November 7, 2016

Cheyenne is basically right on the border of Colorado and Wyoming. I guess I've just been going more and more northern on my mission. And yeah, we did have to do that. Our Zone goes all the way out to Alliance Nebraska. And it goes past Wheatland Wyoming too. So yeah it's big. 

 We definitely drive a lot more. I will send you a pdf of all of the areas in the mission. We cover the prairie view ward and the cornerstone ward. So that should show you how much ground we have to cover. We try to walk as much as possible though. 

New minivan:

Last night we had a pretty eventful experience where we had to take some missionaries down to Windsor last minute. We had heard some disturbing things about some missionaries and them driving away from each other for long periods of time and leaving each other alone, and then they lied to President McMurray about it over the phone when he confronted them. :( 

So he asked us to go pick them up and take them down to Windsor, a 45-50 minute car ride. He asked us to do that around 6 PM, so we had to cancel our dinner appointment and go pick them up and take them down to Windsor. 

That was one of the most awkward car rides ever. When we got to the mission home, President interviewed them both and got the situation sorted out after about 2 hours. So we didn't get home until about 10 or 10:30 last night. Ugh. It was not a fun experience, but it is always sad for me to see missionaries wasting their time on their missions by being disobedient and not paying attention to the rules at all. Their mission has such a great potential to be amazing, but when they do stuff like that, it is sad. 

On our pdays, we mostly give rides to people in bike areas. We also go shopping and type emails and do laundry and stuff like that. We usually hang out at that place in the videos I sent home. That is where we do laundry and stuff. Last p-day we went golfing. I shall include some videos from that because it was pretty funny. 

Elder B from the zone:

Meeting up with all of Elder Domnikov's companions:

"thug" golfers:

For my daily workouts, I try to do lots of variety. I have a list of crossfit workouts without weights, so i use those often. Today my workout was:

30 lunges with 15 lb weights,

Max pull-ups

14 jumping lunges

Max pull-ups 

Wall sits

And then later today we are going to go do yoga x with some other elders. We will send pictures hahaha

It is hard because we don't have lots of time, but i'm getting better at being effective with the time we have. We also have a pull up bar and two 5 lb dumbbells at the apartment, so that is nice. 

Yeah, we had a regional broadcast for the north america central area yesterday with elder rasband, elder ulisses soares, brother devin durant, and sister bingham. They talked a lot about the temple, which was super cool. 

Those are some great insights! I love those. They are so true. Something that we learned from one of the stake presidents up here was super cool. He said that we are saved by grace after all we can do, right? Well, what is all we can do? So he looked up this scripture in alma:

11 And now behold, my brethren, since it has been all that we could do (as we were the most lost of all mankind) to repent of all our sins and the many murders which we have committed, and to get God to take them away from our hearts, for it was all we could do to repent sufficiently before God that he would take away our stain--

12 Now, my best beloved brethren, since God hath taken away our stains, and our swords have become bright, then let us stain our swords no more with the blood of our brethren.

It is all we can do to sincerely repent. That is so cool to me! Especially as we study the doctrine of Christ, we learn that everything in there is about repentance. This truly is a gospel of repentance, and I am so grateful for that. 

Those seriously are some great insights about being purified and sanctified. 

So just a heads up for you both, the mission president is wanting to try something new by having us write blogs. I don't know when I will be allowed to have you guys read my blog or anything like that, but hopefully in the near future you will be able to read off of this blog. We are just starting to pilot this in our area of the mission so it should be cool. The point is to have some of our investigators follow our blog so they can receive some more spiritual nourishment when we aren't meeting with them. We can also share our blog with people who aren't members but we meet on the street. Hopefully it will be a good finding tool. 

Also, I've been trying to eat healthier now. I read President Monson's talk from General Conference and have decided that I need to follow the word of wisdom better. So I have been eating healthy and have only had two desserts this week. (2 cookies and a raspberry cheesecake)  I have been eating chicken and salads and stuff. It is actually turning out to be great because it is my goal to get workouts in every morning (except Sunday). 

So.... a baskin robbins ice cream cake sounds great! We could probably pick it up around noonish next week. Thanks!!!!!! You are awesome. And i think you should eat a cake for me too lol 

And no worries about the absentee ballot for me. I dont even know who I would vote for. I know nothing about the two people except that they are both not good options. We try not to talk about politics as missionaries obviously, so there isn't really a good way to get informed. :/ what a mess. Who did you vote for?

I have shared the frozen pizza video with several missionaries now. You might go mission viral. You never know.