November 30, 2010 - Week 68

Hello Everyone!

How is everyone doing? It is raining once again in Vancouver. In fact, it hasn't really stopped raining for the past couple of weeks I swear. It is all good though. I'm pretty much used to it by now. A few things happened this week. I better start off with Thanksgiving. I had a great Thanksgiving day. In the morning we did service from about 10 am to 2 pm. We got about 10 missionaries together and grabbed some rakes and garbage bags and went around raking peoples lawns in our stake. We did a lady's yard in our ward and finished up pretty fast. As we were driving to the next house we saw an older man doing his yard. He had a ton of leaves and hadn't really done a whole lot of it yet. So we pulled over and so did our convoy of missionaries. 10 missionaries came out with their rakes in hand and offered to help. His wife eventually came out and offered to give us some hot cider and cookies. We went in and they fed us while we warmed up. We talked to them for a while. It was really neat. We were joking around how they probably haven't had that many Mormons in their house at once. They are actually in our area so we are going to go back and invite them to one of the wards Christmas activities coming up. After service we went to our first dinner, the Maynes. It was great. That family is hilarious. They fed us a ton and we chatted and played some apples to apples. Literally right after that we went over to the Gonsalves house for our 2nd dinner. We loaded up there and met some more of the Gonsalves family. Brother Gonsalves and Cajia are still doing awesome. Sister Gonsalves is warming up too. I think she can really see how the gospel has blessed her family and she is starting to soften up. Last but not least, we went over to the Browns house for dessert. The Browns are the Samoan family in the ward who were recently baptized right before I came here. They fed us this dessert called pani po po. It's these rolls with coconut milk and brown sugar on them. Its kinda like a cinnamon roll. We were about to die at this point because we had eaten so much. As we finished up the pani po po, they bring out a big bowl of ice cream and a plate of cake. Oh kill me now. We ate most of it, but just couldn't finish it off. Elder Burgin and I weighed ourselves when we got home and we both gained 10 pounds just in one day. You know me though, it was gone in about 2 days. I just can't keep weight on. Oh well. Someday I will get fat.

The big downer to the week was Ian's baptism was put on hold for a while. The day before Thanksgiving, Ian's in-laws picked up their son and took him four-wheeling. Ian really wanted his son to be there for the baptism so we decided to do it this week. We talked to him about because it's just not a good idea to put off your baptism. The adversary really gets involved the last week of your baptism and if you put it off, it just gets even worse. But it's what he wanted to do and it's the way most of Ian's family and Nicole's family could make it. Ian said he would be okay. Now there are just so many things coming up that are making it even harder to do the baptism this week. Hopefully it can work out this Saturday. After so many miracles that happened in this whole process, you can see how Satan makes an attack and tries to stop it all from happening. I have confidence that all will work out, we just need to help their family as much as we can this week.

The work right now is slower than usual. I have been having internal conflicts with myself all week. I have just been struggling with how I could be a better missionary. You would think that after 15 months of doing this that I would be a pro. I recognize so much the missionary that I could be and sometimes it is difficult to know how to be that missionary. I have been praying and studying so much this week. With fervent prayer I have gained so many answers to my prayers, it is unreal. Today we went to the Portland Temple. Once again I thought that things were going to keep me from going to the Temple. We were giving a few missionaries a ride. One of the missionaries had a mis-communication problem and was super late. He ended up not even coming because he was so late. This of course made us really late because he told us he wasn't even going to come about 30 minutes after we were supposed to leave. We showed up to the Temple and barely missed the session. Our ride was able to sneak in at the very last minute, but we weren't. We didn't know what to do. We decided that we would do initiatories while we waited. We just did one each and then we decided that we would go to the later endowment session. Once again the Lord answered my prayer, because doing the iniatitories was exactly what I needed. The Lord works in mysteries ways. Elder Burgin and I are trying to work things out in our area and find some new investigators. We just taught one of the members in our wards girlfriend. It was a pretty good lesson, could have been better, but we figured out what we could do, once again through a lot of prayer and study.

It sounds like everyone had a really good Thanksgiving week. I'm always glad to hear that the family is doing great. Take care of yourselves and enjoy this time of year.

Love,
Elder Garrick