Week-14
Fall back with daylight savings has finally happened, and it's both good and bad. We get a bit more sleep now, but we also get less daylight for finding. Ups and downs of missionary work, I guess. It just means I have to find a better use for the evenings.
MONDAY started off pretty early for Elder Holbrook and me. Apparently, an Elder who had been here months ago had signed up for this area to clean the temple, and the sign-up stays with the area and not the missionary. It was pretty cool to see the amount of care they put into cleaning the temple and all the different rooms in it that you'd normally not see. After we finished up at the temple, we went shopping for the week and got ready for P-day. P-day is really different now that I'm in a bigger zone. Before, it was just basketball every day, but now they do a bunch of different sports, board games, and card games.
TUESDAY, we got all our planning for the week done and then headed out. We actually went tracting with one of the youth from our ward that day to help encourage and excite them for their own mission one day. They're definitely motivated to serve one day because they told us that they were going to be dressed up as a missionary for Halloween later that evening. Since it was Halloween, the mission president didn't want us to be out on the street because of all the little kids running around. So we went and got some fast food for dinner and then headed back to the apartment for the day. When we got there, the mission had given us a couple of talks by President Nelson to study so that we could still be using our time productively, which was pretty cool. The talks were his most recent one from general conference, "Think Celestial," and an older one called "Enter into Thy Closet."
WEDNESDAY, we got some really surprising news about the mission. Due to the speed at which the work is moving throughout the world, 36 new missions are being made worldwide. And one of them just so happens to be the El Paso, Texas mission, which is currently in my mission. So around mid next year, my mission will be split into the New Mexico Albuquerque mission and the El Paso Texas mission. After we got that news, we had lunch with a member. While we were talking with him, he shared his own conversion story about how he joined the church, and it's so cool to me to see just how powerful the gospel is in changing someone's life.
THURSDAY was mostly just a bunch of tracting in the morning and afternoon, with us getting a couple of return appointments that we hope don't fall through. Other than that, not much happened until the evening. In the evening, we had a meeting with the stake president to introduce all the new missionaries to the stake. On the way there, basically as we were pulling up to the house, we saw what we thought was a dog in the road. As we got closer, we realized that it was not a dog, but actually a coyote. It's kinda crazy to me that the first time I've seen one wasn't out in the mountains, but in the middle of a neighborhood in the city. During the meeting, the stake president asked us all to share how we felt about the Book of Mormon. It was awesome hearing all the testimonies of the Book of Mormon and then being able to share my own.
FRIDAY was another early morning. We woke up pretty early that day so that we could go and play pickleball with the social media leaders at the stake center and then headed to their apartment to get ready for zone council. It was pretty fun because it was the first time I've played pickleball, and I also got to see Elder Whetten again. After we had zone council, which took really long since we needed to set up goals for the month.
SATURDAY, we had some service leveling a backyard and laying down rocks for one of our friends out here. It was pretty fun being able to do some service and see the progress we made on it.
SUNDAY was the first Sunday of the month, so we had fast and testimony meeting in church, and we were able to hear a lot of people go up and bear their testimonies. It was amazing how strong the spirit was and how much you could tell these people love the Lord.
My thought for the week comes from Helaman 12:7-8, which says, "7 O how great is the nothingness of the children of men; yea, even they are less than the dust of the earth. 8 For behold, the dust of the earth moveth hither and thither, to the dividing asunder, at the command of our great and everlasting God." It's a bit of a harsher chapter, but I think that it holds a lot of meaning in it. People can be prideful, thinking only of themselves and listening only to their own will, but the only way to truly get anywhere and to have lasting happiness is to be humble and willing to serve the Lord in all things.
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