Pretty Awesome Stuff

Wow I can't believe it has already been 2 months. It has gone by so quickly! This week was pretty wild and there was lots of cool stuff and crazy stuff that happened. So I guess you'll just have to read and find out which is which! 

Tuesday (Dec 4): Today we got a call in the morning from an older lady in our ward. We got to do some service for her and plant some flowers and rake some leave. Then she made us burgers for lunch and they were delicious. After lunch she asked us if we could build her a Christmas tree out of sticks and a thin rope and we said we would give it a shot. After a little bit of brainstorming we finally got it figured out! It was very time consuming but in the end I thought it turned out to look pretty dang good. 

The tree we built for a member

Then we had to travel up to Woolwich to the zone leaders flat tonight because there is a leadership counsel meeting tomorrow in London for all the zone and district leaders. So I will be on exchanges tomorrow while Elder Stoddard goes to a meeting. Turns out I get to be with Elder Ibanez from my MTC group!

Wednesday: Me and Elder Ibanez had a pretty sweet day here in Woolwich. I got to know him a little better and he is so great and a really funny guy. He is from Barcelona, Spain and he is 21. He definitely doesn't look like it though. Nothing extremely exciting or eventful happened during the exchange but it was just awesome to spend the day with him and create a good friendship. After the meeting, me and Elder Stoddard were supposed to go back to Hastings but we wouldn't have gotten back until 10:15 so unfortunately we had to stay in Woolwich another night. 

Me and Elder Ibanez

Thursday: We were finally able to make it home after a stop to district meeting this morning. Me and Elder Stoddard sang a duet "If You Could Hie to Kolob" since this could possibly be our last district meeting with all 4 of us the same. Then tonight we taught Mohammed again and taught him all the commandments. He had only smoked 1 cigarette so far that day so it was pretty exciting. Then tonight we were practicing for the ward choir again. But we had a really cool experience in our lesson with Mohammed. We had him pray for God to help him overcome smoking and his prayer was so humble and the spirit was so strong. He basically just said how he believes in Jesus and wants to follow him, and that he needs help. It was truly humble and so powerful. 

Friday: Our day wasn't too shabby. We spent quite a bit of time on the street but it was really windy and rainy so not a lot of people wanted to talk. Elder Stoddard got his Christmas package today but we don't have a Christmas tree so we actually looked in a charity shop for one and we were able to find a nice small one that was already decorated and it was only 5 pounds so I had to buy it and now we are ready for Christmas in our flat. 

Our sweet Christmas tree

Tonight we had a dinner appointment with an older sister and she took us to this great restaurant  and she bought us a steak! Man it was so delicious. I really enjoyed it and she was so kind. so we didn't have great luck with the weather today but we definitely ate well tonight!

Steak dinner

Saturday: We spent our morning helping the Evans family move so we loaded up a whole bunch of stuff on a van but we couldn't go with them to help them unload since they are moving out of our area. I had a good time though. We then came back and ate some lunch and traveled to Tunbridge Wells to do a tracting blitz with the sisters and we were able to find 3 new friends for them in only an hour so that was super efficient and productive. 

Our district, both of the sisters are from Brazil! The one next to me is 34 years old!!

Travel ate up most of the remainder of our day though but we got home and read some Preach my Gospel and we read Alma 5 together. Wow that is such a great chapter and if you are ever in the mood for a good chewing out from a Book of Mormon prophet this is the chapter for you. then we watched the restoration movie again while we were eating dinner and just kind of unwound in preparation for Sunday. We had been texting Mohammed throughout the day but we got a text from him tonight that said "Guess what guys, I don't like smoke anymore" WOWOWOWOWOW me and Elder Stoddard literally started screaming with joy at like 10pm I don't remember the last time I was so happy. This whole transfer of hard work and disappointments was all made worth it with just that one text message. 

Sunday: This morning was transfer calls and boy the anticipation was crazy. Who was staying, who was leaving, were we both staying? To make it worse all we knew was that we would get a call at some point between 6:30 and 9. That is a long time gap. When the call finally came we found out that both of us are staying here together this transfer!! Wooohooo! I'm so excited about being together here in Hastings for Christmas. Church was great today and a few people invited us for dinner this week so we have 2 dinner appointments this week which ties our record. Then we did some street contacting and we got a challenge from our zone leaders to "heart attack" a member of our ward, which basically means tape a bunch of hearts with nice messages to their door. We actually had a really good time with it and we chose to do a less active family with a few kids. It was fun and reminded me of doing 12 days of Christmas as a family. 

Me putting in work

There you have it. I spent a day with a Spaniard, sang a duet, ate some steak, and Mohammed quit smoking. Pretty awesome stuff right! Christmas is coming so quick it is crazy. I would love to hear how things are going from you guys so don't be afraid to send me an email! 

Peace out until next week!

Elder Orchard