email (plus a picture!) | October 8, 2013

Crazy Week!!!

Seriously, this week was crazy!!!  First of all, we started a long term service project with someone in the ward.  They are building a path down the side of their house so that the basement tenants can have something besides grass to walk down.  It is a lot of digging and stuff.  The cool thing is that they don't really know too much about what to do, so they are listening to my suggestions and advice.  I like critical thinking stuff like that so it's nice to do the service and help them make plans.  It took up like two of our days, and we are no where near finished.  I'm worried we won't finish by the time the ground freezes, but we will try.  

Then, Thursday morning I got a very interesting phone call during Breakfast....  I'M TRAINING!!!   In other words, tomorrow I will get a new companion fresh from the MTC and I get to show him the ropes.  I'm so excited and happy to have this opportunity.  Plus, a bunch of us from the MTC District are training too.  I'm most excited for Elder Jacobs (my MTC companion).  We've become such good friends and I love that we are serving here in the same zone, and are both training at the same time.  It's super cool.

Because of the training call, we had to go to Calgary to go through some training.  There is a new stress program that new missionaries are supposed to utilize to endure the stresses of missionary work.  I'm excited to use it in my training.

Obviously Saturday and Sunday were General Conference, so they were the highlight of my week.  Every talk was awesome.  I especially liked Elders Bednar, Holland, and Dube's talks and President Uchtdorf's talk.  It was perfect for Randy.

Speaking of which, the investigator front was very bipolar this week!  First the good news.  We had a great lesson with Randy, during which we talked about the pro's and con's of joining the church.  By his own declaration, there are no significant con's to join the church but there are a lot of pros.  Most of the time we talked about specific tangible blessings we've received from being a member.  Then we found out he actually read his Book of Mormon and listened to most of the Conference talks on the radio!!  I am so happy for him!!

Now for the bad news.  We found out that Nicole and her kids are moving to the other side of Lethbridge later this month!! So in other words, we won't be teaching them for much longer and won't be able to see them get baptized.  I'm really bummed but if it is the best option for them I guess I shouldn't complain.

Other news, Elder Henderson is going to be a Zone Leader in Calgary for the next little bit.

As for just random things:

We had a Chinook come through (which is basically a really warm wind off of the mountains) so it "warmed" back up.  It's still chilly but not to bad.  No snow yet though.

I've decided to try and include more things about Canadians and Canadian culture in my emails, since that stuff is interesting.  I think that the most interesting thing is how similar Canadians are to Americans.  They follow US news and events and sometimes speak like we are all the same country.  Also, there are a lot of Native reservations around here and so I've learned some stuff about those cultures.  As for the white people, a lot of them are kinda intolerant to the Natives.  It was kinda surprising.  Oh! and I found out that Alberta is a "rat free province".  Basically the provincial government exterminated all the rats and if you see a rat you have to call the government organization and they come out and kill it.  It's kinda weird but kinda cool.

And I don't want to bore you to much, so I'll end it there.  I love you all and love hearing from all of you!  Thank you for your prayers and support.

Love, 

Elder Wake

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Here's a picture of  the missionaries in Braden's zone, taken at the end of August.

Also, Braden asked me to let everyone know that this Monday (tomorrow) is Canadian Thanksgiving! He's pretty excited about it.