Exchange with Elder Orbeck

This week’s been a bit stressful and busy, we had Zone Conference and two exchanges. The first of those two exchanges was with Elder Orbeck, he’s a legend! We had a really good exchange, he’s from Tahiti and actually a recent convert to the church, so he’s a bit older, but super awesome! We picked up some lunch, but didn’t have the time to eat it, we needed to drive straight to Quesnel for a lesson. We read through some of The Book of Mormon with their friend and have a spiritually filled lesson. Elder Orbeck was surprised how spiritual it was. We drove straight to another lesson at the church. The Spirit was really working in this lesson too, it was crazy. Brother Coleman joined us it, and was legendary! We taught the Plan of Salvation and he dropped the most epic Gandalf quote. I’m actually really considering using this in our future lessons now haha. The quote is something along the lines of: “Death is a gateway to your next grand adventure.” Just drop that quote, and boom spirit mic drop, tell me that’s not freaking awesome! After that lesson we finally had a chance to eat our lunch and head back to the apartment. You know it’s days like this that makes missionary work 100% worth it.

12 Elders vs 1 Apartment

Our apartment has room for eight elders max. So you may be wondering how we arrived at having 12 elders in our apartment. Glad you asked! It’s kind of a long story, it all began as we put together our travel plans for a zone the size of Texas. Oh yeah, and also Haida Gwaii, which the sisters need to travel via Ferry for eight hours, only to then travel another 8 hours by car. Anyways, after taking into consideration our apartment size and the limited air mattresses we have, we planned to have some elders drive an extra hour to the Quesnel apartment so that we would have enough room. After finalizing our plans we sent them off to the Assistants to be approved. In response to our travel plans, they basically told us that nobody will be driving an extra hour to Quesnel, they want us to host them all. We then responded and asked if they were sure they wanted twelve elders in one apartment. We weren’t sure if they knew how many we would be hosting, but they gave us a thumbs up, so I guess we just gotta make this thing work. So long story short, we hosted twelve elders. While the APs stayed in the Quesnel apartment with only one other set of elders. You know… we don’t get paid enough for this.

But God is a God of miracles, and orchestrates everything on such a grand and detailed scale. He made it work. I am truly grateful we have two showers.

Zone Conference

We made it through yet another Zone Conference. And I got to say, this was probably the most stressful Zone Conference I’ve planned for. But here we are again, God makes it all work. The new members came and they were so awesome! The panel worked out really well. One of the new members used to be in the army and he shared a bit about his experience in Afghanistan; he has so much faith, it’s testimonies like that, the whole world needs to know. We also had to plan the Assistants training, which was a big contributor to our stress levels. We were fighting against the clock the whole time. We had every companionship of each district do a church tour where we explain My Covenant Path experiences in different rooms in the church. These explanations needed to be about 1-2 minutes long so we could finish in time. We were also in two different groups because of the two different districts, so there were so many things to coordinate. So yeah, we enjoyed basically doing the APs training for them.

AP Exchange

Right after Zone Conference we did an exchange with the Assistants. I was so exhausted after the conference, but we had an exchange ahead of us, so I just did the best I could. I was with Elder Westover, and we had a lesson over Zoom with one of their friends right after which was pretty good. Elder Westover is a Chinese speaking missionary, so naturally he’s looking out for people that speak Chinese to talk to. He was asking us if we have any Chinese friends, we didn’t have a single one; but we did have a new member that is Chinese, and he is so awesome! He was just in Vancouver with his sister so I wasn’t sure if he was back in Prince George. His sister was just visiting him a couple weeks ago. The senior couple here actually had them over for dinner and games which was sweet. We heard that his sister only spoke Chinese. Her brother wanted to introduce the gospel to her, but didn’t want to be too pushy with it. Anyways, I remembered all of this, but I didn’t know if they were back in Prince George or if his sister is still there with him. So we shot them a text, and then decided to visit. Talk about God orchestrating this. We had a brief Plan of Salvation lesson, and by we, Elder Westover did it and I was his companion haha. It was perfect, his sister was able to learn more, she will be going to Korea for school, but he got her contact and stuff.

Interviews

Interviews were pretty good. Nothing too special, President wants us to help the other missionaries know that we are pioneers for the Prince George area. It sounds like it’s been hard for some missionaries because they don’t see much happening. But he told me that we need to help them understand that they are prophets of their areas. Sister Gill was showing us the Persian speaking devotional with Elder Bednar in it. That was pretty cool.