Week 28: Solvang

April 19, 2021

Had a very busy Monday, had to make some whitewash sheets, clean the car, fill out some MTV paperwork, and say goodbye to everyone we're teaching. These were the best and worst 3 months of my mission, funny how that works. The members will be just fine, and our people will progress. I'm ready to move on and get this next thing going. 

April 20, 2021

Met my new companion today, Elder Peterson. He's super cool, he's from Orem, born and raised, and we get along well already. He's been out just as long as me, so we'll both get to learn from each other. Solvang is a pretty sweet place, everything is Dutch themed, even the outside of our apartment building. Our area doesn't really have anything going on right now, so luckily we get to start from pretty much ground zero. I'm looking forward to this, I'm so much more prepared for a whitewash this time than last time. It's going to be some good, hard work, but I'm starting to enjoy that at this point. I'm going to have high faith and high hopes for this transfer. 

April 21, 2021

Had a very productive day here, we made some progress towards knowing what's going on here. We've discovered that there's not a lot of parks to contact at, so we'll need to get creative. We were able to meet with our Ward Mission Leader, and we have some good members here. We are actually covering about 4-5 small towns in this area, which are Solvang, Santa Ynez, Buellton, Los Olivos, and Ballard. It's always a little weird doing whitewashes, which is all I've done so far, but it's a good way to get good at learning on the fly. Elder Peterson's awesome and we have a lot in common, so that's also pretty nice. Day 2 went well, and I think it'll continue. 

April 22, 2021

Today was great, I've been enjoying the extra hour of personal study I've been getting everyday, because Elder Peterson has to do language study for when he goes to Tahiti. He has to speak French and Tahitian, so that's pretty crazy. But we did a bunch of finding today, and I got to whip out a little more Spanish today. I honestly might start learning some more, because there are a ton of Latinos around here. We've done dot-knocking, street contacting, park contacting, so we're getting up to speed. We had a member visit with the Swolgaard family, and Sister Swolgaard is actually the sister of Brother Beifuss back in Elk Ridge. And she has met Owen when he was over hanging out with Isabel. Small world. We have some awesome members here, they're very missionary minded. It was a much better day today, because we are getting to be a little more familiar with this place. 

April 23, 2021

Today was a good day, we made a lot more progress getting to know the members better. We have really awesome members here, it's a small community, but they all know people they have in mind that they want to share the Gospel with. They haven't had much success, but they really deserve it and they're working for it. Hopefully we can help that success come along. 

Elder Peterson continues to be awesome, haha he's literally like Hayden. This is a cool place, we contacted little in the Danish part of town, there's just a ton of tourists. But it's a cool place, I've found I like working in smaller towns, because it seems like there's more opportunity to find people that are low-income and the members are much more willing to share the Gospel. We had a district council today, and we've got great missionaries in our district. It's looking like a good transfer ahead. 

April 24, 2021

Had a good day, woke up at 6am to get to district exercise at 6:30. I think God is chastening me for complaining about a 15 minute drive by making it 30 haha. I'm liking this area so far, it's little dead, but we're slowly making steady progress. We were able to get a Spanish referral for someone named Marcos through a spiritual prompting we had, so it's nice to have those confirmations of your faith. We had Sherri not show up to our lesson tonight, so that was a bummer. We met with Brother Saunders, our ward mission leader, and his wife, and Brother Saunders is a genius. But we are still working our way up to getting some lessons taught. Kind of reminds me of the good old days in Wildwood Park Ward haha.

April 25, 2021

Today we finished our week off on a good note. We went to a neighborhood because we were impressed to go there, but there was no one around, so we were wondering why. Then as we were about to leave, but we decided to see if there were any gray dots to knock on. So we went to a nearby house where someone named Michelle lived, and she agreed to hear more about our message on Tuesday. So that's exciting, it's our first real traction we've been able to get. 

It feels so nice to have an idea of how to do things and to not be a new missionary anymore. I'm excited for the new week. We had a good church meeting today, the ward consists of about 6 or 7 big families and their extended families, so it's very tight-knit. It's honestly probably more secluded than Morro Bay was. But the Hay's had us over for a breakfast dinner tonight, and that was good. Reminds me of when we used to do that at home.