September 14, 2010 - Week 57

Hello Everyone!

Well this has been another busy week. I tell ya what, it just never slows down for us. I am completely fine with that though. I enjoy being busy. Time is going by so fast. It actually makes me nervous sometimes knowing that it is flying by. Well I want to assure everyone that I am getting their letters. Seriously I just haven't been this busy in my life ever. It is very hard for me to write letters back. Even our P-Days are hectic and we are usually the ones who organize our p-days and get everyone together to do things. So it's even hard to write on p-days. I will try my best, it just may take a little longer than it usually does.

There isn't a whole lot of amazing things that happened this last week. President challenged the Zone leaders this week to have 10 OYM's (Open Your Mouth). This just means that each day he wants us to talk to 10 different people and teach them something and invite them to do something else. For example, stop and talk to someone on the street, teach them about the Book of Mormon, and then invite them to read and pray about the Book of Mormon. It hasn't been that hard. Elder Prawitt and I do this a lot anyway. It has been helping us to talk to everyone and focus on our purpose as missionaries. We are being blessed for it as well. We have a lot of potential investigators that we could teach in the near future. There are also people coming out from nowhere at church who just came with their aunt or boyfriend etc. Its really exciting. we are hoping we can meet with them and start teaching them as well. This week we also met with the Gonsalves family. The wife is the only member of the family. The husband and their 12 year old daughter are not members and the missionaries have been teaching them for a little bit. We had a great lesson with them this week on the Restoration. Brother Gonsalves is praying about a baptismal date for sometime in October. They all came to church on Sunday and really enjoyed it. We have high hopes for them. We have also been finding a lot of Russian people. I don't know if I told you all yet, but Elder Prawitt served in Ukraine for the first half of his mission. Because of medical issues he had to come home for a couple of months and now he has been serving in the Kennewick Mission for almost another year. Well Ukrainian is very similar to Russian so its nice because if they can't understand what we are saying then Elder Prawitt can translate it for them. Russians are very funny too. They are really nice and curious about the things that we teach them. We will see how it goes. As for our other teaching appointments, nothing too big. We had a few appointments cancel on us which was a bummer, but we keep trying.

This week we also went on exchanges again with two companionships in the zone. That was a ton of fun. I really like doing that because I am able to really get to know the other missionaries and talk to them closely. This week the AP's are coming to our area to go on exchanges with us. We will split up and do double the work for one whole day. It will be pretty intense though. I'm really excited for it. The AP's are really good missionaries and I am becoming good friends with them. This last week we also had a Sister's Conference for all the sister missionaries on the west side of the mission. Since we have 6 sisters in our zone, we were asked to come help and give training. It was actually a pretty good meeting. We role played and taught with the sister missionaries. It was definitely different from teaching with elders, but I learned a lot from them. On September 11th we did the Day of Service at the church's carrot farm. That was a ton of fun. The whole stake was there and we spent the day picking carrots, weeding, and cleaning the carrots. All the missionaries were there together too. I can't believe how many carrots we actually had. It was amazing. Probably 8 truck loads. All the elders had to load the carrots from the truck to the store house.

Well that's pretty much it for me this week. Very busy. I am learning more and more about sacrifice and consecrating my work to the Lord. President Greer said something at ZLC that has stuck with me. He said, "So many of the missionaries are still stuck in Utah, or Arizona, or wherever they may be." His point was that there are many missionaries who are still trying to live the lives they lived back at home. I'm doing my best to get completely lost in the work. And from Lyndsie's comments, I am doing a good job at it because she said I am now one of those weird missionaries. It is probably true, but this is the one time in my entire life where I can literally devote ALL my time and attention to serving God. It's an amazing experience. I know that it will be different when I come home, but I don't want it to be all that different. I want to do the things I am doing now for the rest of my life. I want to know the things I know for the rest of my life and live the way I am right now for the rest of my life. I take that back, I want to be a little better tomorrow and the next day. Today we went to the Portand, OR Temple. Man that is such a beautiful temple. I loved it so much. I went in today with a lot of questions on my mind. I had a lot more questions come up during the session. As I sat and pondered of these things in the Celestial room, I prayed and searched the scriptures. I came away with so many answers to my questions. We just barely got back. I think we are just going to go shopping now and try to get some sleep because we had to wake up really early. Oh I'll be honest, that probably won't happen. We will probably play basketball or frisbee. I'll will definitely write some letters though. Take care everyone. I love you all very much.

Love,
Elder Garrick