The Exchange Experience and the 'Secret Message'

Yup, we did exchanges with the zone leaders! It was pretty awesome! I went with Elder Livingston and my comp went with Elder Evans. I gotta pack my stuff for the day and head off to Richmond. We also drove two other Elders cause they are flying out to Smithers the next day. We had a super fun time getting them to the airport in the morning. I had a nice chat with one of the Elders that’s leaving to Smithers. Elder Yamashita is super into cybersecurity and software development. So that was great talking to him!

On the exchange we had a lesson and the person we are teaching perferred that we would call on Zoom. So we headed over to the church and did our virtual lesson. It went pretty well! Isn’t it amazing that we can feel the Holy Ghost together even though we are in completely different locations! Elder Livingston almost extended a baptismal date, but we think that we should meet in person prior to that. So that’s pretty cool! That’s my first time where we really considered extending that while teaching. On our way back from the church we talked to this guy that was working out in his garage. He was very nice, Elder Livingston was asking about his weights cause he’s looking to buy more. He had like the crazy fancy adjustable dumbells that he was showing us. He didn’t speak too much English, but Google Translate’s got our back! Anyways, super chill guy, he told us we were welcome to use his gym in the evenings.

We had a meeting with all the new missionaries over Zoom. It was great, we talked about our friends and bounced ideas off of each other on how we could more effectively teach them. It was great being able to hear all the new missionaries experiences.

Their was this epic self-reliance fair organized by the stake that we attended. We were invited to participate in that, and it was a great experience. We just had a booth where we shared our culture with people. We had Book of Mormon’s in different languages and even a section of the Book of Mormon in brail! The thing’s huge, and it’s only like 1/8th of the Book of Mormon haha. We even had a raffel! People could put in their names for a change to recieve The Family: A Proclamation to the World. Overall we thought the self-reliance fair was great! Anything from maintaining vehicles to sowing to making an effective resume, and food storage, they had it all.

And before I knew it, it was already fast Sunday again, time flies! We freaked out cause of the time shift. Wew are one hour ahead now, luckily the alarms on our phones are synced with the time. We just got super scared when we looked at the time on the oven cause it was one hour ahead. We thought just for a second that we totally missed our meeting. But everything worked out and we were fine.

We got a bit wet today. We took a bus to go finding and didn’t think to take an umbrella. Needless to say we got pretty wet after we walked to some thrift stores. But it was totally cool cause we got some KFC out of it. A really nice member gave us some giftcards, so we got some sweet deals at KFC.

We had a lesson with some more members where we shared what we like to call the “secret message.” We organized this “secret message” with the Elder’s Quorum President. The secret message is about inviting members to open up their homes and share Christ-like love by inviting friends or other members to the home. It’s about strengthening each other, uplifting each other, sharing the gospel with each other, and becoming unified with each other. Anyways we believe this is a really great message that we all can benefit from.

Anyways I just want to close my thoughts by saying the mission’s been hard. Not for the reasons I expected, it’s been hard because I know that I’m capable. Yet I continue to fall short. Despite my best efforts, I know that I’m capable of so much more. I’m hoping that I can reach that. Because I know that I can. I just need to be patient in my times of trial and continue to learn and grow from these experiences. I need to press forward with faith, and open my mouth even if I didn’t know of the htings I must say beforehand. I need to trust in the Lord and everything will fall into place.