Crackin the Passwords 🔎🔑

We sorted out the whole computer situation in the office, so that was pretty good. I was on the phone with a guy from Salt Lake that works in the technology services in the missionary department for like an hour and a half. Basically we needed to get these computers in-compliance; this required getting all of the necessary software for that. The mission office has two spare laptops, both of which were in a cabinet; and one hasn’t been used for like a year. In order to get into the laptop I needed to put in the password to the Mission Support account. But this is where things get tricky… that password changes like every month. And so that gets a bit difficult when you have a laptop that hasn’t been updated for over a year. So basically while I was on the phone with the guy in Salt Lake, he was looking at the list of old password that goes for months back, and we were playing the guessing game until we found which was the right one. Luckily after about 5 attempts we were able to crack the password and log into the computer. Once I logged into it, we went to churchsupport.lds.org, which was kinda cool. I just threw in the session id, and he was able to remote into the computer and begin getting it up to compliance. Basically we just had to run a year’s worth of Windows and Dell firmware updates. No problemo, right? Which as you probably could imagine, took us like 2 hours. So as that was updating he jumped off the call to help with another support ticket. I.T. support’s just gotta be so fun. 😂 But we quickly ran into another problem, he needed to add the MTS (mission technology specialist) account to the computer for this process. Luckily Elder Yamashita, the man, the myth, the legend, spoke about this very MTS account at the Lower-mainland Zone Conference (which consisted of 5 zones, kinda crazy actually haha.) He was like yo do you want the MTS Microsoft account password?? And I was like yes please, I didn’t know such a thing existed, and why we had one. Now I know lol. I’m pretty sure he forgot, cause he never sent it to us. So we ended up giving him a call, disrupting is personal study, (so sorry Elder Yamashita), but we were able to retrieve the password. Then batta-boom-batta-bing, the MTS account was added and the magic begins to happen! 🪄✨️ Basically the MTS account is a workplace Microsoft account, which once logged into loads a bunch of shell scripts and software that gets Church Protections ready to go on the computer. It also gets you some pretty snazzy looking temple wallpapers. Anyways, our work here was done, at least on that computer. We jumped off the phone with him and I began the same process on the other computers. Needless to say we were in the office for the majority of that day.

Exchanges with Elder Cockx

Elder Evans went on exchanges with Elder Davies (DL), and I went with Elder Cockx. This is Elder Cockx’s first transfer and he’s a really great missionary! He’s from Belgium, which is actually pretty cool cause he speaks like 3 languages. We had a pretty good exchange, the Wu’s had us over for dinner and our recent convert, Navneet was there too! We shared a brief spiritual message about the Gospel of Jesus Christ with them, and Elder Cockx did an awesome job in his teaching! After that we did some finding and we met this lady that wasn’t really interested but definitely was open to chatting. We tried to help her better understand the role of the Book of Mormon and how it goes hand-in-hand with the Bible, but she was not havin it. She was still nice, but it was a bit difficult to help her understand that the Book of Mormon is not our own Bible. She has this study group for the Bible, but she said that she doesn’t have time for another book. Anyways, it was still a good interaction, I hope the Lord continues to work with her and help her realize the role of the Book of Mormon.

Prince George Zone Conference 🛩

We flew up to Prince George for Zone Conference and that was pretty sweet! We got to stay in this fancy hotel under the reservation of “Mr. Evans.” 😂 I was crackin a few jokes about how I can see Elder Evans, this british guy, in a suit and tie, flashing his business card as he goes to a 5 star hotel with his personal butler and the most fancy food haha. But it was pretty nice to be able to sleep in a hotel. After that we quickly drove over to the church and began Zone Conference. The amount of missionaries that serve in Prince George Zone is so few, it’s actually crazy! The Prince George stake is the size of Texas! Prince George is just so big, it was a lot of travel for everyone to meet there. But needless to say it was a really awesome Zone Conference! It went a lot faster than normal because we had the Leadership session of Stake Conference right after so we had to end an hour earlier. We sped through the presentation and it went pretty well. I wish we had more time, but it still turned out well.

Baptismal Record Things 📝

The Surrey 1st Elders are putting so many people on baptismal date! It’s actually super awesome, but we are running into a few cinks. One of these people on date they discovered doesn’t live in the Surrey 1st ward boundaries; they live in South Surrey, so the Surrey 3rd Ward bounds. Which makes it difficult when they are going to be baptized this week. The Elders had some concern because this guy had a lot of great member relations in Surrey 1st ward and sending him to Surrey 3rd may be a lot harder for him. We directed them to reach out to the Stake President to see if they could have him baptized in Surrey 1st, if they absolutely feel that is necessary. The thing is that priesthood keys work by geography. The bishop acts under those keys and that only works for people that live under those geographical boundaries. Elder Evans was telling them that he’s pretty sure the general handbook says they need to get approval from the Area presidency in order to move the records from one ward to another. However, according to the email chain, it sounded like the stake presidency got back to those Elders and said that they are good to baptize them in Surrey 1st and they can move those records. We chatted with President Gill about it a bit after the Zone Conference, and he thought the same thing, but he said if the Stake President says so, then they are good to go! Some time later, they realized that permission was required from the Area presidency and now that’s currently in the process of getting approved. There was also a bug with PMG which seems to be happening world-wide. We actually experienced the bug with Navneet’s records. Basically, after you submit the baptismal form, the membership record gets created once the ward clerk approves it. The member dot gets created, but the previous dot that you submitted the baptismal form is still on there continues to say that “membership record in progress.” Anyways, after some looking into the problem we found the solution is to merge the two dots and PMG realizes that the record was created and the issue sorts itself out. It’s actually really good that we went around and did presentations on baptismal forms around the mission; I hope it really helps so we can iron out more of these record issues.

Spiritual Thought

“The covenant path is our greatest hope for avoiding avoidable misery on the one hand and successfully dealing with the unavoidable woes of life on the other.” -Why the Covenant Path