Christmas Parade

December 10, 2018

This week has been good! Didn't get to do a whole lot it seemed, due to Christmas ZC and other Christmas stuff.

Monday, we had the usual pday, and then at night we did some stop bys and cleaned our car. We forgot we had to clean it during pday time so we had to take a few minutes and get that done before Tuesday, cause of ZC. 

Had an interesting experience finding ways to clean my suit of the nasty smoke smell from Thompson. I came across away that said to use vodka, so I did it and it actually worked! Pretty crazy.

Tuesday was Christmas ZC so we drove into Winnipeg in the morning and got stuff going there by 11. ZC was super good, learned lots of good things from pres. and sister Hitchcock, along with everyone else that did portions. Pres Hitchcock did his on Joseph Smith and the book of Mormon, it was probably my favorite. 

We ended up playing district jeopardy with everyone, and our district for some reason was the smallest team. We had 4 while most everyone else had at least 6 in it, plus we decided that we are ether forgotten district ha-ha because they forgot to even out our district up on the board to play! It was alright though, we lost big time, but it was still fun.

For the movie we watched polar express. At the part where they have the hot chocolate singing and dancing sis Hitchcock came out with a tray of hot chocolate dancing and handing it out, so that was pretty funny. 

By the time the movie was done and everything was put away it was 8.40 so me and Trickler decided we would try and make it home so we could sleep there rather than at the Y.S.A. elders place with 2 other sets of elders, so we did that and we made it before 9.30 so we were gold.

Wednesday, we helped out at the soup kitchen serving the people there which was alright. I think that's the second time I’ve helped out at one of those since I got out on the mission.

Once we got done there we had a pretty normal day far as missionary work goes, studies, knocking doors, and stopping by people till 9.

Oh and we had dinner with our RC (recent convert) Eric which took up a good part of our night cause he likes for us to play poker with him every time we go over I guess... Trickler got destroyed, and near the end after about a hr and a half of playin I was starting to get short on chips, and it was getting late so I "gave into" his bluff and went all in just so we could finish the game and get going. 

Once we finally got out we were walking out to our car and as I walked around the back end of it to the driver side I got rushed by this guy that I guess had been sitting there waiting for us to come out to our car (we got some people that really don't like us out here) my first reaction was to try and get out of his way and run, but with the ice on the roads that didn't work out for me. He grabbed my right arm and reached for the other but he missed, I swung and hit him square in the face which of course made him let go of my arm. By this time Trickler had realized something was going on my side of the car so he ran over to give me a hand but by the time he got over there this guy had run off into an alley. What this guy was planning to do with us we don't know but it was pretty exciting I'll tell ya that much!

Now if that was to have actually happened that would have made for a way better story then what actually happened! I came around the other side of our car and realized that someone decided to egg us... It was only one egg and it was placed is great spot right over the opening of the back door, so it leaked into the car a little bit so that was beautiful! We couldn't take care of it that night cause it was too late so we had to clean it the next day, and by the time we got around to that we had about 3 members be like hey have you seen your car? It's been egged! So that was fun! 

Thursday was again a pretty normal day with missionary work, not a lot exciting went on that day. We did have dinner with the Borczuchs though and that was super nice! Gave bro Borczuch a hard time about his Ford cause it broke down the other day on him when he was out. Even tried to fix it up for him by putting a Chevy sign over true Ford sign, but I don't think it worked. 

Friday, we did some service over at a little senior center/ hangout place for everyone in town setting up chairs for a wedding that was going to be going on Saturday sometime. Doing that got us in with one of our LAs that works there and he opened up to us quite a bit seeing us there helping out, so that was good! He even invited us over for dinner that night if we didn't have anything going on. 

Had a super good lesson fir day night with our investigator Aries, he's a Filipino, he's married, has 2 boys about our age, works and McCain's, and he doesn't look like he's much older than 26 so that kinda tosses you through a loop when you find out he's got kids our age. Super nice guy! We taught him kind of L3 (gospel of Jesus Christ) as we taught he had some questions about the people in the afterlife and about repentance, so we answered those for him. It was probably one of the best lessons I’ve been in in a while, the spirit was there that's for sure as we taught him about how he can repent and follow Christ even closer. It's pretty cool to see the spirit working through you as you teach people, cause things just come to your mind like that and you know what would best help them. He asked for ways to know how he can know he's been forgiven even after he's repented of that same thing countless times before that, and if he is forgiven when that happens. I took him into the talk 70×7 and read a bit from there and I think that helped him out a bit, it was super good!

After the lesson he fed us so that was a bonus! 

Once we got out of Aries place we headed down to the Christmas parade to see the stuff going on there and to see if we could find someone good there that we could maybe teach. The parade was much bigger then everyone made it seem, and there were quite a few people out there watching it so that was kinda fun to go see all that. 

Saturday, we spent the day cooking the turkey for the Christmas party that night. Somehow, we got put in charge of that but it's whatever it was fun. Got lucky that we had things to do to keep us around the apartment most the day while it was cooking. Did our weekly planning since we didn't finish it Friday, did our studies, went out to newton for a couple hrs to stop by a potential that said to come back that day. We showed up at his place and came to find out he was a preacher...so that was just awesome! He was super nice though, him and his wife. They talked with us for at least an hr and a half about God and Jesus, the blood covenant, and whether or not God's love is a feeling or fact. It was a good visit cause he wasn't really bashing with us he was just preaching all his beliefs to us and not letting us talk too much, which I'd rather that than bashing.

5.00 was our Christmas party so we headed over there for that. Didn't have a super bug turnout but that was fine, meant more food for us! The turkey and everything turned out really good to their surprise, so let's hope that next yr. the elders that are here are as good a cooks as we are, or the branch might be disappointed. 

Sunday was pretty good! Aries showed up!! I gave a 5 min on the spot talk so that was fun. I talked about the light of your testimony with the story of the old rancher and the preacher with the coal, if you remember that story. They all seemed to like it cause everyone during church kept bring it up as we went along in classes.

After church elder and sister Jensen's, the senior couple in our branch came over to our place to do some things while we waited for 3.30 to roll around so that we could all drive out to the Adams place in Holland together for dinner at 4.30.

When we got to the Adams place we ended up playing games for a hr and a bit while they finished/ started making dinner, it was a good time. 

After dinner was all done the boys ended up playing games again while the girls cleaned up the last bit of stuff (they told us to play games) by the time we got out of there it was 8.00, so it was a strait shot home and to bed for us. 

It was a good day I'd say, got to spend some time with the best senior couple in the mission, got dinner, and an investigator to church! What more could you want as a missionary! 

Well that was our week far as I can remember. Hope you all had a good week, and have a good week this week!

Love ya all talk to you next week!