Week 64: Newbury Park

December 27, 2021

Today was a good day, just spent some time saying goodbye to everybody and having some fun. We've been here with some awesome missionaries, and I'll miss this area. We finished off the night packing and saying goodby to the members. I'm looking forward to Newbury Park, excited for what the future holds. Another transfer trickled by. 

December 28, 2021

Transfer day, it was the first time in six months that I've been transferred. Headed down in the mission van to the Wendy Drive building, and met Elder Larson there. We got started right away, and got some lost bikes stored for when we can take them next week. 

We did a few studies, and then hit the streets and had a good day of street contacting. We got a few numbers, met some really cool people, and were able to meet some more of our Zone. It's a much smaller Zone, only 16 of us, but I think that it'll be nice to get to minister one-by-one a little better. Excited for the future. 

December 29, 2021

Today was awesome. We had a super long social media training zoom from 10-12, and learned some really good stuff about how we can better do missionary work on Facebook. After that, we had some studies, and then did a ZLC with our district leaders and sister training leaders. We had to plan accordingly, because we've still been getting a ton of rain, and so finding has been a little hard. But I know the Lord can still help us out with finding people to teach. 

We were super, super blessed today. We had a part-member family that just moved back into the Ward, and they have three kids that we were able to start teaching! It was such a blessing, and they already know how to pray and they believe in God and everything. So bright times ahead. 

December 30, 2021

There was a lot of rain today, so we really utilized the time and planned out as much as we could. We had a lesson with Natisse, one of our friends who is on date for baptism for the 27th! Super excited for her, she is really awesome, and totally prepared to be baptized. We went from house to house and contacted in the rain, and were able to get a few potentials. We also made a bunch of calls, and set up some member visits. Nothing too crazy today, just a good, solid day of satisfying missionary work. Also, the power went out tonight, so pretty fun!

December 31, 2021

We had our district council today, we had Elders Alford, Schlensker, and Benner give discussions, and they all did awesome. Elder Benner loves to draw connections and scriptures to each other, and talks about some deeper stuff. 

We talked to a lot of nice people today, and even got invited to play some pickle ball with some people. We started teaching our friend Kyle, he's had a couple of losses happen in his life recently, and so we found him at just the right time to help him out with the Gospel. Other than that, we just had a night of a lot of social media work, because we had to be inside at 6:00pm, because it's New Year's Eve. 

Good year, I was able to enjoy an entire year of my life doing missionary work. Let's hear it for 2022.

January 1, 2022

Today we were able to play some pickle ball with the Westlake District, had some good fun. After some studies and some Panda Express for lunch, we went to a lesson with Paul. Paul is a really nice guy from South Africa, he's a Christian, and he's working on gaining a testimony of the Book of Mormon. So he's cruising through it, and going to read a chapter a day! 

We stopped by and saw a lot of people tonight, and the main thing that we had success in was member visits, which is the best kind of finding you can do for this kind of an area. 

We got some bad news tonight, we have to go into a kind of half-lockdown mode where we are going to do Zoom calls and limit district and zone meetings and activities and everything, just like we did last year around this time. Kind of depressing, but at the very least, we don't have to restrict our finding efforts. So our main goal now is to keep our Zone happy and motivated so that we can keep the work going forward. 

January 2, 2022

Today we went to church, and I was able to meet some more members of our ward. They are all awesome people, and they do so much for the missionary efforts. Our friend Natisse wasn't able to come to church, because she had a cough. I kind of had a cough too, and so our mission nurse said to stay home for the night. A huge bummer, we pretty much went crazy. And if it keeps up tomorrow, we're going to have to quarantine again. That would be really rough, hoping for the best.