Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Update on Zach

Here are some bits of news from Zach over the last month or so:

March 23rd

So my big news this week is that we moved. Mom has more details on why. (a girl in the apartment building kept flashing the elders) But we're temporarily staying in a house that the mission is renting from a member family. We have the whole place to ourselves. Since its been recently remodeled we've been asked to take extra good care of it. Same deal with our new apartment. We're in the house till the remodel on the apartment is done. But we had to go out and buy things like towels, rugs, soap, cleaning stuff, etc. I'm. We did what we could at the dollar store to save money.

April 6th

It's been a pretty good week. We've tracted out some pretty interesting people. Always a pleasure. Transfers are this coming week. I'm staying, obviously. Elder Kauvaka gets the axe. So tomorrow night I'm getting a new companion and I'm the senior in the area. Kinda scary cuz I'm still trying to learn the people and places. But I'll survive. I got the letter/package that you sent! I really liked the power point. Heida gives me rave reviews on your lessons, so I hope you hold the calling for me to come home and enjoy at least one lesson in your class. And it was kinda nice and kinda made me trunky to read the Alumni Calendar. Man I miss camp. But I was glad to see it, trunkiness set aside.

April 13th

So transfers took place this last week. I got a new companion, Elder Van Leeuwen. We hit the ground running. You might remember my mention of him as a zone leader in Corvallis. He and I were on the transfer van together on the way down to Medford. He's also the cousin of a missionary by the same name who was serving in Minneapolis when I received my call. So this is pretty cool.

We've been working hard and really unleashing the potential of this area. We have baptismal dates for a couple people, a tentative baptism this weekend with somebody we've been working with for quite some time. We've made a lot of progress.

April 20th

It's been an extremely busy week. We taught 11 lessons to investigators with a member present, which was about a third of the districts total for that statistic. So we're tearing it up out here! Man, and I gave a kid a blessing the other day cuz he had a tooth ache that was just murdering him. His mom called later and said that he had an abscess and it broke just a while after the blessing. So that was cool.

Anywho... we're having a lot of success. Our prospective baptism for Saturday fell through, but he's scheduled for this weekend. We need to get it done! And we're making some major progress with our other investigators. Elder Van Leeuwen was exactly the companion I needed!

We've had a lot of success working with part-member families and families with unbaptized children in this mission and in the area. We've been doing really well and I'm excited to see how the rest of the transfer goes.

April 27th

On Saturday I had the privilege of baptizing Nic Bune. That was pretty awesome. We've been pushing his baptismal date back for weeks now for various reasons, and he got sick of his family delaying him and just nailed down a date. It was a major challenge because of the Saturday stake conference related events (priesthood leadership meetings, adult session, etc) But we muscled our way into the stake center to get it done. It was pretty great. We also set a baptismal date with our investigator with severe anxiety, John Jones. We're pretty stoked about that.


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