The Final Goodbyes.

Elder Chandler will be the new technology elder with Elder Watkins. I’m super excited for them, and Elder Chandler is going to be such a great fit for the assignment! Elder Watkins is doing an amazing job, he’s gonna do great things training Elder Chandler and giving trainings at Zone Conference. I already had spoilers on the next training, because I worked on it a lot with Elder Watkins, but they’re going to do an awesome job presenting it and I believe it’s going to help the mission a lot. I’m going to really mission the Richmond ward and Elder Watkins. That ward is the perfect representation of the term “ward family.” I wish them all the best, and I hope to see them again in the future!

Arriving to Prince George

Well, I’m now in Prince George. Pretty cool actually. We cover two wards–Fraser & Nechako– so that’s going to be interesting to juggle and manage, but things will work out. We also reset the area, so both me and Elder Snow are brand new. We’re in this to figure it out together. It’ll also be his first time being Zone Leader, so I’ll be helping him out and supporting him in these new Zone Leadership responsibilities. I’ve received many reports that we have the nicest apartment in the mission, so that’s super exciting! Definitely going to be quite the step up; it’s kind of keeping me on edge, I don’t know what’s coming. All these blessings are coming in, I sure hope nothing crazy tragic happens. But I’m incredibly grateful for all of the change. I really felt it last transfer, like my whole mission is going to change so much; it’s almost like starting a new mission. I’m excited to see what the future holds. And Elder Snow is so awesome, I’m looking forward to the rest of the transfer working with him. Also, our area is absolutely massive! We have a friend that lives about a seven hour drive away from us. Luckily almost everyone lives pretty close to us, it’s just crazy how big these ward boundaries are–hence the two wards. But you know it’s pretty awesome because we can still meet with those that live super far on Zoom.

Sunday Best

Church was pretty awesome! Also pretty tiring, since we cover two wards, we went to the sacrament meeting for both of the wards. And we had ward councils for both of them as well. One of the wards was even planning on doing a ward huddle right after– which I thought was super unnecessary but glad they canceled it. We didn’t really have much to report on at all since we just arrived, they were teasing us because of it haha but we’ll have a lot more next time.

Planning Day

Well since we are both new here we gotta figure out the area and everything. So today was a pretty big day to plan. I believe the area has a lot of potential. I’m hoping that we’d be able to tap into some of that. I was looking through the Preach My Gospel app and we have so many people that were previously on date. Some of these people haven’t been contacted in a while. So we are going to reach out and see if we can get things going again.

Untapped Potential

The social media sisters sent a message to the whole mission– and it sounds like if we aren’t able to increase our teaching rate for our referrals the church is going to stop paying for ads in our mission. Which is kind of a big deal, so we are all going to work together on getting that up. These referrals are quickly becoming our number one source of finding, and I’ve seen so much success from it. When we were doing Preach My Gospel mentoring sessions, the hope was that they would train the new missionaries and the trainers to switch their mindset in their finding. A lot of missionaries that are coming in are stuck in the old stigma of finding–where you have to knock doors and meet everyone in public. Even a lot of missionaries that are still out do that. We have so many people in our Preach My Gospel apps. People that have met with missionaries before. People that may have been busy and aren’t busy any more. People that may have initially not been interested but may be now. And with referrals we have people knocking at our doors wanting to meet us. No longer do we have to go searching for people. People will find us through the technology that the Lord has blessed us with to make the gathering of Israel from the 4 corners of the earth possible. The magnitude of how important this Facebook page is and the ads that we run on it cannot be overstated. And I’m not the only one that sees it, there’s plenty of amazing missionaries in this mission that understand this. We just need to help get the rest of the mission on board. We truly live in the fullness of times, the work is accelerating, the brethren are preparing us, and we need to keep up. The urgency continues to rise. And with the rise of AI translation technology, we truly will be able to reach every nation, kindred, and tongue.