Temple Day

Our last P-day was temple trip day!! So it’s automatically the highlight of the week! We did an endowment session and they had just updated the video! If you haven’t done endowments recently, I definitely invite you to do so. The covenants we make in the temple are so powerful and are such a great blessing that we have in this life. I was kinda nervous cause I just so happened to end up to be right next to President Gill for the whole temple experience. But it was so awesome to see him at the temple with us. He really shows that he really loves each and every single one of the missionaries.

The Post Temple Experience 🥤

Just after the awesomeness of the temple, the unthinkable happened. It all began when we were getting our lunch with the district. I initiated the filling process of my root beer, in great excitement for my food. I then began sealing the plastic lid on top of the cup. As I was pressing the edges of the lid to the roof of the cup… boom disaster struck!! Before I knew it there was root beer pouring everywhere. I have not once in all my experience with fast food ever seen a cup do something like this before. The entire side of the plastic cup ripped in half upon the pressure of the lid. One of the Elders, Elder Sachadina rushed to help me. He grabbed some napkins and assisted me in cleanup. What an absolute legend, thank you so much Elder Sachadina! That was some pure Christ-like love right there. We got everything cleaned up and honestly the whole temple experience overshadows this one. Massive thanks to Elder Sachadina for being a great friend!

Interviews

Alright, alright, alright, we had interviews with the one and only, legend himself, President Gill. The interview that I had with him went pretty well. Let’s just say that the Lord is unraveling his work for me. It’s kinda crazy actually, cause while I was away from my trainer at the temple, President Gill started to chat with him about what’s going to happen in the future and what he needs to do to prepare me. So yeah, lot’s of crazy stuff! I want to be the best missionary I can, I want to be able to fill the great responsibility I have as a missionary, I want to be what God needs me to be. I want to live up to my expectations, my trainer’s expectations, my family’s expectations, the expectations of my ancestors, and everyone back at home who strengthened and supported me. But most of all I want to live up to the expectations of my Heavenly Father. Anyways, I’m excited for the future, I’m excited to be apart of the greatest work on the earth today.

Tons of Traffic & District Council 🚗

We were late to district council, there was so much traffic. Everytime it’s 3pm and we are going to Richmond they close off like half the lanes and have them merge. So yeah that was super duper fun! But it’s okay we made it! Our poor district leader and his companion got stuck behind a train and ended up having to drive almost two hours. So it was quite the interesting district council. We just ended up doing a video call with them, so we made it work. They eventually got their at the end. But that was probably the wackiest district council I’ve had haha! Elder Evans, one of the zone leader’s had a quick chat with us afterwards. He’s super nice, he was just telling us that we are doing a great job with all the referrals and work that we have. He told us that President Gill assigned Elder Nelson and me here because he knows that we are more than capable of doing this tremendous amount of work. Anyways, that was super nice to hear. We’ll keep grinding through trying to teach 100 people haha.

The Referral Video Project 🎥

Today was actually Black Friday, we mistakenly thought last Friday was Black Friday haha. So we hit up some more game stores. I’m not exactly ready to take the plunge to buy some expensive Magic cards but they were cool to look at. Also we had Elder Evans and one of the APs, Elder Martin call us. They were just giving us a little project that we can do to help lighten the massive load of referrals that we need to message. I think President is trying to tap into my video production skills a bit. The idea is that we’ll make a quick video that will help teach members how to contact referrals. Then we can push some of our load onto the members and have them assist in those efforts. I’m looking forward in helping create that. We don’t really know too much in regards to the project, we were just informed that we’ll be working with the social media leaders on it. More details will be shared soon but right now we are just thinking about it. Honestly I have no idea how we are going to make this work in our schedule, but we’re going to try to do our best! On top of that we also just got assigned to be interaction missionaries. That means that we are going to be messaging people that interact with our mission’s Facebook page. We will pray to each person that we respond to and be led and guided by the Spirit asking them something in regards to what they interacted with. Our list of things just keeps expanding! But we’re gonna do our best to keep up this great work!

Spirit Guided Lesson

We’ve been meeting with a member lately and he’s been going through some stuff so we are trying to help him spiritually. He’s a super nice guy, he made us some really yummy chicken and rice! We were teaching him the Plan of Salvation and I made the dumbest mistake and jumped over covering Adam and Eve, but my companion got me covered; so it’s all good. I’m just glad that the Spirit was there during the lesson and helped guide us in teaching him. My companion just pulled up a scripture that came to his mind. Even though we didn’t have it planned for the lesson, which was great.

Epic Car Radio Project 🖥

We also met with the Davis' again and that was great. Paul was showing us his epic car radio media player project! He put a Raspberry Pi 3 in a car radio and he has an Arduino that communicates with the display and the Pi. He has a bunch of music loaded on the Pi with all sorts of playlists that you can control with the radio. The metadata for each song shows up on the display as well, which is super awesome! He showed us his setup with MPD and his Python script that receives inputs through the Serial ports. Man, computer projects like this make me so excited haha!

The Sabbath Day 🙏

It’s Sunday everyone, and it was amazing! Everything just happened all at once today. Where do I even start? One referral that we just received was interested in attending church came today. It was great seeing him, he seems like a super nice guy. He definitely seems like he wants to continue going to church which is great! I’m excited to get to know him some more in the future! He also wanted to sit through second hour so he was at Elders Quorum with us too. My companion was giving further explanation on the things that were being taught so that he wasn’t completely in the dark; which was great! Paul was also at Elder’s Quorum!! This is the first time I’ve seen him stay for second hour. Which is so good, we are excited to see that he is progressing. I also got to chat with him a bit more about his car radio project, so that was pretty cool! The Elders Quorum was looking for some extra volunteers to pass along church tour fliers with us. And the absolute legend himself Paul said that he could help out! Wow, I’m happy that he’s willing to come to Elders Quorum and get involved! Also one of our friends that’s been coming to church almost every week now just informed some of the members that she wants to get baptized! That’s crazy, we’ve only had one lesson with her so far, so now we are trying to meet with her more! We are so happy that she wants to make her first covenant with Heavenly Father. Now we just gotta make sure we cover all the lessons with her and make sure that she’s ready. I’m looking forward to meeting with her more!

Epic Fireside 🔥

We finished off this Sunday with a bang with the “This I Believe Fireside!” These fireside’s consist of new members sharing their conversion stories and their testimonies on Jesus Christ. This one was led by the Spanish missionaries, so the whole meeting was in Spanish, luckily they had translators and translation equipment. We invited our friend Sherry and she came!! It was so great, she was very excited to come. The fireside was phenomenal, there were so many great thoughts! Anyways it’s crazy, the work just keeps getting busier. All of a sudden we had so many people messaging us back and our referral list just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Especially with the Christmas season coming up, it’s a great time to be apart of the Lord’s work.