Tomatoes, Transfers, and 7 months (Week 8)

October 19, 2020

Hello everyone!

I guess the biggest news from this week was the transfer we had! Sister Heap referred to it as a "monster transfer". Out of the 92 companionships in the mission, every one of them except for 9 would experience changes. Transfer calls were supposed to be on Saturday and then transfers were to happen on Monday/Tuesday. But to accommodate for a bunch of new missionaries that were coming in on Monday, we received an email Friday morning telling us that transfer calls were going to be that day and the transfer would happen on Saturday. We also learned that the mission would be expanding from 6 to 9 zones.

We got our transfer calls, and once again, I was in the slim minority! We were of the 9 companionships that did not experience a change. This has happened 2 transfers in a row which is crazy! We were called as social media specialists though! So that will be fun! We will be running the zone page along with the specialists from the newly formed Jackson zone. So that was pretty cool!

We were also able to witness a miracle with our friend Sister Ekins who was serving in Meridian with us. So it was a bit of a sacred experience for her but she was very firmly advised before she left on her mission that she would be learning a foreign language on her mission. And then she got called English speaking to Lansing. It was definitely hard for her to understand and to cope with. So she decided that the Lord told her that for a reason. So she decided to learn Spanish on her own! So she has been studying it on her mission. And in her interview with President Heap, she mentioned that she would like to speak Spanish. We do have a Spanish zone here in the mission, but it is already packed with missionaries, and Sister Ekins had already been told that she would be training anyway so it seemed very unlikely to happen. But transfer calls rolled around and President told her that the Lord wanted her in the Spanish zone. So she has transformed into a Spanish missionary! I thought that was really cool. God really does know all of us and he keeps his promises if we are willing to put in our own efforts.

We also did some service for the food bank gardens again, and we did quite a bit of harvesting in the garden and we got stuck with a ton of tomatoes! So I'm going to make some green tomato salsa and maybe some fried green tomatoes! We spent quite a bit of time on friday cleaning tomatoes. We also picked some peppers. And the master gardener that we were working with just called them hot peppers, so we picked a few and took them home. So we all decided to just take a bit of them, and they were awful! They were crazy spicy. Elder leavitt was crying and there was a lot of milk drank, and anyway, come to find out after we googled it, they were red Habenero peppers. Which are apparently more spicy than regular Habeneros but that was crazy. We also got some potatoes and a cucumber and some other stuff which will be put in my salsa.

On Sunday we had another lesson with the Donnelly's, and they are still so amazing. We also finished a new Facebook video for the zone page, where Elder Leavitt plays the taco bell cup, i play the glasses, and Elder Averill plays his guitar like a bass. Anyway all our "instruments" sound really bad and then when we all came together we sounded great. It ended with an invitation to come to chuch and quoted Psalm 133. Which was pretty neat.

But yeah it was a good week! We've had quite a bit of lessons fall through but one of the greatest blessings from all this pandemic stuff is that there's always things that we can do. If something doesn't pan out we can just grab our phones and go to Facebook finding. So that's pretty sweet.

But things in Michigan are going really well! And I will tell you guys more next week!

Elder Oswald

Cleaning the produce