Five Pin Bowling 🍁

We decided to have a little bit of fun on p-day for a change; so we went five-pin bowling. It was pretty good. Shoutout to Landen for telling us about this amazing game that’s only found in a few countries, and luckily we are in one of them. So basically, it’s exactly as it sounds like. You get five-pins. You get a small bowling ball with no grip holes—it’s small enough you can grip the whole ball in one hand. Which effectively makes it possible to chuck it at ridiculous speeds. Thus the game is incredibly fun, and I would reckon to say it’s better than OG bowling.

Transfer Things

The transfer news came in and basically nothing changed. So that was pretty cool, Elder Snow is now my longest companion going on three transfers now. I honestly wasn’t surprised to stay, I’ve done three transfers in every area, so it’ll be interesting to see where I go next. I’m just crossing my fingers I don’t have to be up here for the winter. But you know three transfers with one companion is pretty rare, so either me or Elder Snow are doing something really right, or we haven’t learned what we needed to learn yet; idk haha, but Elder Snow’s great, we get along super well, so I’m not complaining.

Baptismal Date & Opposition

We taught Landen again, and that was yet again another awesome lesson. We taught him about the doctrine of Christ and invited him to work towards the goal of a baptismal date. Which is pretty exciting! He mentioned how he has noticed that he’s receiving more opposition from his family and those around him. Everyone faces it, everytime they are about to do something really good, it suddenly gets extremely difficult. It’s sad to see it happen to those you teach, but ultimately it happens in all of our lives and we just need to hold fast to the iron rod. The same thing happened to our friend Parry; as soon as we put him on baptismal date he became extremely busy and we haven’t been able to meet since. He’s expressed that he’s still interested in working towards baptism, it’s just gotten really hard. But what we can learn from these experiences is that when things get hard, when they get dark, there is light at the end of the tunnel. More light than we have ever seen before. Just keep pressing forward, talking faith in each footstep. Trusting in God that he has a greater reward than we can imagine.

Exchange with Elder Astle

Our exchange was pretty good. We had two lessons at the old folk’s home. Pretty much every time I’m in Quesnel we go there haha. A new member came to one of the lessons and that was nice. He was definitely the person that needed to be there. They are teaching a friend that’s struggling to remember things. She’s quite older and believes in Jesus and loves the church, but she can’t remember the important things to pass the baptismal interview. The elders that are teaching her basically gave her a cheat-sheet with all the answers typed up on a big font for her to memorize and read. I have mixed feelings about this haha. But they can follow the spirit and see if she’s actually ready to be baptized. I also had a really good conversation with Elder Astle about follow-ups and how things are run in this mission compared to other missions. It was really interesting to hear about his friend’s mission and how they approach these meetings.

Interviews

Just a few highlights from my interview with President Gill. Friends need to have spiritual experiences otherwise they will not be able to hold onto their testimony. (We have a friend that doesn’t see the need to meet with us but read the whole Book of Mormon in a week). Asked about how long I have been in each area. Surrey (3 transfers), Richmond (3 transfers), and Prince George (now 3 transfers). He felt like I was in Richmond longer than 3. That day there was an issue where Facebook was down world-wide for the missionaries due to the church messing up their MASS360 configuration. They just barely sent out an email that they had a temporary fix in place and had instructions on how to fix it. President Gill copied and pasted the instructions to send it to the entire mission. He reviewed the process with me and asked if he should send it out. I added a few additional steps and said it should work. He was very excited to approve the message to Sister Gill; I think he was pretty stressed about it, so I was glad to help haha. It’s so funny how many of my interviews end up being fixing some sort of technical problem, but you know, I’m happy to help. He asked me if I felt like my faith was growing. It’s difficult to measure, I would say yes, it’s never stagnant; slowly but surely, I’m trying to trust God more and more each day. I learned later after the interviews, the Assistants told us this is a “growth area,” and President left us both here this transfer to continue to grow. So that’s pretty interesting. I feel like every area I should grow from, but you know, happy to be here.

Stake Conference 🥳

It was about that time again, so we hosted 10 elders in our apartment. That was pretty good, something in our apartment gets broken or wrecked everytime so hopefully It isn’t too bad this time. There was a YSA breakfast with Elder Hunsaker, and luckily we had a friend going so we were able to attend. It was awesome! Really glad we were able to make it. The message shared was really great. It was interesting when Elder Hunsaker was speaking about the second coming, he said that the Savior will come again in the next fifty years (we are living in 3 Nephi chapter 2 or 3). So that’s some food for thought, and based on President Gill’s testimony of Joseph Smith, the Lord is actively right in the work with us as it hastens. At Stake Conference they mentioned the amount of temples that the church is building and the membership numbers that we would need to sustain those temples. It’s clear that things will continue to speed up beyond anything that we could ever imagine. The greatest miracles are yet to come. I loved all of the thoughts at Stake Conference, but there are a few I would like to highlight.

Make the temple a part of every trip you go on. Every Fast Sunday pray for things to stop doing and things to start doing Stop letting your burdens weigh you down; be willing to let go of them. They really, really, really want a temple up north. They emailed the First Presidency to not forget about them. We’ll see a temple sometime in the future. Not sure if it will be next general conference as they all think, but we’ll see.

Zone Conference

We had Zone Conference and it was amazing! Probably one of the best I have ever been too! There’s only one other one that’s really up there with it, so that was pretty good. Surprisingly it was very interactive. We had an activity for our training about setting goals and making plans with using the resources of marshmallows and toothpicks to build towers. It went better than we thought, we had to base it off of chapter 8 of PMG and I feel like we are always doing Zone Conferences on it. But I’m glad we were able to integrate it into something that wasn’t a terrible training. Elder Orbeck & Elder Astle were doing a musical number and they wanted us to do it with them. We ended up doing it with them, and suddenly the Gill’s stood up and sang it with them as well. Apparently they planned this all along and we had no idea. So that was pretty cool.

Exchange with Elder Smith

After Zone Conference we had an exchange with the Assistants. And that was probably one of the most memorable exchanges both me and Elder Smith have ever had. The very first door we knocked, an extremely friendly guy answered and was really excited to talk to us. He then says that missionaries keep stopping by his place and must feel the Holy Spirit inspire them to come. He then proceeds to tell us that we are not Christian and that we should stop calling ourselves Christian. He talks about how the baptists & the presbyterians and all of these other church’s work together and all call each other Brothers and Sisters in Christ. He then adds that they all don’t call us that. And then makes his argument that since all of these churches (the body of Christ) agree that we aren’t Christians then we are not Christians. Now keep in mind his kids are just standing watching him at the door, one even comes up to him and said that Mom wants him back inside; he chuckles and continues to keep chatting. We tell him that “public opinion is not the arbiter of truth.” And he’s like yes, exactly! Which confused me because his whole point was about public opinion. He tells us that we live in this big echo chamber and because we grew up in this we have no idea. He then said, let me guess, you guys are from Utah. Luckily Elder Smith was from New Zealand haha, telling people I’m from Utah is the worst, even with members haha. He then moves on and we begin talking about the Book of Mormon. We asked him if he’s ever taken any time to actually read it. He said he read a little bit, but it wasn’t worth the time. He brought up these scholars that are rating Bible translations and Scriptures and said the Book of Mormon didn’t pass the test. Therefore it’s not even worth looking at. He asked us if we’ve read any other Bible translations, specifically the NIV (New International Version) and we both said that we have read a bit of it. Which is interesting because I think the NIV is not even that good, it’s way over used and there’s more accurate translations. He told us that we don’t follow Jesus and we can’t call ourselves Christians. He then challenged us to not call ourselves Christians for a week and see if anyone recognizes us as Christians without us telling them. We declined his challenge and told him we aren’t going to deny that we follow Christ. We invited him to take time to actually read the Book of Mormon and prayerfully ask God if it’s true. He basically laughed at us, and uh yeah, so we headed our own ways. It was definitely a very interesting and memorable interaction. It’s interesting to see the way that others teach and try to convince people using the strategies of the Adversary versus the persuading influence of God’s ways. The Book of Mormon is a great example of the anti-Christ’s and their tactics. This principle is illustrated at the beginning of Alma with Nehor and the end with Korihor right before the war chapters. Some people’s flawed logic continues to surprise me and I hope that they don’t overwhelm those that are sincerely seeking the truth. We met a lot of interesting people on the exchange. Lots of interactions surprisingly in such a short period of time. We had multiple people drive by us and yell some things that will not be recited here. Within two minutes we had 3 people drive by and say stuff which hasn’t really happened much before. So that was weird. But you know, that’s just how it goes. Anyways, it was a cool exchange. We at least got someone’s number.