July 11, 2011

Howdy folks! How y'all doing today? Happy Stampede! Yee haw! haha. Sorry, I'm in the cowboy mood. The Calgary Stampede started on Friday. It's pretty intense. Apparently its the biggest outdoor show on earth. Unfortunately we aren't allowed to go to any of it, maybe I'll come back sometime to go see it. It sounds like it's pretty fun. Just a huge fair. The stampede grounds are in our area and it has been getting pretty crazy around here. I am really enjoying it. And, yes, the royal couple have been around lately as well. They went to the Stampede and the zoo and such. So because of each of those things it has been crazy and crowded downtown. haha. It's fun for us though because we spend a lot of time walking around downtown and talking to people. Especially since we only have half the use of our car this month. Probably the best part of Stampede is the free food! It is everywhere! There is a free pancake breakfast and BBQ lunch somewhere in Calgary everyday. It's sweet. Missionaries love free food. They are just put on by random companies and stores. Like Henninger Toyota had a freaking good lunch and The Source had a breakfast that was waffles on a stick put on by Vans and those were freaking good. The city of Calgary puts on a couple as well. It's pretty sweet. My dream of my mission was to be in downtown during the Stampede and I never thought it would happen. I'm so happy... :') haha. But don't worry. We are getting a lot of missionary work done as well. Well... not a lot but we are trying! It's hard to find times when people are actually home during all of this craziness, but we still manage to get a decent amount of lessons. We have been calling a whole bunch of the less actives and do not contacts just trying to see if they are still there or interested at all and it's actually been pretty good. We have had three of the do not contact people say that we could come by. One canceled on us though. We have been getting a hold of some less actives as well. It's been pretty good actually. So funny story from that though. We called a guy named Vincent Penny and when we called an older lady answered so I asked if she new a Vincent Penny and she was all, "no but I live with a Vicki Penny." and I was all "well is she related to Vincent. Do you have a phone number for him?" and she was all "no there isn't a Vincent just a Vicki." "Right so do you know of any Vincent?" "I don't think you understand. Vincent Penny is now Vicki Penny." "...oh... welp... is there anything we can do for you?" haha, oh man. It was pretty funny. Anyway, that was one of the highlights of the week. Another one would probably be the waffles on a stick and the free hat and stickers we got from Vans. That was pretty cool as well.

We were also able to teach a girl named Laura Halley. That was cool. She has been less active for years and called a guy that was in Elder Worthington's last area who is basically her father and she lives in our area and she wanted a blessing and a blessing on the home. It was pretty cool. Then we got this girl named Lachele to go and pick her up and bring her to FHE. That went really well. She was really scared she wouldn't know anyone there but she really enjoyed it and the Ward members were pretty good at fellow shipping her. It helps that Lachele is freaking amazing. She can get along with anyone. So hopefully we can continue to work with Laura and get her out to church and stuff. She didn't feel comfortable enough to come to church this Sunday but she will get there. Another cool story was a guy named Addison Gough. He's pretty sweet. He's kind of less active but he was thinking about going on a mission and then his girlfriend got cancer so he waited and now he is 22 and doesn't want to be 24 when he comes home. So he didn't want to go so we just taught him and told him that a mission is great and he would probably still really enjoy it. Then on Sunday the Bishop pulled us aside and said that he had just had a meeting with him and his girlfriend and something that we said in that lesson made it so that he was now seriously thinking about a mission. That was so sweet! He came up to us and signed up on the dinner calendar for this week so I am looking forward to meeting with him again.

Well, I hope y'all had a great week, I sure did. I hope all goes well this week for you. I'll keep you updated on the free food next week. haha. The Stampede goes until next Sunday so it should still be pretty crazy up here this week. Almost every night they have fireworks for the Stampede and we can watch them from our apartment balcony. It's pretty sweet. Anyway, have a great week! I'll let you know if anything exciting happens this week! Thanks for everything! I love you all!

love,
Elder Townsend

July 4, 2011

Hello everyone! HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!!!!!!! Hurray for the United States of America! haha. I hope you all had a great week! We had a pretty slow one here. It was still pretty good though. It is officially half click month. So we only have half of our kilometers for our car. We only have 900 and we cover a whole stake. Which so far is not working out so well. Especially since I still don't really know anyone in the area who we can stop by. At least in family wards when you can't drive you can walk and stop by some people but when you are in a YSA ward nobody really lives close together so that doesn't work for meeting with as many people as you can. But we are still managing. We have spent the greater part of a lot of days just walking around downtown and talking to as many people as we can. It's actually a lot of fun. I like talking to people on the street a lot more then tracting and you get to meet a lot more fun people. Friday was Canada day and we walked around downtown for a while in the morning and we walked down Stephen Avenue which is a pretty happening little place. Especially on Canada Day. It was sweet. My favorite person we talked to was "the whistler" he won whistler of the year award. He was on the street asking for money. He was actually really good and when he saw us he pulled us over and said I've got a song you will recognize and he started to whistle "We Thank Thee oh God for a Prophet. It was sweet. Then we talked to him for a while. He is a member of the church or at least was in 79 and 80 but he said he didn't want any religion to have claim on him as their whistler. So he didn't go to any specific church. He was fun though. He even whistled the Star Spangled Banner for us. haha. I was going to get a picture with him but my camera ran out of battery. That was sad. As we were walking around there we ran into two members of our ward and they invited us to their BBQ they were having that night so that was sweet because we didn't have a dinner. Canada definitely doesn't know how to celebrate like the States do. It was sad. That was pretty much the highlight of our week. We have spent more time talking to people on the street this week than I have in a long time! I've walked more then I have in a long time as well. I'm so sore! haha. It is a lot of fun and we get to meet awesome people. We talked to this gay guy and a really drunk girl that were together and the gay guy was hitting on my comp and the drunk chick was hitting on me. That was fun. haha. We do meet people that actually do want to listen as well. We have given the Mandarin missionaries two return appointments and the sisters one and the other elders in our district five potential investigators from it. So that's sweet. Now we just need to find YSA age people. It will happen! We had a return appointment with someone who was 26 but when we got there he said "Oh I thought I said NEXT Saturday. Well next Saturday doesn't work either so just don't worry about it." and then closed the door... that was sad. We really need to find more investigators and I was hoping he would be one.

Well, I don't really know how half click month is going to work out. I'll keep you posted. I hope you all have a great week! I am going to continue to try my hardest to find people to teach! As for now our zone is having a big Fourth of July BBQ so I am excited for that! It should be fun. It's in the south zone so there goes a bunch of our kilometers... dang it. Anyway, I hope you guys are doing great! Thank you all for everything! I love you guys!

Love
Elder Townsend

Hepworth, Moore, Kuettel, me

Hepworth and myself

Downtown!

June 28, 2011

Hello! How is everything going for all of you? Well, I am getting a new companion and staying in this area. My new comp is Elder Worthington. From what I know of him it should be an interesting transfer. But I am going to try my hardest to make it the best I can. This week was pretty slow for us. We actually had a pretty good number of lessons but most of them were with members. We are still trying our hardest to find some investigators to teach. We had a couple potentials we were hoping to teach but one got kicked out of his apartment for drug use and loud music and moved to the West Stake and the other ones name is Anti Tom... he's anti. So I don't think that will be working so well. haha. But the main person we are working on right now is Nicole Wilson. She is a recent convert who is going through some hard times in her life. She is slowly but surely coming back and is improving in all the best ways.

Probably the highlight of our week though is the fact that we are dying of black mold poisoning. We found a bunch of black mold under our kitchen sink. There was a leak that we called in and they fixed it but they left the cleaning to us. So we went to work with soap and bleach. I think it's pretty much all gone but I think I am definitely showing signs of breathing it in. Coughing, headaches and loss of attention span. But I called Sister Archibald about it and she said my body will just take care of it on its own. So hopefully that doesn't last too long.

Well, I don't have all that much time to write this week. There really isn't much left to write about. Thank you all for everything! I love you all so much!

Love,
Elder Townsend

Cleaning black moldCalgary

June 20, 2011

Alright, So I am getting pretty sick of the rain. I hear other parts of the world need it, so what can I do to send it to you all? haha. I think it has rained here every day for the past three weeks. Apparently I just might never see a summer while I am in Canada. We didn't have much of one last year either. Anyway, besides all the rain, we had a pretty good week here. Nothing too exciting. We had a couple really good lessons with less active members of the ward. We had a lesson with Mathew Wishart and his mom. They are both less active. But we had a really good lesson with them and they committed to come to church on Sunday, but they didn't come. sad. But we hope to get in to their house again. They are very nice welcoming people. Then we had a lesson with Matt Haase. He was baptized last year, but he was baptized into another ward because the missionaries there didn't want to hand him off to the missionaries here, but now that he is here he doesn't have any friends so he doesn't like coming. But he is doing pretty well. He is a really fun guy, he didn't come to church either, but he comes every now and then. And we had a lesson with Nicole Wilson. She was baptized in February and has had some really big ups and downs but she is coming out of a pretty big down and actually came to church for the first time since I have been here and she brought her 12 year old sister who wants to be baptized as well. So that is pretty cool. We can't teach her though since she is 12... and she doesn't live in our zone. She is pretty sad about that. So is Nicole. But that's still pretty sweet.

On Wednesday we had a special training from president and the assistants. That was pretty cool. They talked about what they want us to do nowadays when we invite members of our ward to find someone for us to teach in seven days. We've been doing that a lot and they have changed how we do it. Now we teach a ten minute first lesson before and have the members pretend they are investigators and then ask them who the Spirit brought to their minds. It's pretty cool. So far it hasn't worked out too well. People get really distracted and off topic and it takes longer then I think most people expect to have us over. It's still pretty cool. We have had some pretty cool experiences with the seven day challenge in this ward so far. Some of the members actually do it and have some cool experiences. Nothing resulting in people we can teach though. Those will come with time and persistence.

Other than that we had a pretty slow week. Think the rain makes people go into hiding anyway. Well, I hope you have all had a great week and I hope all of you fathers had an amazing fathers day! You are all amazing and have a huge role in your families lives! Thank You to all of you!

I love you all! Thanks for everything!

Love
Elder Townsend

June 13, 2011

Well, this week was pretty slow for us. It started out kind of fun. We went to the zoo last Pday. I've decided it wasn't worth it though. I'm not a big fan of paying $22 to walk around and look at animals. But it was OK. Then we had a couple lessons with members this week. Not too many dinners. But we were able to get a few lessons with less actives and recent converts. So that was good. We met with Chris McClure. He is a recent convert and is trying to work on getting the Melchizedek priesthood. So that's cool. The lessons with him are getting better. Less random tangents in the lesson. It doesn't help when your companion can't even keep focused ever. haha. We also met with Nicole Wilson. She is a recent convert that has been trying to decide if she is in the right church. I'm pretty sure she knows that she is but she decided that living all our commandments is just too hard. But she has been improving. Elder Hepworth is actually a really good missionary and knows his scriptures inside and out and can resolve her concerns pretty easily. It is still just up to her to decide to come back. I hope she does and I can see her progressing towards that since I have been here. So that's good. Other then those two none of the lessons were really that exciting. We are still looking for someone to teach in our area. Hopefully it happens soon.

We had a pretty exciting Sunday though. We got to church and a less active we taught, Russell, came and brought his non member roommate. That was sweet. It looked pretty funny with Russell wearing baggy shorts and a rock band t shirt and sunglasses and his roommate wearing a huge sweatshirt and a huge eyebrow piercing and a hat that said eye (showed a picture of an eye) <3 (heart) beer. It was pretty funny, but hey, it doesn't matter what you wear as long as you are there! So that was sweet! There was another non member there who "knows everything about Mormons" and has some things he doesn't believe and wasn't very interested in meeting with us at all, but he said he would probably be back to church sometime so we could say "hi" to him then. It was kind of sad that he wouldn't let us talk to him, but hey, if he's coming to church then that's awesome! The Spirit will work on him eventually.

That is pretty much our week though. Nothing too eventful. To make things all worse Elder Velinga, the car czar, called this morning and told me I got a photo cop ticket in a play ground zone. I hate play ground zones. There are little tiny signs on the side of the roads that tell you it's a play ground zone and you need to go 30kph (which is freaking slow by the way) and it is effective from 8:30am till one hour after sunset, which sucks when the sun is going down at like 10:30pm nowadays. But I was going 41 in a 30 so now I owe $60. Which really isn't that bad. So I guess that's good. Darn Canada.

Well regardless. It wasn't a horrible week. But I do hope that more exciting things happen in the upcoming week. We have a special training on Wednesday which could be fun. Well I hope all is going well for you all! I hope you all have an awesome week! Thanks for everything! I love you guys!

Love,
Elder Townsend

Are you my mother?

Missionaries are weird....Red panda.... cute....

REACH!!!

June 6, 2011

Hey everyone! How is it going? I hope you all had a great week! Congratulations to Zac on his mission call! That's so awesome! We had a pretty good week here. Nothing too exciting. I think I might lose some weight serving here in this area. It's a diet that I call the YSA dinner calendar diet. haha. No they actually feed us pretty well here for a YSA ward. Unfortunately we still don't have any investigators. Did I tell you last week about the guy named Steven who just walked into the church while we were there last week? Then we had to pass him off to the sisters in our district because he was 31. Well they taught him on Wednesday and he's probably going to be baptized. This Wednesday, we actually went on exchanges so I wasn't here for it, but we had a lesson with this man from Africa that one of our ward missionaries asked to come listen to us, but when they went there with the member he didn't show up. There was this man from Iraq that lived in one of the wards here that came in to talk to the bishop and he brought a non member friend into the church with him. The two of them started to talk about the differences between this church and the Catholics and Elder Hepworth and Kuettel asked if they could teach him about this church and he said sure so they did. He took it really well and accepted to be baptized on the 18th! Guess what... he was like 40 so we gave him to the elders in our district... well we are still looking for the miracle that we will have that ends in US actually having a new investigator, but it will happen eventually.

The other highlight of the week would probably be from Friday. We went branding. Yes, branding again. But I have to say that this one was a little more exciting. I had told them that I had done it before and how I did it and they said that we would be doing it the more efficient and a more manly way... OK... so I get there and what we did is this. They would let a bunch of calves into a corral and then there were like thirty people there and we paired up and then one of us grabbed the back right foot of a calf and the other grabbed the head and then we dragged it into an open area of the corral and then wrestled it to the ground. yea. I wrestled a bunch of cows. It was sweet. Then the guy on the back would hold down the back legs and the guy up front would kneel on the cows neck and hold the front legs as there were a bunch of people with branding irons and vaccines and knives (for castrating and horn cutting) and we would hold the cow down until everyone had come around. It was pretty sweet. Then repeat a lot. It really was a lot of fun and a lot more efficient. We did over 300 cows in about an hour and a half. It was sweet, but then we had mud/manure/cow blood covered clothes. haha. It was pretty nasty and my legs are covered in huge bruises where I got stepped on while I was holding another cow down. It was awesome. At the end I felt like a man and I was exhausted. If anyone needs help doing that when I am back home let me know! I would love to! haha.

That was pretty much my week though. Sadly, Ii didn't get any pictures this week. I will get some of branding soon though. There was a girl there that took a bunch of pictures. That's right there were even YSA girls there! I was impressed they did it, but they loved it! Some of them took a little convincing before they would do it though. haha. Well, I hope you all have a great week this week! I hope I can do the same. Thanks for everything! I love you all!

Love
Elder Townsend

May 31, 2011

How is it going? That is crazy about all the tornados down there. It's hard to see all that happening, but we knew stuff like this would happen and it is great to know that we have the gospel and know that this life isn't the end. Just like Isaiah says and Nephi quotes, after all the destruction in the world his (talking about Jesus Christ) hand is stretched out still. All we have to do is turn to Him and grab His hand and He will help us. Just as Peter did when he walked on water. I hope everything works out OK for everyone.

As for me. I had a pretty good week here. We don't really have any investigators, but we are working on that. We do have a couple recent converts that we are working on. Most of them were baptized and then moved here. But it is good that we at least have them to work with. We are slowly having the area pick up. On Wednesday I went with Elders Moore and Kuettel into their area for the day and we taught a girl that was a referral from the office. Turns out she is YSA so maybe we can start teaching her. She seemed really interested and willing to learn, but whenever we asked her to do anything like read or pray or come to church she just said, I'll think about it. Which is sad. We are going to call her again this week and hopefully we can get in with her again. Then on Friday we had some baptismal interviews we went to for other missionaries in our district and during one of them we were sitting in the church and this guy walked up to the door and we let him in and talked to him and turns out he wasn't a member. He had been in the building two years ago for a funeral and he had been having a hard life this year and so he just stopped by to see if we could help him. So we talked about Jesus Christ and how He can help everyone in their lives and talked about the Book of Mormon and gave him one. He seemed really interested and such and we asked him how old he was... 31.... One year too old! ahh!!! haha. It was still a really sweet experience though. I really enjoyed it, but unfortunately we had to pass him off to the sisters.

Then on Sunday at church we had three really good talks about missionary work from converts. That was cool. Then after church we had a lesson with a recent convert who had another friend from another church over as well. Apparently she is church shopping now and wants to know which one is right for her. So Elder Hepworth really wanted to be there to talk to her other friend so he convinced her to let us over. So we came with Cody, the ward mission leader, so we could have priesthood and we talked about the different religions. I think we should have taught a first lesson really quick, but we didn't. It was still a really good meeting and I think it helped Nicole, the recent convert. But I think it could have been a little better.

That was pretty much my week here though. Thank you for everything you guys do for me! I love and miss you all! I hope you all have a safe and happy week! Thanks for everything!

Love,

Elder Townsend

The view from our balcony

This is what we are driving around in all day... I've never been in the heart of a big city like this and I have to drive because my comp was in an accident and the mission won't let him drive anymore.