📦 Boxing Day 📦

Today was boxing day, which to my knowledge is basically another Black Friday that Canada celebrates. So I guess you can imagine what we did today. Yeah we did a lot of shopping. My companion got some Christmas money so he was eager to spend it. We headed over to House of Cards to check and see what was on sale. Basically, most of everything in the store was on sale, which is pretty awesome. They had a table full of Magic the Gathering decks that were half off. So I pulled the trigger and bought one, I knew I was probably not going to find a deal like this for quite a while. My companion bought a Lord of the Rings deck which was pretty awesome. Now I own Magic cards, I never could’ve saw myself buying these things before haha. But now that I’m playing it, I’m starting to see some of the appeal.

👥 Many, many, contacts 👥

The referrals are speeding up again. Staying on top of messaging them all and keeping track of all the contacts has been stressful. But I’m going to continue to try to do my best. We were informed at District Council that our transfer day is being pushed back. So I guess I get an extra 6 days of being trained, so that’s pretty sweet. Anyways, doing all of our contacts has been difficult. I tend to overcomplicate things and make it more difficult for myself to write messages. But I donno, I’ve kinda done that with all aspects of missionary work. I just feel like I’m not cut out for it. But it’s okay, I just gotta keep learning and be willing to make mistakes in doing so.

📱The Box of Phones 📱

We headed to the mission office and we were given a whole box of mission phones and sim cards. Cause I’m the new mission phone guy. So yeah we returned to the apartment with a buncha loaner phones that I gotta setup with the church protections software. We have some Samsung A23’s and S10e’s as well as a S9 and an older A5. You know, they are trusting us quite a bit with all of these loaner phones. We basically have unrestricted access that isn’t being tracked by the mission. So theoretically, we can access Google and download additional apps if we really wanted to. But I’m gonna try to be responsible and just get the phones setup with all the church protections stuff.

⚙️ Troubleshooting ⚙️

Well shoot, my companion’s phone alarm didn’t go off so we didn’t wake up till 8 this morning. Whoops! So we got up and ready to go a bit faster today. President’s been redirecting all the technical phone issues to me now. So we’ll be doing quite a bit more IT support. And the other tech guy (Elder Yamashita) will continue to reprogram the missionary contact syncing program. So far we’ve received two technical issues that we are working to resolve with the other missionaries. It’s always a pain trying to troubleshoot problems over the phone. It’s so much easier to fix them when I have the phone right in front of me. But it’s all good, we’ll figure these things out. Sadly we weren’t able to meet with one of our friends today. So instead I got to work on all the phones. I began to factory reset the devices and reconfigure Church Protections on them. A lot of the phones were still logged into an old missionary account. The office wasn’t able to login to them without a password. Luckily I was able to get the devices to their bios screen and wipe them from there. It took some trial and error because the different models use different button combinations to get them there. But after a couple hours, I was able to get them all wiped and rolling with MaaS360. After all of that I began to pop in all the sims, testing out what works and what doesn’t. I put each sim card on a sticky note with their number and status. We also received 4 new sim cards that we can activate as needed. The assistants gave us a call that night asking us how many working sim cards we have. As they called it, I was already in the process of figuring that out. We ended up with 5 working sims. We’re thinking that they are probably opening up quite a few areas next transfer, so that’ll be interesting to see; hence the need for working sim cards haha. Also my companion has been such a great example haha, he grabbed one of the phones, logged into it with his personal email and downloaded Pokemon Go. To be fair the phone’s model wasn’t supported by Church Protections, so that kinda enticed him to do it. So yeah, he’s been catching a few Pokemon haha. We ended off the night with another lesson with the Davis'. It was good; we shared a part of the Sermon on the mount with them. The message was about seeking the Kingdom of God first and He’ll provide for us.

👍 Sundays are Great 👍

Church was pretty great today, Jordan Prasad had his homecoming talk; he just got back from the Winnipeg Canada mission. We also had some of our friends come to church today! It was too bad one of the buses our friend was taking came a bit late but he was able to make it towards the end. We got to chat with him a bit more after church ended and it sounds like he’s interested in coming to church again next week. I also had a neat little spiritual experience after the first hour we were walking around the chapel, figuring out who we needed to talk to. My companion turned towards me and asked me who I thought we needed to talk to. He asked me what the spirit was telling me. Immediately, this guy that walked right past us came to my mind. I didn’t recognize him. I assumed he was on his way about to leave, but he was actually chatting with Brother Prasad. We then realized that this guy was previously taught by the sister missionaries in our area. We actually tried to meet with him before, but he was busy. Anyways, before we knew it Brother Prasad had put us in a room and we were talking about the Restoration, faith, prophets, the Book of Mormon, and all the things. It was awesome! Brother Prasad is an amazing teacher; he has so much character and charm. He’s an absolute legend at missionary work and you can tell how much he loves it. Our friend actually had a baptismal date before, but it didn’t happen because he moved and we lost contact with him. But now he has moved back and he’s getting ready! It’s crazy, he’s actually already been taught everything, he’s just at the point where we are helping him prepare for baptism. It was such a great teaching experience! I’m glad I was able to follow the spirit and meet with him.

Spiritual Thought 🙏

“Whatever questions or problems you have, the answer is always found in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.” -The Answer Is Always Jesus Christ by President Russel M. Nelson