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.
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