So sorry I missed the last email so we gonna do another double week email. This email comprises of 3/26-4/9.

Transfers: I’m gonna miss those Elders

Today was a very busy day, and one with mixed emotions. We dropped off Elder Hanson and Elder Lopez at the ferry terminal. I’m sure gonna miss those Elders, but they are gonna do some amazing work in Victoria. We made our way back to the mission office and gave two trainings as well as did some administrative work for transfers. I’m actually really surprised how well our first training went. It was for all the new missionaries that just came in and we just shared about using technology to share the gospel. The message seemed well received so that was good. After that we had a training that we gave at the trainers meeting. I definitely was a lot less prepared for that, I wish we had more time beforehand to prepare. But it wasn’t too bad so that was good I guess. Things have just been so busy, we didn’t have very much time at all to plan for two trainings. The transfer travel part of transfers went really well today. Everyone was able to get to where they needed to go and our travel plans worked out well. Unfortunately, we did run into a lot of issues with transfers because the teaching areas in imos were not configured correctly. We have new assistants that are still getting in the groove of things and they didn’t realize that’s something they needed to do. Elder Evans and I tried to help them out without overstepping our assignment. We had many calls from other missionaries that day because that’s something that they thought we could fix. So we just forwarded that information to the assistants and tried to help where we could. Quite a few missionaries weren’t able to have access to Preach My Gospel a day or two after transfers because of that, and I believe Elder Kuta (our mission vehicle coordinator) was struggling to work out vehicles and stuff because imos wasn’t up-to-date either. But that’s okay, we got everything sorted out and now we are chilling.

Dang, I realize that my emails sound super administrative and not as spiritual as I’d like. I’ll try to focus on the spiritual side of things, but I’m mostly just throwing the administrative side in here for me to look back on. Hopefully they aren’t too boring :P

Easter Sunday! 🙏

Brothers and Sisters, we have made it to Easter Sunday! I’ve been looking forward to today for a bit. We’ve been inviting a lot of the inactive members and our friends to church with print-out flyers, so fingers crossed we can help get more people there! We went to church and it was super-duper awesome! Very spiritually-filled, and I loved how they did a fast and testimony meeting this Sunday. (They moved it a week back cause fast and testimony Sunday would’ve landed on general conference next week.) Everyone’s testimonies were so focused on Jesus Christ and so many people got up and bore their testimonies' it was amazing! Elder Wolsey of the area seventy persided and Elder Evans was telling me that when you preside your job is to observe the needs of the congregation as you are standing in place of the Savior. Our testimony meeting went a couple minutes over because he felt the need that there was someone else that needed to bear their testimony. And it wasn’t like there was a bunch of time in-between people getting up, people were like right after the other. I was going to try to bear my testimony but we were already out of time. But it was really inspiring to me that he was observing the needs of those around them and in-tune with the Spirit to decide to let the meeting run over. May we all try to be more observant in our lives and follow the whisperings of the Spirit as we do so. Sometime after church we decided to continue to visit less-active members. We first visited Brother Davison, he’s retired and is a super nice guy. He’s just struggling a bit after the loss of his wife a year ago. He just lives in an old-folks home and honestly we think he just really needs someone to talk to. So we’ve just been making an effort to visit him some more. After that visit we met this lady just outside. She just approached us and was wondering what church we were a part of. After we told her she said that she thinks she heard of our church, but she wasn’t sure from where she heard it. She was super nice and said she’d love to visit our church sometime. We gave her a card and we’re looking forward to seeing her soon! Looking back on it, I kinda wish we were able to get her number. But I have faith she’ll reach out to us. We visited with this one guy and he and his family seemed really sweet. I really felt like that whole interaction was very inspired by the Holy Ghost. It was probably one of the most normal and natural door knocking interactions that I’ve had on my mission. Usually it’s a lot more difficult for me to create conversation and come up with inspired questions, but they were just flowing through the conversation. I got to know him a lot better, and shared a brief testimony about attending church. I asked him if he’d be interested in hearing more spiritual messages with us and he agreed so we gave him a pass-along card. Anyways, I’m pretty happy we saw some success today. Sadly we didn’t see very many of our friends come to church on Sunday, but the interactions that we had after church has helped me feel more successful.

Planning Zone Conference Training 📝🤔

We did a lot of planning and had a meeting with President. We have another presentation that we are preparing for all the Zone Conferences this transfer. President Gill was thinking we’ll keep doing Preach My Gospel training. I wasn’t entirely sure what we should do our training on. We went through quite a few ideas like Weekly Planning in PMG and Device Safety with Device Audits. After a lot of consideration and prayers the Spirit impressed upon me that we need to focus our presentation on filling out baptismal forms. It seems like that’s something that gets overlooked and I’ve heard a good portion of missionaries struggle to get it filled out and everything correct. So we’re gonna buckle down and throw together a presentation. Hopefully it goes well. 🤞

Gangster Sandwiches 🥪 and Duncan Stay 🏕

We ferried over to Nanaimo with the Assistants for Zone Conference! It was actually my first time doing the drive on ferry which was pretty cool. The assistants just took their car over. Once we arrived at Nanaimo we stopped by this super awesome restaurant. It was so good, I totally forgot the name. 😂 Anyways we had a little something called the “Gangster Sandwich.” It was so good, 10/10 would recommend again. We met up with another set of Elders there, Elder Ott and Elder Carwin. They took us to their apartment in Duncan afterwards to stay the night before Zone Conference. We snagged some nice pictures with them on the way so that was pretty sweet.

Nanaimo Zone Conference 🎵

We had yet another wonderfully spiritually filled Zone Conference. There was a musical number at the beginning, and holy cow that was an amazing performance! Words cannot explain how spiritually filled those musical expressions were. President Gill gave it three wows. The missionaries here are so talented. President and Sister Gill were like wow, we should have that recorded. Little did they know Elder Evans in the back row recorded the whole thing with his mighty phone mic. Elder Evans comes clutch once again! President and Sister Gill had an amazing presentation about teaching our friends to the temple and beginning with the end in mind. The Assistants also knocked it out of the park with their presentation on My Covenant Path which was so needed! The lunch took quite a bit more time than expected, so when we got around to the time with our training we had to shorten it quite a bit. But it turned out way better than I thought! I’m glad that Elder Evans and I were able to make the message really Spiritual, even though we are discussing many application based training.

194 Years 🌄

Today marks a special day because it’s my second time watching general conference as a set apart missionary. I gotta say general conference just keeps getting better. Today also marks 194 years since Joseph Smith received all of the Priesthood keys to restore the church.

Victoria Temple! 🇨🇦

Today was quite the remarkable day. We went to the mission home to watch a session of general conference. Unfortunately our friend wasn’t able to come and watch it with us. We were planning on doing his baptismal interview right after the session too, but he had some family stuff come up so we’re going to try to do his interview tomorrow. I loved the amazing messages shared at general conference and especially the emphasis on covenants and building a personal connection with the Savior. We also got a temple announced in Victoria British Columbia!! The work’s moving forward in BC! It’s amazing to see the Gathering of Israel unfold Once the temple is built we will have two temples in the mission. Another cool fact is that Victoria is the capital city in British Columbia; which is kinda weird cause you would think that Vancouver would be.

Social Media Inspiration 💡

We had a lot of planning today, but ended off with a bang. We met with the STL’s and started figuring things out with Zone Conference training. We were told to focus our training on chapter 8 of PMG which is about making goals and plans. I don’t know how but it always seems like that is the goto topic for zone conference trainings. I’ve seen it so much more than any other topic. But that’s okay, I believe that’s something that we all can improve and do better at; so we’ll just keep seeing trainings on that till we finally figure it out. Planning took a bit to get the wheels turning, but I believe at the end we had a good idea on how we were going to present the training. After that we headed back to the office for a Technology Council meeting. The meeting went a lot quicker than usual, but it was very spiritually filled and effective. The Social Media sisters had a big zoom meeting with all of the missionaries that are assigned to do social media work and many of them shared great thoughts and insights. President Gill said at the end of it that he was very grateful for the meeting and council because he received a revelation for the social media page from the thoughts shared. After the social media meeting, he shared the revelation with us. But before that he began with a question, he asked: “What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear First Light (the Facebook page name)?” We discussed it for a bit and then he shared that he had this very clear inspiration that we need to change the page name to “Christ’s First Light.” Which is so cool, because just last week, Elder Evans and I were talking about the exact same thing.

Road Trip to Kelowna 🚗💨

Road trip, whoot whoot!! We are driving 4 hours all the way up to Kelowna for Zone Conference! It’s been pretty awesome on our drive we saw all of the seasons of weather. We saw the shining sun ☀️, pouring rain 🌧, and snowing winter ❄️ wonderland. I feel like I’m on Spring Break right now. It’s kinda weird. We listened to some more of general conference in the car and now I’m reminiscing about when my family and I would go on a road trip at the same time and listen to conference.

Spiritual Thought 🙏

“12 The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.” -Romans 13:12