.  Your average Joe Competitor rider, like Nathan Young (Kaylee's dad) finished 1.5 HOURS after.  I am gloating, but it was a beast of a ride for me and one for the books.  I am thinking about quitting now and going out on top.  

Anyway, things are great otherwise.  We like Claudia and she is a fun temporary addition to the clan.  It is fun to introduce someone to new things, like a buffalo and moose (which don't exist in Europe), corn on the cob, peanut butter, root beer and beef jerkey.  

Soccer and little league football make up and the rest of the activities, along with a little school.

Well I hope all is well and many blessings come your way.

Love   Dad

No Burnaby Ward, "Corn Roasts" as an activity are not an "American thing", nor a "Mormon thing". I'm not sure where you got the idea to call boiling a few hundred cobs of corn a "Corn Roast", but it was neither from America nor from the Church.

 

After 14 months of walking, this shoe is done. 

Family,

Well, just like that it's been another week already! Time is one of the most irritating things. When you're tracting Wedeene Street for the 5th time in Kitimat, there seems to be an unending supply of time, but when it takes half an hour to an hour to get anywhere and you're spending another hour of the day doing 12 Week, the extra hour of companion study for greenies, you just do not have as much time as you would like to. But the work in Burnaby is good! It kind of feels like a gigantic playground. There's streets and Skytrain stations and parks to contact in, there's endless doors to knock. P-days are the worst, because you pretty much have sitting on a bus and waiting to be checked out in super long lines at Metrotown to look forward to. Finding and teaching is much better. The ward here has a lot of awesome members. This week as a way to try and get people to come and check out the chapel, the ward had a "Corn Roast" where they boiled a lot of corn and had a potluck. All the missionaries took a few sacks of corn home and a few pounds of butter. Can't complain at all. Life is good.

This week has been a good one. I had the chance to meet most of the investigators in the teaching pool. Well. So far, a lot of time in Burnaby has spent cleaning up. Physically, and missionary work-ily. (The bathroom no longer smells. That's good.) But the teaching pool was filled with people like... "Oh, I'm a Baptist missionary from Texas, who is being sponsored to live here in Vancouver for a few years so that I can learn how to live in multicultural areas. Then, I'll be sponsored to live in Mexico for a year or two to learn Spanish, and then traveling to do missionary work in South America, and until then, I just want to squabble with Mormons in coffee shops". That type. Great people and all, just not humble seekers of truth. (But then again, I probably shouldn't criticize too fiercely, because it seems like he does have things figured out a bit more cozily than certain missionaries in South America that I know.) But in general, we pretty much just have 2 people that we're working with, Mark, a 10 year old Filipino boy who we've set a date for later this September, and Alan, who we're just working very closely with to get him living the Word of Wisdom so that he can unite with his family and be baptized by mid-October. So, that leaves a lot of time to find people to teach!

...So that's pretty much what our days consist of. We wake up, do the missionary schedule rigamarole, study, eat and then leave for the day until we get back at 9 because we don't really have time to go home. So you'd think that being on your feet all day would result in weight loss, right? Wrong. Just as there were pride cycles in the Book of Mormon, Elder Blotter's weight cycles based on if he is in the North or in the Lower Mainland. In the North, I've always lived by a track and could go running if my companions didn't want to, and food is scarce. Here, there's just too much left over food from ward activities and things. So, I had lost all of the MTC and deep-fried Mars bars weight in Kitimat, but I predict that it will be back after a few weeks. Alas, I'll run it off next summer or something.

We saw quite a few miracles this week, however! A few things have happened this week that have made me reflect on the evidences in my life that there is a loving Heavenly Father. Usually, they are just a bunch of small things that are orchestrated to make things work out just right. At one point, we were up in the North part of Burnaby for an appointment with a a member (so, it's already unusual that we were in the Sister's area, the only reason we go there is for an appointment with a member, since there are multiple companionships for the same wards here) and when we went to catch a bus going back to our area, the buses weren't on schedule (unusual. Well, not that unusual, but still) so the next bus wasn't for a long time. So, we called the zone leaders for permission to just take the Skytrain into the east part of Vancouver to transfer at Commercial-Broadway onto the line that goes right through our area. And so then we were off through Van East, which isn't even our area, which was unusual. After a few minutes on the Skytrain, this woman walked up to us and introduced herself as a member of the church, and told us that just a few minutes before she had been praying and praying and asking for a some sort of a sign to some question she had, and with tears in her eyes, she said that we had gotten on the train just moments after she had prayed. Very cool to see how God can put you right where you need to be when you need to be there. Secondly, on Fast Sunday, we were about to catch a bus in the evening so we could head home to eat. We were waiting for our bus, we sat down on the bench to make some phone calls while we were waiting. And... for whatever reason, the bus chose to just drive past us, without picking us up. Which mean probably over an hour of walking to make it home. Such a waste of time. Gah! I remember just praying that someone would pull over and offer us a ride. And sure enough, just a few minutes later, a car pulls over and a member already giving the Korean-speaking elders a ride pulled over and gave us a ride as well. What a miraculous answer that was. God is good, and he does answer prayers!

And well, I hope that you all have a really good week this week. Thanks for all of the support. It's good to hear how everyone is doing back home. The church is true!

Elder Blotter

P-day in Burnaby...

What Chinese food looked like in the 1920's......

Introducing Elder Francis....

Flying South for the Winter, Part II: Return of the Basement Suites, Skytrains, and Oodles of People.

Family,

Well, I'm back to Van East! Well. Van East East. Burnaby South, if we want to call it what we're supposed to call it. I have been transferred to the area adjacent to Van East. Boundary Rd is in my area again. Since I've left, they've had to squish in massive amounts of Sisters in a lot of different areas, so now Burnaby is cut in half and elders are in the Southern half, but that's the stomping ground now. And goodness. I. Love. Vancouver. I forgot how much I loved Vancouver because of how much I love Northern BC, but Vancouver is a great place to be. It feels like the perfect temperature outside always. The bishop is from Japan, the opening prayer to Sacrament Meeting was in Mandarin, the ward mission leader is from Uganda, etc. etc. etc. Going running in the morning, you run past Filipino bakeries and it smells good. There's people all over the place. Frozen pizzas don't cost 9 or 10 bucks. You don't have to eat frozen pizzas, because food is cheap. ...Apples taste really good. We live in the basement of an East Indian family's house.  The list goes on. Anyways...

So my new companion is Elder Francis, who I am follow-up training. He's been out for 6 weeks. (I think I'm just going to be training for the rest of my mission, or something) He was originally called into the Spanish work, but has been serving in the English work because there's not enough Spanish areas for the number of missionaries that we have right now. His dad is a diplomat for the Canadian government, and so... he was born in Colombia (his mom is Colombian and his dad is your typical pasty white Canadian. Not that pasty white Utahns can point fingers), and has since lived in Argentina, Guatemala, Toronto, England, Hong Kong, Romania, The Philippines, and... Utah, because he went to BYU for a year. His family is currently living in Kenya. So... there you go. He speaks English and Spanish, decent French, and a little bit of Mandarin. He's a pretty cool elder, to say the least.

And the work in Burnaby is very cool! This Sunday, a wonderful little 10 year old girl named Faythe Mileta was baptized. The missionaries here have been working with that family for a while. Brother Mileta is also investigating, but he just has not been able to quit smoking. His wife, who is a member, obviously wants him to quit, but is kind of an enabler and doesn't want him to get too worked up or stressed about quitting smoking. In the first lesson that we had with him, we reset a date with him for October 13th and made a plan for him to quit smoking. Right now, he's smoking "maybe a little over" a pack a day. But he can do it! Elder Aidukaitus (perhaps... I misspelled that) of the Seventy was visiting our mission, and he went out of his way to specifically visit them, and after he pulled us aside and told us to make sure we baptized him. General Authorities. They're the best. Apparently, at the beginning of August, Elder Francis and Elder Kennedy (who is 7 foot 6 or something insane like that and has full rides in either basketball or football to BYU... I have some literally big shoes to fill) set a goal to have 10 baptisms, but all of those people have kind of been dwindling aside from the Miletas.

The ward here seems very cool as well. We have everything from this prim and proper British lady who, if you impress, will spend thousands of dollars on you in the form of new suits, shoes, food, etc. (she's included past missionaries in her will, apparently) But she picks favorites, and some missionaries just get the cold shoulder. There's this Iranian guy, Sammy, whose dad owns the largest construction company in Iran. Sammy had a rare disease that only 6 people in the world had, and his dad funded millions in research until they found a cure. Anyways, he's blind and a little disabled, lives by himself here (and somehow became a Mormon), and since he's blind he has no idea what time it is. And he calls all the missionaries in the area 5-10 times a day, which most of the time we can't answer (which if we don't, he sings the "I'm so lonely" song). And since he has no idea what time it is, that 5-10 times a day need not be restrained to the hours of 6:30 AM to 10:30 PM. We've been woken up a few times already. Good people though, that's for sure.

We've met a few people that seem very promising, but we have a lot of digging in to do to pick the work up in Burnaby, and there are a few challenges. When I came into the area, the area book hadn't been updated for a while, and the teaching records were all just kind of jumbled together in no particular order at the front of the binder. The area isn't... organized at all. We need to break the area down into smaller areas, organize the area book, and get a big map of the area and plot out where all the less actives, part member families, members, etc. etc. live so that we can plan better. And we can't afford to sit around in the apartment doing that, so... we'll probably do that for the rest of the P-day and then in the mornings and evenings until it's done. And transit here... well. In Vancouver, transit was incredibly overwhelming at first, but eventually you just figure out that more or less you Skytrain as East/West as you need, and you learn the buses that take you as North/South as you need. The buses are more sporadic and the city is in less of a grid than in Vancouver, so it's going to be a little dicey and takes about an hour to get anywhere, but hey. We'll get there. Right now we're emailing at the "Justice Institute of British Columbia" and it took us an hour just to get here. It'll take at least an hour to get back, and then we've got all the other P-day errands to run... Fun stuff. Better than having to drive in Vancouver. Anyways.

Well, there are certainly a lot of challenges up ahead, but I'm excited for them! The challenges here are a little daunting, but preferable to the challenge of knocking the same door for the 7th-8th time. Shout out to Elder Atwood, who is staying and training in Kitimat and will be there for at least 6 months!

Well, dad sent a little video attached to one of the emails of Jacey doing a backflip. That's a super cool trick! But what in the world! Jacey, you already look a lot older and you've still got quite a bit of time to grow! And Jed, look at you in your football pads. You're old enough for that? What in the world! Ha ha. Well. I hope that you all have a great week!

Elder Blotter

Mother, I forgot my camera, but I'll try to send some pictures next week.

Fall Strikes the North.

Here is Elder Blotter with the Syphus Family. Sis. Syphus has a food blog and is a wonderful cook. She fed the missionaries almost every week. They were from Arizona but working in Kitimat for a year.

Family,

Well, hello, everyone. It's been a cold and wet week up here in Kitimat! Either it's just a cold spell, or somebody upstairs must have flipped the switch, because the last weeks have been hot, and now there's a little nip in the air. The missionaries from Prince Rupert came to Kitimat for exchanges this week, and so me and another elder were on bikes in the pouring rain. Probably a good experience, because missionaries with vehicles probably get a little bit soft. Not exactly the most fun, but it was good in that even if people will close the door on us before we get the chance to say anything, at least they have to acknowledge that we're sincere enough about what we're doing to go and get wet for it.

Anyways! It was a good week this week. We had a pretty intense Canadian service project with some members that I am still sore from. we drove off into the bush/rainforest (Kitimat really is a rainforest based on how much it rains. There are frogs just jumping around on the streets and sidewalks. That's unimaginable in Utah) on sketchy logging roads and chainsawed trees down, chained them and pulled them into clearings, and then cut and split the wood and loaded it into trucks. BC has more trees than it knows what to do with. It's literally a jungle out there. But, since wood is only as expensive as the time it takes you to go and get some, most people have wood stoves in their homes because it's a lot cheaper than a gas furnace.

The work is going well in Kitimat, though! We're working with some interesting people. Heavenly Father has some diverse children. I might have mentioned Cam before. He's interesting because he has read very heavily into this researcher who studies psychology and human reaction. Apparently, if you have people hold out their arm and make a statement while trying to push their arm down, the way that they react indicates if it's true or not. So if you were 30 years old, and somebody had you hold your arm out and said "You are 31" while pushing down on your arm, it would go limp, but if they said your correct age you would naturally keep your arm up and resist the pressure because it's a natural way your body reacts to things that are true or good for your mental health or something like that. And the vast majority of people have that positive reaction when told that "Jesus Christ is the Son of God", and so because of that, he believes that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, because if it wasn't true, it wouldn't have that influence and "resonate" with so many people. And he isn't "this is my excuse to my scientist friends why I'm Christian", this is "I really don't know how it's possible, but apparently Jesus Christ really is the Son of God. How about that?" Which is pretty cool the different ways that the Lord can lead people to finding faith in him, but it's just a stepping stone to developing sincere faith with deeper roots.

 And then we're teaching Ed, this older guy who has very fiery opinions about everything because all he does is watch documentaries. He insists that if he got a few hundred dollars more a month from welfare, he could get back on his feet and start contributing to society. Then we found out from some members that he's also addicted to crack, so... you know.

And then we're teaching people like James. James is this solid individual who has a million questions about everything, and is a little bit slow, but is really hungry to find truth. He'll read the Book of Mormon, and then he'll re-read the same pages a few times just so that he can understand it. It's troopers like that that make you glad to be on a mission. It's interesting to be on a mission, because you just see the inside of people's houses and into people's lives that you just wouldn't otherwise. It's pretty cool.

Well, it's transfers this week again. After 3 transfers, there is definitely going to be a change in Kitimat. The general consensus that will probably be wrong (just because the general consensus is usually wrong) is that I'm going to leave and Elder Atwood is going to stay and train a new missionary. Either way, it should be a pretty exciting week!

Good to hear from you all, and I hope that you have a good week!

Elder Blotter

Re: Another week has gone by in Kitimat....

This is awesome Jill. His words are beautiful and you can tell he is filled with peace and joy and loves his mission and he loves people. People of all kinds. To me, that is the meaning of the word Christian. Btw, he is such a great writer! This could be a chapter in a book, its so well done.

I just had a call last night form the elders that we met while visiting the office where Jerry and Audre worked. Did Nessy tell you about our visit? Did she mention the young (handsome and sweet) man that is the brother of a red headed girl who married somebody at your church? He was to return to Logan sometime soon and will be starting school same as Ness. Well, anyway....(please, do tell if you meet him. He grew up on a farm and is worried about school)... the other two boys called last night and I hope will be coming out for eggs. One was from Utah, the other, I'm not sure.  Oh Jill, Nessy commented on how they glowed and they really did shine a pure light that couldn't be missed. We are doing great but missing Ness. I am sure her calendar is keeping her hopping! Tell her we send her bunches of love.

 

Talk soon,

Thanks for the forward. It really is so touching to read his words. I may not be Mormon, but I am definitely "mor" (more) because of the gift of knowing you.

lots of love,

sal