November 2010

Sorry I'm not that great at letter writing.  But just talking to you every week in emails helps me figure things out. 
First to answer questions that you have asked in your letters. 
1. Primary program... I saw Crystal Ridge.  3rd Wards, and 17th is next Sunday.  Crystal Ridge had like a ton of kids, enough to fill the stage and have extra seats set up, huge!!
2. Letter to Bishop & Vicki- I couldn't read his handwriting so I deciphered it as Becky & Vicki.  I was like, that's wierd, oh well... whatever
3. Tell Donna Monroe hi for me!
4. James ordained as an Elder!  He'll be gone before we know it.
5. You should know the hand motions to Book of Mormon Stories!!
6. Yes we had a time change.  We love sleeping in!
7. Thanksgiving... no idea we will find out on Thursday.  We had Canadian Thanksgiving on Oct 12.


Sorry I'm not good at writing, email is easier and I know that I don't put details in my emails alot, so hopefully you like the series of letters that you will get soon.

I am doing great!  Absolutely freezing.  I seriously want to move somewhere with no snow... or a little, and it doesn't get below zero!  Not a lot is going on here.  We have 1 investigator, Sandi, who is 11 so all we are waiting on is her Mom's permission.  She is way solid though.  She has only missed church 2 times in the past 8 months.


Things have been way fun here in the west, I love the Elders I’m serving around and Sis. Riley is awesome.  I love and miss you too and don’t count the days too slow… Christmas will be here before you know it. 

We are living with the Relief Society president of 17th ward, and we are also in 3rd ward here in Calgary. We also went service tracting this week and hung out with the elders in our district, it’s fun cause one of them is from England and another is from New Zealand and so we have been teaching them AESL (American English as a second language) so it’s hilarious.  We also had to try and figure out how to cook pancakes (chocolate chip pancakes) using a cookie sheet...... it didn’t work out too amazingly.  The reason for no pan was we were cooking at the church that way we could be there with the elders since they aren’t allowed in our apartment (or our members house that we live with) and the church did not have a frying pan or skillet of any kind, only pots and cookie sheets.  Oh and we learned how to play rugby (kind of) its way fun.

Yes, I did get your letter and yes we did teach someone. He was introduced by one of his friends to the church and so we met with him and taught him lesson 1 (Dave from Colombia) I had to do the first vision so after I told it he stopped me and made me repeat myself...dude talk about one of the strongest spiritual moments of my life! So I retold it and he talked about how he felt like he used to feel the spirit all the time and now he felt like it comes and goes and it was incredible, he didn’t accept to be baptized but I know that it won’t be too much longer and he will, we had to pass him off to the Spanish elders but that’s ok we will be updated.   

Do you remember that guy from Colombia that I talked about last week that had me repeat the first vision? Well he has been meeting with the Spanish elders and they called us the other night and told us that he accepted to be baptized next month. So that is exciting, hopefully it is somewhere where we can go and see it.  This week was good; we went to the family history center and learned how to get started on our family history so we might be going back again. 

Glad to hear that you have invested in a better tree cause that old one gave us nothing but grief....and it has been snowing here since Tuesday and has been in the negatives. We haven’t taught anyone new and the only interesting thing that happened was us having dinner with a family yesterday and the Dad’s crazy mom was there (she’s from Germany) and she kept trying to stuff us with food.  I got an email from Mumu and she sounds pretty disappointed that I’m thinking about not coming, I’m sorry to get her hopes up, I shouldn’t have said anything. It was a pretty sad email....I didn’t mean to hurt her by wanting to and then not wanting to.  I feel like I need to be in the Salt Lake Valley for some reason...I think I want to move there when I get done with my mission

Oh and can you send some Butterfinger in the Christmas box? The only thing I can say is that Elder Wallace was talking about it last week and I was like, dude that sounds soooo good! So if you send some, I can have some and I will share with him since they don’t have that in New Zealand.... yes Sis. Chase is my new companion and she is the one that I was on the plane with, and I spent a lot of time with when I was in Lethbridge on P-days.

One of the miracles this week is that last night we headed to our dinner appointment and we turned at an intersection and Elder Wallace called us a few minutes later and said, "yeah, literally 5 seconds after you went through the intersection there was a major car accident, like a car was flipped on top of a van." ........so yeah that was a little rattling. We also had an experience where we had set up an appointment with an investigator and both of us had a really bad feeling about it. So we called and cancelled an hour or two before we were supposed to be there.  We immediately felt better about it. So I don’t know, but we were grateful for that prompting even though we don’t know why...

Mom:  “oh my gosh..... that really struck me hard.... I am so grateful for prayer and for you doing the right things and for being watched over.  Continue to listen to those promptings and the Lord won’t lead you astray.  Oh my it just gives me goose pimples!!  I love you so much!  Always remember that!”