YSA Works Different

I’ve officially kind of settled into my new area. It’s Fraser Valley YSA, and man, I am totally not used to this at all. Since we are serving in a YSA, our area basically covers the whole lower-mainland. We cover from Abbotsford (Boston Bar) to Richmond. It’s totally crazy that we can drive pretty much anywhere. We’ll just have to be careful to not drive too many kilometers. There also hasn’t been any missionaries in the area for like a week, so there’s basically no plans in our schedule. Which makes things a bit difficult when we are both new to the area and have no idea what’s happening. But you know, we’ll figure this out, eventually.

It’s so blessed to serve so close to the temple. The YSA chapel is about right next to it. Just walking around the temple, and being in the area is pretty awesome. It definitely is a testament to me that temples bless all people in the area. The uplifting spirits and energy is very nice to be around.

We live in our four man apartment, currently with the (new) Portuguese elders: Elder Yamashita and Elder Araújo. They are quite the duo, lots of fun and personality haha. Never a dull moment haha. Also, when we arrived at the apartment, everything was gone. No food, no paper towels, no olive oil, no laundry detergent, pretty much everything that you would expect to be there wasn’t there. Elder Watkins really cleaned out this place before leaving. So we did a bit of shopping to get us to Tuesday.

First Lesson

Currently we are focusing on just getting into contact with our friends. There seems to be a lot of potential for the area, we just need to get it back into gear. We had a fun call with this guy named Tristan. He’s a super nice guy, and had a really good relationship with the Elders before us. He was willing to drive down a bit of a way to come and see us. We spent quite a bit of time with him because he really likes to chat, but I believe it was really worth getting to know him. He has some crazy religious background, but for the sake of privacy I can’t share here. But basically he was going down a very extreme religious path. He had a dream one day, of these very large closed gold and saphire gates. He then heard a voice, “if you keep going down this path, you will never enter into my Kingdom.” And ever since then he’s been changing his course. Pretty incredible. We invited him to read the Book of Mormon every day, and I look forward to meeting him again soon. This was also my first time where I’ve had a friend give us a church tour haha. We told him it was both our first time at that building, and so he got up and showed us around.

Farsi Class

I had no idea this was going on, but there’s quite a few missionaries that President Gill has asked to learn Farsi. Elder Blake (my companion) is one of them. And a member has just begun doing a Farsi class, each week and this is the third week of doing it. So we attended the class, and that was pretty neat. I had absolutely no idea what was going on, but there were a few other missionaries that were there for the first time as well. But remarkably, they picked up on learning it really quickly. The instructor was stunned, it was crazy. The gift of tongues is truly incredible.

First Sunday

This is my first time serving in a branch, so I’m used to seeing more people, but church as always was very nice. There was a potlock afterwards, which was such a tender mercy because we had no food haha. We got to meet and get to know a few members which was nice, and we had three friends come to church! Which is the highest it’s been in the past six weeks and we just got here. We had two friends come from Surrey, they were asking us a bunch of questions and seemed very curious. It sounds like they’ve been to church twice before in Albertia, so this wasn’t their first rodeo. Regardless, they asked us for a church tour after sacrament. We were like, of course, we barely know the building, but would be happy to show you around! They both will be going to a talent show activity, so we’ll plan on talking to them some more then. It’s definitely been a shift in terms of missionary work. It definitely seems like our main ways of finding are referrals from other missionaries, and activities. So we’re going to try to focus on that.