This week has been very interesting and very long! It is always a long week after transfers because we have to go all the way from Tuesday to Wednesday without a Pday. So that isn't fun. I got a new companion this time! He is a pretty interesting elder. He is from Heber City, Utah and he is the oldest of four. oh, and his name is Elder Glick. He has only been out one more transfer than I have, so five months, but he is our district leader. He s a pretty good missionary though. He was in the ROTC at Utah State for a year before he came out here so he is very militaristic minded and loves rules and staying busy. So it will be a little bit different from my last two transfers but I think it will be good for me. President is really excited for us because his last area was really slow like ours is now when he got in there, but when he left it had picked up really well and they had 7 investigators the week he left. So President hopes he can do the same thing here in Chaparral. We've only been together for a week and I can tell he has a lot of really good ideas about missionary work and awesome things that worked for him over in Shaughnessy, his last area, and that is awesome. I can see how that turned things around for him. but the thing he doesn't know right now is that each area is different. Very different. And things that worked in one area won't necessarily work in another. I completely agree that our area needs change and needs the things he is trying to work in, but he expects everyone to just do it automatically. And we work with the ward mostly and so he expects the ward to just go along with everything he says automatically. But our ward isn't like that. There are a couple that are, but most people we are going to have to slowly work them up to doing the things he wants them to do. But I think he is slowly finding that out and that is awesome. I do hope that we can implement his ideas into out ward because I think it would really help and I really want to see this area go thorough a lot of changes and be an awesome area that every missionary wants to come to.
He does like to stay really busy though. Which is a good thing. But there really isn't anything to keep us busy throughout the day so we are turning to some things that I haven't really done too much out here on my mission. We have started to tract. And that is weird. Missionaries out here don't really tract all that much because it is ineffective. I always thought that was just an excuse to not do it. But now that I have done it I see why we don't do it that much. Nobody we talked to wanted to talk to us at all. Nobody was really mean about it. Some people just open and close the door when they saw us. But most people just politely said they weren't interested and usually take a pass a long card or something. But I don't see too much coming form that. Although I do think that if we do it enough we could potentially find someone, so we are going to keep it up. Besides... talking to people randomly is a really good skill to have and I am excited to stat getting better at it. Another thing that we have started to do to keep us more busy is to walk to all of our appointments. We never really walked too much when Byington was here. We always just had enough kilometers to get to wherever we needed to go. But Elder Glick likes to walk because he wants people, members and non members, to see us out and about during the day. And also it takes up a little more time between each appointment. But it does mean that we are walking a lot. I think I have walked more this week then I have all last year,even at BYU. OK, maybe not... but it has been a lot of walking! I'm going to have huge leg muscles at the end of this transfer and hopefully I'll lose a couple of pounds too, eh? haha.
Other than that this week has been pretty good. It has been a lot of introducing Elder Glick to the area and trying to get him to know his way around. And going to the members and getting him to meet everyone. We haven't had all that many lessons though. But we did get the chance to have one with Jeanette again. That was awesome! I love going over there! She is always excited to see us and is always baking something for us to eat after the lesson. This lesson went really well. We taught her the first lesson again. She got the basics of it at the church tour she went on but we wanted to go a little more in depth with it this time. And we got Matt Leavitt to come, and we brought Sis Yee over as well. We thought it would be good for Jeanette to get to know some people in the ward better so we are going to try to get someone from Relief Society over there each time we go. So that will be awesome. Sis Yee and Jeanette got along really well and Sis Yee had some really good insights in the lesson. And after the lesson Jeanette had some really good questions again which was awesome! You can definitely tell she wants to learn as much as she can before she gets baptized and is sincerely interested. Then we talked about her baptismal date. We had originally had it set for this coming Saturday, but she felt like that was pretty soon. And we thought it was too because she still had a lot to learn and she still has all of lesson four to be taught to her which we usually like to have in two lessons. And it will be good for her to come to church a couple more times before she is baptized as well. So we decided that we should move the date to March 6th. Which is going to be awesome. It gives us enough time to teach her everything and her enough time to feel more comfortable in the ward. But she is doing great. She even signed up on our dinner calendar to feed us, which is awesome!
It is also beneficial that her baptism will be in March. And I'll tell you why, but first I just need to clarify that moving her date into March had nothing to do with this at all! It was all her idea! But our Mission President gave us a goal as a mission for March. The goal that he set was that we would have 100 baptisms in March. Which is pretty significant seeing as though we get an average of twenty as of now. But he has promised us that if we are 100% obedient and do everything we can to reach this goal that we will be blessed with the success we need and we will be able to reach it. It is pretty awesome. You can definitely see a lot of change in the missionaries out here already. And we already have over 50 dates for the month of March which is more then we have ever had. I definitely have my small doubts about it happening but I am not going to let that effect me. I am going to do all that I can to do my part to reach this goal and I have faith that the Lord will make it happen. So I am excited to see what happens this coming month and how things go here.
That is pretty much if from me though. This next week will be pretty exciting. We have a "mission tour" on Monday. I'm not entirely sure what it is but an Elder from the 70 is coming. I hear it is just going to be a really big zone conference with an Area Authority there. It should be a lot of fun though and really good. Our ward is actually in charge of feeding us all lunch so Sis Shaughnessy, our Relief Society President has been working really hard on that. It should be an awesome day. Oh and Jeanette, our investigator, even signed up to help with serving food at it. So that will be awesome! It is going to be a good week. Well, I hope you guys all have an awesome week as well! I love and miss you all so much! I can't wait to talk to you again next week!
love,
Elder Townsend
a tribute to the best district ever.
Elder Townsend
a tribute to the best district ever.
The three seniors in our district last transfer... they all left... :(
I think the birds are a little confused by the weather. They are all flying back already...
The zone. I miss them already... so many of them left this transfer...
whore frost... 
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