Smoooothh transfers

Transfers were surprisingly not too crazy. There wasn’t too much transfer travel that we had to plan for as Zone Leaders so that was pretty nice. We basically were working in the office, working on our technology assignment. We had a bunch of Elders stay at our place over transfer travel which was pretty cool. Our place is kinda of a mess just cause I haven’t been able to fully unpack yet and because we have like three sets of Elders over. But it’s actually so epic this apartment is huge compared to my last one! (Keep in mind my last apartment was the smallest apartment in the mission). There’s actually space, I don’t have to cram everything in our closet haha. So far the transfer has been super duper awesome, I’m excited for the future!

Mostly Finding & Fixing Contacts

We did a buncha finding today. This morning we jumped into the office to help figure out a missionary phone situation. We then worked on the missionary contact syncing roster thingy. It was so sad when we figured out the whole system wasn’t working. You would think that if I didn’t touch the code (which I didn’t), it would continue working. But nope! It chose to break with the most perfect timing ever; transfers! That’s when everyone needs up-to date contacts, when everything changes. But yeah the whole thing decided to go crumbling down. Which is not the greatest, so we did what we could to get things working again. After some time reviewing errors that couldn’t be traced to the issue, and reviewing a dev environment with the exact same code working, we weren’t really getting very far. We had a quick phone call with Elder Yamashita and he suggested we look at the caching system. So I located the caching functionality and threw it all in the dumpster and moved a few things around. And lo and behold! She was workin’! At least we think. We’re not gonna know for sure until tomorrow when all the contacts do the whole syncing thingy again. After all that fun stuff we got on the bus and did some finding. We had a really great conversation with a guy on the bus which was pretty sweet! After some walking we checked out the mall, went on the sky train, did a lot more walking, went to some stores, and a bunch more walking. We didn’t see too much immediate success from our finding, but we had some good interactions and left some pass along cards. Overall it was a really great day, my legs are just tired but I’m excited for some church tomorrow.

The Sabbath & The Tech Problems Strike Back!

Well the good news is that I got contacts working again! Church was also pretty sweet. Our friend Tom came and another guy who was found by the new missionaries that just came in and did some finding. The ward’s quite a bit smaller than Surrey 3rd, but it seems like a super awesome ward! Elder Evans says that President Gill is the most inactive member in the ward haha. He usually comes to church once a transfer, so it’ll be cool to see him at church sometime in the future. After church we did some door knocking and right off the bat we think we found someone with interest. We’ll have to stop by again, but we gave them a Book of Mormon. It’s crazy, I feel like it’s always at the beginning of our finding sessions, we find the most success. After that we did some office work. All of the zone mission stat forums aren’t working. There’s some problems that Elder Yamashita’s code is running into. Long story short there’s some issues with the contacts database which is causing the system to run into errors which is leading to incomplete forums and stuff. We’re on time crunch right now trying to fix all this stuff so people can submit their stats for MSC. We’re hoping to get it resolved by tomorrow night.

Getting Closer

Welp we didn’t get the system completely finished tonight. But we know what we need to do to have it done tomorrow. We also were chatting with President Gill a couple days about what these new systems will look like and what we are hoping to do going forward. And we asked him if we could have a laptop so we could work after office hours. He approved it and we just got a laptop from the social media sisters! It was quite difficult not really being able to work on the system much on Saturday and Sunday. But the laptop will be the way to go moving forward. Both me and Elder Evans are committed to concencrating the laptop and we are going to be very careful in the way that we use it and ensure all that we do is focused on our missionary purpose.

Spiritual Thought

“Behold, you have not understood; you have supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought save it was to ask me. But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right. But if it be not right you shall have no such feelings, but you shall have a stupor of thought that shall cause you to forget the thing which is wrong; therefore, you cannot write that which is sacred save it be given you from me.” -D&C 9:7-9

I’ve learned a lot on the mission; but one of the biggest things that I’ve been learning is the promptings of the Spirit. With this scripture I’ve learned that I shouldn’t be waiting on solid spiritual confirmations. But instead I should do what I feel would be right. As I look back, I’ve noticed that when I do that I am following the Spirit, I just don’t necessarily realize in the moment.