What is 4 weeks but also 6 months??

September 21, 2020

Hey guys!

So I have now officially been "on my mission" for 6 months! Me and Elder Leavitt actually share the same mission birthday and on the 19th, I turned 6 months old and he turned 7 months old. So that was fun. We got some dairy dan to celebrate.

We finally went live on Tuesday for our first breakdown of King Benjamin's address, which was awesome. We are going live again tomorrow and I am very excited. We also did some more service for the food bank.

On Wednesday, we had our first lesson with Loree. We were able to get to know her better. We didn't have the time to teach her but we bore some testimony and learned a lot about her. She's been through a lot of sadness and heartbreak! The gospel could bring her so much joy! It'll be a couple of weeks until we can teach her again because she is taking a trip but she is excited to meet with us. We also had an awesome meeting with Sister Gray here in the ward. We learned that she had actually been inactive for the past 2 years and no one really knew! She had some falling out with some members in the ward. But by the end of our meeting, she was committed to coming back to activity. And that experience was really humbling, because what did we do as missionaries? We reached out to her and we extended an invitation for her to go to church. That's pretty much all we did, hardly anything. And the spirit did everything. It prepared her for is and was definitely present during our meeting. She said that every time the missionaries reach out to her, it is exactly at the times she needs them the most. Every time. That was awesome.

On thursday we taught Sulaiman. And we learned that he is actually hilarious. He messes with his friends in Afghanistan like I mess with Elder Leavitt here in America. But he likes to call his friend a pederest (look it up 🤷‍♂️). That's the term they like to use to mess with each other 😂😂. He asked me "mister Oswald, is Leavitt a pederest?" To which I replied, "definitely" 😂😂. We had a great laugh but hes not really progressing with the gospel.

We also made our first Facebook video for the zone page, and we played "i am a child of God" on some of our glasses, and I read a nice quote. It was simple but it came out pretty cool!

On Friday we did more volunteer work for the food bank, and had a meeting with Sister Lewis in our ward, and she is the sweetest old lady!! I also made some really good Alfredo Linguine.

On Saturday, we met with Tom Parsons again. Although he is a member, we have made it a point to meet with him every week. He is super kind. And although he's not progressing in the gospel, our calls definitely bring him joy. We had a talk about it, and if Christ was serving a mission, and he had the opportunity to call an old man every week to brighten his day, he would definitely do it. So we like to talk with him. Then we celebrated our birthday, and went to the church to start recording a new song that me and Elder Leavitt are coming up with. And man Elder Leavitt it a wizard with the piano. Hes amazing. We were walking out of the church and we were called out to by a lady who was parked on the other side of the parking lot. She had hit a deer and her car was overheating. She had lost all of her coolant and it punctured her radiator. I was able to use my limited knowledge to help her out and give her some comfort. She had a buddy who came and towed her car a bit later, but we let her charge her phone in the car and stuff which was cool.

Yesterday, we had in person church, which we didn't see Sister Gray which was sad. But we are still going to work with her. We also had another awesome lesson with the Donnelly's. They are still amazing and still progressing well.

But this week was awesome and we have been really blessed and we had some amazing experiences. And I guess the biggest news is that we are going to be training a new Elder on Thursday! We dont know anything about him except that we are going to pick him up Thursday morning. We dont even have a name. But I'm going to be training after only 4 weeks of mission experience myself so that will be fun. Its been nice with 2, but we will definitely take the new Elder.

But I will talk to you guys again next week!

-Elder Oswald

Our soccer ball broke but I stitched it back up