Chapter 4: A Week In A Hotel

Steaks to celebrate the half-way mark of their missions.

Elder Anderson and Elder Eden

Elder Anderson with his new companion, Elder Johnson.

7/20/2020

Today was a really cool Pday! We got to go to Walmart with a companionship that was nice enough to give us rides, and usually that companionship doesn't buy any food so I end up feeling bad because we do buy a LOT of food and they usually end up waiting for a long time, but today they bought actual groceries, I was very proud of them. Our groceries were pretty great; Collins hits his year mark on July 23rd and I hit it on the 24th, so we splurged the money we had been saving today on steak, we're pretty excited for our anniversaries now. Usually on your anniversary it's mission tradition to burn one of your old white, discolored shirts, but we don't really have a place to do that, we don't want to do it at our apartment because we'd definitely scare people, and we can't do it at the church because enough people as it is already think that we're a cult. We also got to film another video about life after death for our Facebook page which was pretty great. The videos we make are pretty good quality, but they still leave a lot to be desired. We also got to do a service project today, we moved a coffin into a guys shed and we got some pretty good pictures of Elder Collins standing next to it before we moved it. The guy was super grateful for our help, and we were glad to have a way to help him out. We also got to do a practice lesson with another companionship where Collins and I got to pass along some wisdom to the people who wanted to practice with us. All of today was so exciting that we forgot to eat until 9:00.

7/21/2020

Today was very exciting. Elder Collins and I got ready pretty quickly so that we could head off to our district counsel early this morning, which was bittersweet because this was my first time doing district counsel with some of these people, and my last time getting to do district counsel with them for quite some time. The district was all really sad about my leaving which was pretty touching, some of these people I've only known for a matter of days, and yet we've still grown united. We also had a couple of interesting lessons today, one was a contact with a less active member (we could tell he was less active because he took the Lord's name in vain a lot as he was speaking to us). This man educated us a lot in politics in the ten minutes we were talking to him, and we even set up a return visit with him, so that's going to be interesting. Another cool lesson we had today was with the Saaris. Brother Saari is the 92 year old guy, and he was telling us today about how he mowed the lawn, vacuumed the house, and many other chores for his wife today which I thought was the sweetest thing ever, I hope I'm as valiant as he is at 92. We also got to share in our all mission devotional tonight about our baptism for the Custers. It was really cool to get to share with everyone and be a way to strengthen their faith about Facebook. Tomorrow's my last full day in this area, so we're going to have to make it a good one.

7/22/2020

Well, we made it a good one. Today Collins and I had to get ready pretty quickly because we had an all mission meeting early this morning. The meeting was good, we talked a lot about how to not be robots on our Facebook pages, which I thought was pretty silly, but then they showed us messages missionaries had sent and I realized that maybe this training was needed after all. After the meeting we got to come back and have lunch. We made gyros with meatballs in an attempt to use some up, but Elder Collins and his next comp still have like, 30 left. Then we got to go to the church and do our comp study for the last time which was very sad. We had a district call where I got to say goodbye to everyone and then a call with my Zone Leaders to say goodbye to them as well. I'm really going to miss these guys. We got to teach a lesson to Brother and Sister Clark tonight. We explained Priesthood authority for Sister Clark's benefit, I don't think she understood it perfectly, but it's a pretty new concept for most people, and she seemed to grasp some of the bigger ideas behind it so that was cool. Elder Collins and I also had to celebrate our one year anniversaries today, since we're getting transfered when they're really happening. Our celebrations included  eating from a massive pile of meat and blasting church music for everyone in our apartment complex to hear and be converted by. It was a pretty awesome celebration.

7/23/2020

Today was my first day serving in the Uncompahgre ward. This morning Elder Collins and I got up and I finished packing so that everything would be set for transfers. I don't think that I lost too much in transfers, just a notebook. After a short wait for our district leader to give us a ride to the chapel we headed out to pick up our new companions. I got to meet my new comp, Elder Johnson, he's an awesome guy and the old companion of my zone leader, Elder Samoijla. After we got everything for the new area sorted out we started off. This new area is pretty cool because we have a truck, the only one on the mission. We'll be sharing it with another companionship, but being able to drive is pretty cool. We started off by dividing the area up with our ward mission leader. Elder Johnson and I will be working in the Southern portion of the area. Our living conditions are pretty weird right now, we don't have any way to cook (boo...), but we are staying in a hotel (yay?). Fortunately these won't be very permanent living conditions. We're only scheduled to be here for a week, but there are some Sisters in this hotel too that are scheduled to be here for at least a month. Those Sisters are part of our district and one of them is super sick, so we went with our district leader to get them Sprite and crackers. I didn't have a lot of faith in those remedies, so when we got to the Sister's door we offered to them a blessing, which they were very grateful for. We came in and were getting ready to start when we got a call from our District leader, he said, "Be sure not to have contact with the Sisters, we don't want you guys getting sick", I replied, "umm... it's too late for that", while we made awkward eye contact with the Sisters. Our DL continued, "oh no! You guys had contact with them, did you talk to them face to face?" I didn't do much to assure him, "yeah, we did..." (at this point it was getting hard to restrain our laughing). So we didn't give the Sister a blessing, I guess we'll just have to have faith in crackers and Sprite. We also had some awesome lessons with the members today, we called enough people that when we went to report to our ward mission leader at the end of the day, he had already heard some of what we'd been doing from the members we had contact with. It was pretty cool that our reputation preceded us.

7/24/2020

Today was my one year mark! We didn't do anything special, but that's okay, because I got to celebrate with Collins on Wednesday. Today was important for Johnson and I because we got to plan out the way we want this week and most of this transfer to go. I can't reveal too much because it would spoil all of the surprises, but we have a pretty big vision for this area, we're ready to make it the incredible place it was meant to be. We're kind of struggling for food, because this hotel doesn't have a place to cook, but a member brought us dinner tonight which totally saved us. I also got to drive a truck today which was the first time I had driven a truck and also the first time I had ever driven on a mission. I don't know why it felt so weird to drive as a missionary, but it definitely felt like it was breaking a part of me. Maybe the "walking missionary" part of me from Brazil thought I was giving up on it. Elder Johnson and I had some great success calling members and uninterested persons today, since we have a new SIM card no one has blocked our number yet, which means that many people got sucked into lengthy phone conversations with us, they were all very positive interactions, though. The best part about today though was definitely breakfast. This hotel provides breakfasts, and they have a waffle maker. That waffle maker is easily the greatest thing I have ever used, this is going to be a very good week here.

7/25/2020

I forgot to say: Monday when Elder Collins and I went to the trailer park we were obstructed from getting to the door, so what did we do? We used my training from Brazil and clapped the door. Elder Collins said, "I don't think anyone heard that..." and then the dude opened the door. I was very proud of myself. Today we had dinner with two members (but they don't know that so don't tell them). The Bishop brought over dinner to the Elder's appartment, and to our surprise, we found out that another lady had been cooking all day and was expecting us for dinner. We had told her that we wanted to set up a lesson with her family, she interpreted that as dinner? So we ate with her and then we got to share our lesson, so win-win for everyone except Bishop because we haven't cleared off the tray he gave us for dinner, so we can't return it quite yet... We also had a lot of success with beginning to message people personally. I'm now an advisor for parents which is pretty awesome, and trying to build up a friend group centered on Christ. The cool part about this is that I get to work with people from all over the world and pass them along to missionaries in their proper areas once they start progressing. It took a while to build up the will to want to try to help everyone because I've been prideful and only wanted to help the people in my area. I finally got over it and now we're doing some incredible work helping out the world.

7/26/2020

Today was a great day! We organized the driving rotation and today was one of our days, so I got to drive our truck around all day, which was pretty awesome. This truck is such a nice, new car, it causes me anxiety to be driving it. We have so many precautions for driving as missionaries, there's a "black box" of doom, as the other missionaries call it, it's supposed to warn you if you're driving too fast, but I didn't even notice it, I'm too scared of scratching the giant truck I'm driving to go over 25mph. We had an awesome church meeting today, we met about half of the members and made such cool friendships, the people really connected with us today. We had so much fun talking to people and getting to know their stories. We also got to bear a quick testimony before the sacrament speaker spoke today which was really cool. People seemed a lot more interested in talking to us after they knew what kind of missionaries we were. We taught a couple of lessons to members today which was a blast, we taught our Bishop and the Foster family, both of whom committed to share recordings of their testimonies with us. We're very excited that we're getting so much support from our members for our work with this ward. Elder Pack and Fisher are the other two sharing a ward with us, and we're basically living as a house of four. We're always going over to their house to eat and study. The members in this ward are so good, they're bringing us so much food because they heard that there are four of us, and we're all very happy to have so much support from our members, especially since we can't make food in our hotel right now.

July Bonus Material

Elder Anderson is doing some pretty incredible things on Facebook with the help of his companion, Elder Collins. Here are a few things he posted on the Grand Junction Facebook page this month.

1. "I did remember all my sins and iniquities, for which I was tormented..."
"I cried within my heart, O Jesus, thou Son of God, have mercy on me...And now behold, when I thought this, I could remember my pains no more...and oh, what joy, and what marvelous light did I behold..."(Alma 36:13,19-20)
Through calling on the name of our Savior Jesus Christ, we can be forgiven. No matter how large the chain or how painful the wound, He can set us free and give us peace and light in a world full of fear.
How would YOU describe Jesus Christ's love?

2. This video is awesome! If you don't know Elder Anderson, you can get a real feel for his playful personality in this video. He has a fun side that combined with a love of sharing the gospel makes him a pretty powerful missionary!

Plan of Salvation in 30 Seconds

3. Does God really hear my prayers? Does anyone care about me? Am I loved? The answer is an unequivocal YES! Consider the story of Enos from the Book of Mormon, Enos wanted to know of God's existence, that he cared about his life, and because he reached out in faith, he heard God's voice speaking to him: "Enos, thy sins are forgiven thee, and thou shalt be blessed" (Enos 1:5).

How have your prayers been answered?

Chapter 3: A Tiny Area Cut In Half

7/13/2020

Today was great! We did all of our Pday escapades which were a lot of fun, mostly just running around Walmart and trying to find the weirdest assortment of items. It was like a scavenger hunt, but your prize at the end is that they take your money. Today I found so many people from my time in Brazil on my facebook page which was awesome! I was so excited to be reunited to them after so long. One of the comments was, "well look who decided to show up", not everyone was happy it had taken me so long to get social media... It was so awesome to see so many familiar faces, though. Today we also got transfer news, our district is splitting up which we're all very sad about. Melody Lane is also being split in half, we're going to share our area with Sisters, which will be an... interesting experience... Our area is already small so we're not sure what to expect after it's split, in addition to that, having four missionaries for a ward just seems weird to me. We joined our Bishop's family home evening tonight which was awesome! Elder Collins and I got to give a great message on repentance, and they're super excited about working with us now. We also whipped out a Facebook post in like, ten minutes tonight. It was our turn to post, but it had been pday so we didn't have a lot of time to spend on it, we made our message about prayer, though, and it ended up being super powerful! I hope it really helps with our Facebook initiative.

7/14/2020

Today was great! We had a mission wide meeting to launch our new Facebook ads, and we have all been assigned shifts to watch over our pages so that hopefully we can respond to people's comments within seconds. It was awesome to see everyone on a missionwide level, but it was even better to see my district in person afterwards. We had an amazing meeting, that was without a doubt the best meeting I have ever had. There was no training, just a discussion, contributed to by every single member of our district with sincere and incredible testimonies. It's going to be heartbreaking to leave those guys this week. Collins and I had a number of successes with calls today, but the best by far was with a less active, we had been helping him prepare to receive the Priesthood, and at the end of our lesson asked if we could meet with his whole family next time. He said he would love that, especially because his wife has been wanting to meet with us because she's interested in joining the church. That's my first referral here! My brother Matthew is also famous now, on our Spanish page we created a post about children and Matthew is a model toddler, so he got to be the face of our post. Hopefully his cute face will bring lots of investigators.

7/15/2020

Today was great! We did a lesson with the members, the Andersons, and they were incredible! We've been attempting to inspire members to create Facebook posts to begin sharing their testimonies with their friends and family members, and the Anderson's are totally willing to help out! We are so excited to be making such thorough connections with members that they trust us enough to follow our invitations and directions. We also got to spend a lot of time with Elders Barstow and Forsgren today which is good because today was our last day as a district, transfers go into effect tomorrow. We also did the baptismal interview for the Custers today! Nate and Colton Custer were both being interviewed, they both passed and are excited to be baptized tomorrow! I talked to Nate a little bit about his conversion experience, and he shared the most incredible testimony with me, it was riveting to see just how quickly he's been progressing and just how truly converted he is. A bishop for another ward walked by us while we were talking and managed to tell us stories for like, a half hour straight. I'm not entirely sure how he can talk for so long, or how the myriad of stories he told relate to one another because he just went from one to another without pausing to breathe, but it was a very cool experience. If nothing else, it showed Nate and Colton just how friendly the members are. 

7/16/2020

Today was awesome! All of the new missionaries arrived in their areas which means that Elder Collins and I are officially sharing an area with another companionship. As such, we spent a decent amount of time calling those Sisters today and explaining everything about Melody Lane to them, and trying to help them to have an easy time integrating. We've had a lot of troubles dividing up our area with the members and our teaching pool, but hopefully by ward correlation on Saturday (our organizational meeting with the ward mission leader) we'll have it done. The big event of today though was the baptism of Nate and Colton Custer. We had a lot of adventures during it, especially with filling up the font, at first it was full almost to the top, then we did our program and, come time for the baptism, to our dismay, it's almost empty. We had a testimony meeting to buy us some time where Elder Collins, Brother and Sister Custer, and I got to share our testimonies. By the time that we were all done the font was full and we were able to have the baptisms. Even though the gathering was super small because of the Covid restrictions, the Spirit was still very strong, and we had an incredible service. Brother Custer and Colton were both able to be confirmed immediately after, and Brother Custer was able to receive the Aaronic Priesthood as well. Elder Collins and I were so excited that we got to be a part of their conversion. This was the first baptism in the Colorado Denver South Mission that came from Facebook finding, so that's a pretty cool success as well. The Custers were true converts, and that made for the most incredible baptism.

7/17/2020

Today was great! We had our first meal with members tonight which meant that we could finally build member relationships in person. It's been very disappointing to not have much contact with the members so to be able to play with kids and talk to adults face to face was very nice. Collins and I also had a lot of success in our calling of the members today, we got some responses and even if some of them were pretty morbid (like one guy who told us about how he was working on making caskets for his wife and himself), it was nice* to connect a little more to the members in this ward. Our Facebook ad went live last night, so we got to do a shift monitoring that ad. The idea behind the shifts is that everyone takes about an hour out of their schedule and by doing that we're able to respond to any page interactions within seconds, thereby increasing our chance of talking to those who interact with the page before they lose interest. Today was also really good because we were able to plan out what we want our talks to be, so this Sunday we're going to completely turn this ward around.

7/18/2020

We're not going to get this ward completely turned around. Today during our nightly devotionals our President was like, "at the end of tonight transfer news will be posted". I looked at Collins and was like, "so how long has it been since our last transfer?" he replied, "one week". Things have  been picking up pace, and because of that, I'm getting transferred out of this area after only having been in it for three weeks. Collins and I are trying to find creative ways to get out of transfers, but all of our pretended scenarios end poorly, usually with the AP's coming in with guns to get us. The rest of today was really good though, we finally found a new investigator and got her on date for baptism. Sister Clark is the wife of Brodie Clark, an active member who we've been doing lessons with. They also have two kids, both living with them, a 14 and 19 year old, both whom we're hoping to meet next time so we can get the whole family on date. We did a service project for the Olsen family, we had dinner with them last night and asked if we could do anything to help them, and then made them let us come back over today to paint doors. It was a blast! I had so much fun with it. We also officially got the ward completely divided up between the two companionships that are going to be in Melody Lane too, which is also great, because it's been a very painful process and I don't want to do any more electronic work like that for a long time.

7/19/2020

Today we got to give talks to our ward! It was an awesome chance to introduce ourselves as the missionaries and teach our ward that we mean business. The ward has been divided in half because of covid, but it works out really nicely because now we have two companionships in our ward, so one companionship for each half works pretty well. Each half of the ward meets in a separate meeting so we got to give our talks twice today. In our first meeting we had to share a time slot for speaking with Sister Anderson (no relation), which didn't work very well, I gave an abbreviated version of my talk but it was still long enough that Collins backed down and didn't give his talk which I felt very bad about. In our second meeting only Elder Collins and I were speaking so I got to speak as long as I wanted and only feel a little bad when our meeting ended after an hour instead of 45 minutes like it was supposed to. Our talks went really well, though, this area is going to completely turn around, our talks might have pumped us up more than the ward. We had a lesson fall through which was a little disappointing, but not entirely unexpected. We did set up a return visit for tomorrow though so that we could help him put the coffin he built for himself into his storage shed. We also got to do an incredible faith building devotional tonight which was a really good ending to the night.

Chapter 2: Colorado Heat Has NOTHING On Manaus

7/6/2020

Today was my first Pday in Colorado. I was pretty excited to go shopping at the grocery store and see just what kind of stuff they had. I found almost everything I brought out, I was so happy to know that I wasn't wasting my precious supplies here and that I would be able to replenish them. We went to get haircuts today and the whole ordeal was pretty funny: We tried to walk inside but the door was locked and they pointed at the "appointment only" sign. So we called them and they pick up, Collins asks them when the soonest we can make an appointment for is, and the lady is like, "right now" so Collins makes an appointment for right then, and then the lady's like, "all right, call us when you get here". I badly wanted Collins to call back immediately and be like "here", but he didn't, so we went to get yeast because I was forgetful in our shopping trip earlier and had neglected to get it. We showed up for our appointments afterwards and they pulled out their thermometers and point them at our heads like guns, I thought we were going to die right there. Then they let us in and gave us both haircuts with our masks on, which I didn't even know was possible. The lady who cut my hair did a great job, but the one who cut Collin's hair just buzzed it, apparently they had the greatest miscommunication ever, and when I made eye contact with him I couldn't believe what I was seeing, it was so much shorter than what he walked in with, and he wasn't very happy afterwards. Other than talking to everyone the only cool thing is that we finished up our video for the area which turned out pretty great, Collins and I did a drawing together, he did the lettering and I did the painting, and it looks pretty great!

7/7/2020

Today was great! We had our first district counsel today, and it's crazy to see just how different everything in the States is compared to how we'd do things in Brazil. In Brazil we gathered as a small district and had a training and couple of small thoughts delegated out to go through, but here there are multiple trainings from everyone on the mission and since everything's online we meet with the President and everyone else for it too. It was a great opportunity to get to meet with all of the Missionaries across the mission and learn so much from them. We also had a smaller meeting for just our Zone after, and I'm sure everyone got tired of hearing me talking, but Collins never tried to restrain me, so maybe it wasn't too bad after all. We also got to do some more service for service Sister Abercrombie which was very meaningful to her, she started crying at the end it was incredible to see just how much the Spirit magnified our efforts. We got our first dinner from a member tonight, which was awesome! I loved to relax for a night instead of worrying about making dinner. We also got to teach a lesson on repentance tonight, it was incredible to teach with Collins, we're not teaching our lessons, we're teaching by the Spirit, this makes me very nervous for transfers, we're being too successful together.

7/8/2020

Today was fun, I was a full-fledged missionary of the Colorado Denver South mission for about six hours. I woke up this morning and I finally received the Facebook app to begin online proselyting, and a cryptic text from Sister Rees in response to my comp's text about my completion of the prerequisites for my Facebook account. Sister Rees text read, "Thanks. I will you". I say that I was a full-fledged member because a couple hours ago Facebook disappeared saying that it had been removed by an admin. I'm not quite sure how to take that... We got to teach two lessons today, which were incredible! We taught one to a member family, and made some incredible ties with them, and taught one lesson to those persons of interest that we have on date, Nate and Colton Custer. We went through the baptismal interview questions with them today and they did incredible! They're going to be baptized next Thursday. We also finished up our service with Sister Abercrombie today: We moved our dirt piles out of her yard so now she has many bushes planted in her yard. She made us dinner as a thank you and edible. She made us some tacos which Elder Collins said were really authenticly Mexican. My dad once ate 11 tacos, scaring the heck out of my mother whom had just married a couple of weeks earlier, likely all she could imagine was what their food bill would be. Well, I know I'm my dad's son because I ate eight tacos from that wonderful lady, as well as the rest of the three course meal she made for us. I was in heaven tonight. Mom: You don't have to worry about me, the members are taking care of us.

7/9/2020

Today wasn't very exciting. It was another big day for trainings so I mostly spent the day watching videos which taught good values and gave me some good laughs. The videos were so short that they were pretty comedic because of all the action that was included. Elder Collins and I had a good game of "beat the video missionaries" where we would cite a scripture to answer the pretend investigator's question before the missionaries in the video could. Turns  out, we are both VERY quick to respond to any question. Our district was very excited to hear about our upcoming baptisms and Elder Collins and I spent a while working on our Facebook posts for this week. We're going to submit another drawing, this week about asphixiation that's either going to be #relateable or scare everybody on this platform and get us banned from ever posting again.

7/10/2020

Today was great! We met with our relief society presidency about how we could implement the Facebook initiative among the Sisters and families in the ward and got some truly incredible ideas from them. It was an awesome day for work because we were able to progress so much on the Facebook path; Sister Rees was able to put Facebook on my phone so now Elder Collins and I can actually work together. Other significant things we did today included turning 3.5 pounds of ground beef into meatballs that we'll likely be using for the rest of our time here and a devotional that we gave tonight. Our zone was in charge of the devotional and did an incredible job, I even got to sharer a "hope of the heart" (Spiritual message that falls into categories predetirmined by President and Sister Rees). I gave a message on the joy of repentance and was very grateful for the chance to talk to everyone, even though I was nervous enough that I wasn't able to remember everything that I hoped to say. Elder Collins and I are super excited now because our ability to find is really about to take off with the number of member lessons we have set up, as well as my ability to work alongside Collins now.

7/11/2020

Today was an awesome day! We spent a ton of time calling and getting to know members which was fun when they picked up, but otherwise was just a lot of record making. We use a cool app called area book to record all of our interactions which is awesome because we used to have to do it on paper, but on the downside, because it's so easy to record them now we have to record ALL of our interactions, so every phone call gets its own summary of what happened. We taught a lesson to a couple of older members in our ward, they were both amazingly attentive, and incredibly intelligent. The husband is 92 years old and still flirtatiously talking to his wife which was about the sweetest thing I could have imagined. Another fun thing is that I finished a painting/drawing about repentance for our area page today. The last one that I did wasn't very popular, which could have been because we didn't present it in an original way, or because artwork might not be appealing to our audience, or maybe they're all just art critics and it wasn't good enough for them. I do hope that this one does better because it was a lot better done: more symbolic, better quality, more artistically pleasing, so I do hope it helps further missionary work in our area a lot better than the other.

7/12/2020

Today was great! We only have sacrament meeting every other week so we weren't able to go to sacrament meeting today, but we did get to have a mini sacrament meeting as our district today which was great! I got to plan out every part of the meeting which was a lot of fun, I really felt the Spirit during it, it was a very successful meeting. We also had a couple of great lessons today. We taught Katherine which was actually a pass off lesson, she doesn't live in our area so we introduced her to the Elders who do live in her area and taught her with them. We helped her to understand the importance of baptism in a really cool way too; She said that she had been prompted to read from Ezekiel and we helped her understand the verses in chapter 36 that talk about baptism which helped her to see that this was more than our desires, these are God's desires as well. We had a great lesson with a Brother as well, the guy had been pretty angry and very closed off the first few times we called him, but he's part of our ward's leadership so it was important to talk to him. As we followed promptings the call turned completely around and now he's ecstatic to help, it was remarkable to see that God wouldn't leave His missionaries alone and would help us to navigate all obstacles. We also had a mission devotional tonight, it was a really great faith booster, I'm so glad to see that the mission is working so hard to help us as missionaries even during quarantine. Collins is also awesome, today we studied Portuguese together which was a great chance to further my knowledge of my mission language.

O Livro De Brian II: Chapter 1: Colorado Denver South Mission

Elder Anderson and his new companion, Elder Collins digging holes for a service project.

Fourth of July fireworks

Here's what's been happening in Melody Lane, Grand Junction:

7/1/2020

Today was a blast! I'm officially back on the mission, headed off to the Colorado Denver South mission. I drove to the airport, said my final goodbyes to my family and attempted to navigate an airport on my own. I have been through the airport several times, but still had no idea what to do. It was a great mess, but eventually I made my way out of security. There was a Sister in the airport going to Denver as well, so it was pretty nice to get to go out with someone rather than just sitting in a Coronavirus-fearing airport alone for a couple of hours. After the flight for a couple of hours we got to Colorado, where we got to meet the AP's, and after a bit of waiting, the large group of missionaries from Salt Lake. It was great to meet and talk to so many missionaries, and to have an opportunity to see into so many hearts. I really missed seeing other missionaries, I heard so many cool stories today, and so much about what a great place the Denver mission is, I'm very excited. I asked a couple of Elders if they wanted to study with me, and so instead of just waiting around like the missionaries tend to do, we got to study a Come Follow Me lesson together! It was super cool to study with two awesome Elders, especially after we had all just renewed our commitment to being missionaries by deciding to come back out here. After our entire group had arrived, we trekked to our car where our AP drove like a maniac (I say that in awe, not in criticism) to the nearest Chick-Fil-A (I approve), and the hotel which we would be staying in tonight before we head over the mountains to my area tomorrow. Between the Chick-Fil-A, and the packed snacks Sister Rees (our mission president's wife) made for us, we're all very well fed and very happy. To make matters even better, we get to stay in rooms with our new missionary friends, I've been having a great time, and can't wait to hear how  tomorrow goes.

7/2/20

Today was awesome! I got my new comp and area which Elder Eden [a good friend from home] had fortuitously told me about ahead of time. We woke up this morning to begin our drive our to Grand Junction and it was a lot of fun! I got to drive separately with another Elder which I really appreciated as it gave me time to study, which I wouldn't have gotten had it not been for that drive. The drive through Colorado was gorgeous! I was so excited to get to see so much, it made for some great art inspiration. There were so many jutting rocks and incredible cliff sides, Colorado really is a beautiful place. After the ride I found my comp, Elder Collins, as he and some friends had constructed a sign that read "Anderson" on it. I carefully hid behind them (it's very important to know how perceptive the missionaries you're serving with are) and the passed the test, realizing very quickly who I was (they were very confused as to what I was doing, I'm not sure why...). Afterwards Elder Collins and the other two Elders who apparently act as our chauffeurs because we don't have a car, drove us back and then locked us out of our house. Being locked out was quite an adventure, we drove around to various places hoping we'd find a spare key, but found nothing. Luckily we were saved when another Elder found out that our bedroom window was unlocked and managed to climb through and unlock it from the inside. I got to video chat meet my mission President which was super cool, and at a video devotional later even got to see Elder Eden which was super fun. Other than that, the day was pretty mellow. We got my phone 90% set up, it still needs Facebook which I thought would be pretty quick to set up, but I was wrong: The church has a HUGE video training course about how to use Facebook that I have to watch before I can get my account set up, hopefully I'll be done with all of it tomorrow. It's seriously multiple hours of videos which aren't the most joyful to sit through, but it'll be over soon. I also got to study with Elder Collins today which was super cool. During quarantine I got to do comp study a bit with various people which I loved, and now that I love it so much it was easy to show Elder Collins just what I loved about it so much. He was really fun to study with, and said that it was a "dang good study session". I very much agree, I'm very happy to be in a place where I feel like I can learn so much.

7/3/2020

I can't feel my spine, it's about as soft as the spaghetti noodles I cooked tonight, which were very soft since I'm such a good cook. I also used spoiled heavy cream to cook tonight, but Elder Collins thought it tasted good so don't tell him. Today was a lot of fun, and really good for missionary work. We had a training for me this morning which was very cool, the gist of it was, "we know this is hard so don't get depressed" but I don't know, missionary work has never been easy, so this doesn't seem to far out of the ordinary. I'm very used to walking into areas and hearing, "oh yeah everything's on fire and it's all hopeless" and then we find great ways to turn it around because the Lord loves this work and He loves effort. The mission orientation was very cool today and came with a small miracle: The battery on Elder Collin's phone isn't the best and the church building didn't have power so we weren't able to charge the phone during the two hour long call with our president. Collins battery dropped pretty fast, but as soon as we got down to one percent it stayed on that for enough time that we were able to finish up the last couple minutes of the devotional and hear the ending. It was no small miracle to us, however. We were amazed that the Lord would love us so much as to watch over even the details of the work we do. We also had a service project today which was cool because it meant that we were able to get out of the house, which Elder Collins hadn't been able to do since he got here. We helped this less active lady, Sister Abercrombie (like Abercrombie and Fitch, however that's spelled), which was incredible because we were able to start building member relations with her and set up a lesson for next week, both of which we could desperately use. The service was for digging holes, which was great because I love digging holes and destroying yards, both of which I excel at. Well,  Collins and I went HARD on digging those holes. The first two weren't that bad, the shovel cut through the dirt like butter which gave me very false expectations about how the rest of the service would go. My third hole was when the fun really began. I hit rock,  and not like, a small rock or even some big rocks, I hit SOLID rock. There was some type of softish rock that just kept going and going. I found out that by slamming the shovel down over and over that I could break up the rock enough to remove a small section. I took that shovel through that rock three different occasions to make some giant holes for potted plants this lady wanted planted. Digging through rock took the rest of the night, but it definitely earned the admiration of this less active Sister, she said she would love to do lessons with us, which we're very excited about. 

7/4/2020

Today's the Fourth of July! It was a very exciting and very eventful day. Elder Collins and I had made some pretty awesome plans about how we wanted to improve our area and today was the day that we put everything into effect. It was really cool to get to spend so much time working on our area because I had doubts before as to how much we could get done, however, we were able to call around to a huge number of members, as well as do a virtual lesson with this lady: Katherine. Katherine is a super smart lady! She's been reading through the Book of Mormon and had a lot of excellent questions regarding everything that she had read, which was amazing! In Brazil we could barely get people to read, much less study the book. We started answering her questions and within two minutes my old Brazil missionary mode had kicked back in so I immediately challenged her to be baptized. She accepted the invitation to prepare for the 25th! Elder Collins and I are very excited to be making such a big impact in our area, it's a lot more rare to find people who are willing to make commitments in the States, so it was a really big deal that in our first few days working that we would already be blessed with so much success. We also had a devotional with our mission tonight for a couple of hours which was really cool, even better because I got to see Elder Eden and Pope, it's very, very cool to be serving out here with two friends. Our Fourth celebrations were also pretty great: We made hamburgers! I love living in the U.S., we have access to so many great foods.

7/5/20

Today was awesome! We had our first Sacrament meeting that I'd had since Covid started, it wasn't very long, but it was cool to get to see the members and meet with them. I signed Elder Collins and I up for talks in a couple of weeks  since we're only meeting every other week (he's been very kind to want to do everything I've suggested). We wanted  to use the time to address the ward about the importance of the gathering of Israel and what's truly going on, but two  weeks is too far away, we'll probably end up making a Facebook video and trying to pass it around the ward. Elder Collins and I worked on another piece for our Facebook videos today: We started doing a drawing together, we figured Collins writing a scripture at the top, and me drawing to go along with it would be an incredible way to try to get everyone's interest. I tried painting with lots of different colors instead of using a true palette and it  looks pretty cool, but I don't  know if it's an effect I'll want to do again. Collins and I have been doing incredible work together, and today is an awesome end to an incredible, abbreviated week.