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.
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