August 22, 2007

August 22, 2007

The only time I lave to write today is in between loads of laundry, so while I’m writing I am being periodically distracted by the news and cheesy soaps (the T.V. kind not the laundry kind). Anyway – After about two months of wearing proselyting clothes everyday, I’m finally getting used to it. We don’t even wear normal clothes on Preparation day if we can reasonably wear our proselyting clothes. The one change is the temperature, last week it was 30 degrees C. for half of the day until it suddenly dropped to about 12 degrees C. Ever since then it has pretty much long sleeves. Apparently that quickly the summer is over.

Friday I am going to be trained by the District Leader for the first time, which basically means that I’m gonna be the one in charge of planning teaching and deciding what to do while my trainer is in Napanee (which by the way is Avril Lavigne’s home town, apparently missionaries tract into her mom all the time. I was there 2 weeks ago and it’s a bum country town…and that is your most random useless pop culture trivia fact of the week).

I thought you might want to know a little bit more about my area, Catoraqui. It is basically the suburban area of the city of Kingston. Kingston is a really old city with a bunch of old churches and buildings. It also has Queen’s University, which is apparently the best Medical School in Canada, and is where Hockey was invented….I went to a Hockey Museum and learned all about it. It’s pretty much classic Canada, about every few days we’ll knock on someone’s house who only speaks French because it is pretty close to Quebec. And just like in the movie, every single thing label, document, and sign is written in English and French (if you look really closely at a picture of the Toronto temple you can see that below where it says “Holiness to the Lord” it’s written again in French). It’s actually kind of odd considering the lack of exclusively French speaking people.

The missionary work is going pretty well, we have a whole group of new people we are teaching and we are hoping to see a lot of people progressing towards baptism in the next transfer. (six weeks) We just taught a great girl named Shannon who was perfectly prepared. We were in her neighborhood fro an appointment with a lady we’ve been teaching for a while but who can’t quit smoking. She missed her appointment, which she does a lot so we decided just to drop by Shannon and her mom who we had street contacted and who sounded interested. As we walked into her driveway, she pulled right behind us and we were able to teach her all about the restoration. She told us all about how she was looking for something more in her life and had been wanting to o to church. Apparently, her mom had always been kind of anti-religion, but ever since we talked to her on the street she had been much more open to the idea. Another one of our investigators Matt, who went to Youth Conference with his friend is the most solid person I’ve ever taught. Most people we have taught always forget to do the reading we asked them to or are stubborn or nervous and too lazy to get up for church. This guy reads everything and asks other people for things to read, he goes out of his way to learn more and even gets up himself and rides his motorcycle 30 minutes to church every week. He would even have a baptismal date if it wasn’t for one of his parents being somewhat opposed to it. He keeps going on the internet to dig up anti-mormon stuff. As soon as we can teach Matt with his dad and clear up all the misconceptions, he said he wanted his friend to baptize him.

I’m having a great time so far. I am just to the point where I am getting used to missionary work enough so that I can actually enjoy it. It is hard and I never feel like I get enough sleep, but it’s great to be busy every day, it really makes you appreciate the times that you can just sit down and relax (about once a week during church). I hope to hear from you soon, I’m gonna be better at writing every week. I like letters so much more than e-mail because I can read them other times that in the space of one hour once a week. Anyway, I want to send my memory card to you guys, but I need to back up the pictures onto a CD first, if you have any ideas of the best way to send it just email me (will it b e alright to just put it in a letter?) Anyway----

Love, Josh