Week 12 - Good Week
Hey guys! This week has been mostly the same as previous weeks. All except zone conference! Zone conference was super cool. First we had to drive there of course, which is usually an 8 hour drive. But, we missed a turn, and it turned into a 12 hour drive. All good though! I'm just glad we didn't go into another ditch. When we got to Winnipeg, we visited our favorite games store GameKnight. While we were there, Elder Mendenhall bought a new mono-red Magic: The Gathering deck! He also ordered a red-black one for pick-up at Walmart, that arrived right as we got back from Winnipeg! His two new decks way better match his playstyle, and games against him are much more fun and challenging. In Winnipeg we stayed with the London area elders, and we taught them how to play Magic as well which was fun.
On Wednesday we had zone conference which was awesome. Our guest speaker Shane Littlefield had a lot of really interesting stuff to share! One thing that was really interesting was all the numbers he shared regarding different finding methods. For clarification, one of the things we do as missionaries is look for people who are interested in learning about the gospel, and we generally call that part of the day "finding" for short. The most common method our mission uses is street contacting, basically we just go and talk to people in public places. Turns out, that is also by far the least effective method! Even door-to-door is better by a decent margin! The top 4 methods all related to working wtih members, and the#1 method is working with less active members! That was a bit of a surprise too, I would have expected working with people who are regularly coming to church to be more effective than working with those who aren't. But working with less active members was better by double! He had a lot of other cool stuff but I'll spare you all the details haha. Exciting news though! Since Shane Littlefield wasn't able to make it in person to zone conference, turns out he'll be coming to our next zone conference too!! I think it was supposed to be a surprise, because President Carr hadn't mentioned it, everyone was surprised when Shane Littlefield said it during his talk, and President Carr started giggling a bit. So that's cool!
The rest of the week was pretty average, but I made a new friend! He's my new sleep paralysis demon. I named him Bubbles. He only visited once, but I hope he visits again so that we can talk, I feel like we got off on the wrong foot last time when I felt like he wanted to kill me. This was also only the second time I've ever experienced sleep paralysis in my life. Very odd.
Oh also, completely unrelated to that last paragraph, you may notice that I'm on week 12, while last email said week 10. This is because I went back and updated all the titles to reflect how long I've been on the mission rather than how many emails I've sent. I missed the first week haha
AAAaaaanyway to close on a high note, here's a picture of my dog Tucker back home, playing with my Aunt and Uncle's new puppy!!
That's all this week! It's a great day to be a missionary :D
-Elder Hays