Bell, Rigdin PT

This week felt like it went by really quickly for me. Probably because we had to spend almost half of it stuck inside because Elder Shawcroft got some kind of stomach bug, which was no fun. MONDAY was the first zone preparation day since basketball was banned, so I was pretty interested to see what everyone was going to do. Unsurprisingly, the stuff we spent the most time doing was volleyball and pickleball. TUESDAY we did a lot more service than I would have liked to, but we gotta serve as the Savior did somehow. After we got done with all our planning for the week, we went and helped stack wood for a member of our congregation for a bit. We were able to get some tracting done that day, but then some woman who speaks very little English had us come over and help set up lights around her porch for almost 2 hours. WEDNESDAY we had exchanges with our district leader, and I went out to Española for the day. It's always interesting going out to Española because you can either be in the...

This has been the first full week of my seventh transfer, and I'd say it's been a fun one. I'm glad to still be serving with Elder Shawcroft here in the Taos ward and to be able to keep teaching the people. MONDAY, because one of the areas in our district was whitewashed, meaning both missionaries there were replaced, they needed more time to get their apartment set up, so they decided not to come to district P-day. Because of that, the district decided to just do separate stuff this time around. Elder Shawcroft and I decided to just stay in our area and play a bunch of board and card games. It was nice to have a really calm and relaxed P-day without having to do a bunch of traveling. TUESDAY, we had some odd service to help out with. Someone who missionaries had tried teaching in the past but marked as someone to not contact anymore because they just bash the missionaries had reached out to us a couple of days before, asking for help putting bags of dirt onto his roof so i...

This week had quite a few interesting things happen for a couple of different reasons, with the biggest reason being that we had transfers! Monday, we had the last zone p-day of the transfer, and it was a pretty good one. We had new senior missionaries in the zone who decided to come and hang out, so we ended up playing a good amount of pickleball with them. It was really fun because they were apparently a coach back home and were really good at pickleball. At the end of the day, during the mission's family home evening call, I got to hear my last companion, Elder Stanger, give his departing testimony before he goes home. We also got a slightly menacing announcement from President Edwards that a lot of people were going to be moved this transfer. Tuesday, we headed up from Taos to a little middle-of-nowhere town called Questa to help a member who is moving back for the summer drain their well house that flooded. That took about 2 hours, and then we just spent the rest of the day in...

I hope you all have had a great week. This weekend was General Conference, so all the missionaries in the zone have been pretty excited for this week. On MONDAY, we had a district P-day in Los Alamos, which is actually where the Manhattan Project took place. It was pretty cool because we got to see a lot of the houses they spent time in there and learn a bit more about the people who were a part of it. We even got to see the Oppenheimer house, which reminded me of all the memes from before my mission. TUESDAY, we spent most of the day tracting and trying to find new people to start teaching. Not much else happened, but we did see some elk while we were knocking on doors. On WEDNESDAY, we did more ditch digging. With all the snow melting, one of our members needed some help digging a ditch so that his septic tank didn't flood. It's pretty fun being able to help out with it, and it definitely gives us a solid workout. During the tracting time we had that day, we got kinda Bible b...

Happy Easter, everyone! I hope everyone was able to use this wonderful time to remember the Savior's love and sacrifice for each and every one of us. Monday, the weather still refuses to be normal and decided to give us a ton of snow. It was pretty crazy because some parts of our area only got a couple of inches and other parts got something like 2 feet of snow. We even got called out to a member's home to shovel snow off their back porch because they were worried the porch would collapse. Tuesday was a weird day because we did weekly planning as normal, but only had enough time to do maybe an hour of tracting before we had to head down to Santa Fe so we could carpool down to Albuquerque for the temple trip the next day. It was pretty fun because we got to spend some time with some of the missionaries I came in with, got to listen to a really interesting talk from our mission president, and hang out with the APs at their apartment. Wednesday, we got up early for the temple trip...