Sunday, January 7, 2018

CALBAK 2K18

Hey everyone!

It's been the best week ever, a fitting end to the best year ever.

I don't remember if I mentioned this last week, but we learned it's finally happening. Our mission is finally getting hip with the times- we'll be getting smartphones in the next two months!

Last Monday we got to call home! Which my family already knows about, but not everyone has heard. Calls home were good. I always feel better after talking to my family. Also the members gave us chocolate oranges, which is awesome because I thought I wasn't going to end up having any this year.

A little kid, upon learning how new and young my companion is, called him a "baby missionary." Been called a lot of things on my mission, but never that. Also we got mistaken for police a bunch more times.

We walked around a lot this week. Actually, I think more than any other week in my mission. We've walked so much, but it's been awesome. Super tired, but I'm pretty sure that means we're doing something right. Talking to lots of people and helping some.

An old lady told us her son really wanted to talk to us, so we came by the next day to talk to her son (with much excitement on our part.) It turns out that he is a member who was visiting from Hawaii and just wanted to ask how the ward was doing and say hi to us. Darn bait and switch miracles.

Cool story about planning by the Spirit. We were figuring out where to go during planning and I felt like we should visit a member who's been sick for a couple months, so I haven't met him, but he used to be active before he got so sick. We sat down and shared a message and he was really happy because he had started to get out of the habit of reading the scriptures. He also told us about someone who recently moved into the area who wasn't active, but he'd baptized when he used to live in Palmdale, so now we have someone else to look into teaching and reactivating. Neither might have happened if we'd gone by at a different time or day. He's also selling a car and there just so happens to be a part-member family we were working with who just had their car stolen. Hmm. Maybe this is the beginning of a very good thing.

So another awesome thing happened! We got a referral a while ago for a guy who wanted a bible to give as a gift to his wife (ya'll might remember that story.) We'd never been able to catch him at home until this week, and we finally got to share a little with him. Life is pretty rough for him right now, but he has already made a lot of good changes- he prayed and asked God what to do when he was younger, and felt that he needed to quit smoking and swearing. He also never drank in the first place! Funny how people are prepared to hear about and accept the gospel. We're super excited to get to teach him the gospel.

New Year's Eve itself was really chill since we had to stay inside, and Elder Simpson was sick again. What luck we're having! That's okay though- what better way to begin the new year than by sleeping!

There was an awesome talk given this week in Sacrament meeting about spiritual goals, why we set them, and our motivations for reaching them. I really liked it, and the biggest thing for me that I'm going to apply going into this new year is to try to set goals that are of the "thou shalt" rather than the "Thou shalt not" variety. I want to be the kind of person who does keeps commandments and does things because I love to and love God.

I hope everyone has a happy 2018!
Elder Adams

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