Sailing the high seas!🏴‍☠️ Of the apartment😒

The only other service we have had
besides raking pine needles.

Isn't imagination great! I bet you thought that I was going to relay the frolicking tale of my pirating adventures. But we are more like the pirates who don't do anything. So if you ask us if we do anything, we'll just tell you. (we don't do anything) 

Things are getting intense!

All we do all day is sit around!

We are more busy than ever before though.

We have at this time set up 10 lessons for Wednesday, all of them are solid lessons as well! 

Our days are so boring. Even though our mission president has told us to go outside at least twice a day for a little walk, we still look for more excuses to go outside. Service has been able to help out a lot with this. 

We rake up tons of pine needles, and that's about all we can do for yard work around here. 

The other Elders I'm with are not used to staying inside for so long, usually at the end of the day they are banging there heads on whatever they can find. (Rookies)

 My shoulder after the wreck.
You should see the other guy

So if any of you remember, about last year in July, I had a major bike accident and I guess I set a an alarm for my next bike accident back then, because it went off a few days ago. So what happened: we were biking home from our stake center, we used the building for its wifi. We are currently in a trio, and the elders wanted to get home fast. So they take off, leaving me a little ways behind.

I try to catch up with them and realized that I couldn't see, it was dark. So I turn on my first head light. Dead. I turn on my second. Dim. At this moment I realize that I should also turn on my back light and I turn to switch it on.

Right after I turn it on I look forward and BAM! I hit a pedestrian crossing sign in the middle of the sidewalk.

Here is the other guy -
We could've wiggled it out of its foundation.
I hit it hard.

My shoulder hit it directly, and it knocked me off my bike. I also have a stronger testimony that helmets save lives because I hit the ground hard. From all we can tell it's just a tendon that's damaged. But it's not that bad, we don't go outside that much anyway, so it should not affect the work that badly. 

We have seen some great miracles with this change to technology.

Our ward gave us a list of all the members in our ward, both active and non active. We have been spending some time going through it all, calling every person and seeing if we can share a little message with them through the phone or video chat. 

We took a drive the other day and took some pictures of the area.

 






We tried calling a sister on our list but a man picked up the phone. He had told us that his wife (whom we were trying to ) had both left him and the church a while ago. He said that she could use a little more "Jesus" in her life, so he gave us her number. When we called she seemed surprised that we contacted her. She was glad that we had reached out to her, and to our surprise she wanted a good uplifting message from us. So we taught her about the Holy Ghost and how the Lord has promised us that He will leave His peace with us. She believed the message and said we could call again on Thursday (the next free spot on our schedule). It was amazing, and did not go in the way we expected it. 

Here is what we do in our free time now -
Day 3 of Quarantine

Here is that scripture that we shared with her. 

John 14: 26:27

26 But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.

27 Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.

I hope you all have things to do, because we don't. 

Enjoy the great outdoors, because we won't be anytime soon. 

Take care everybody, and enjoy the pictures.

The Bing Crosby museum here at Ganzagas University.

Couch Potatoes

Professional Chicken Chaser

This self isolation has caused Facebook to become annoying to us missionaries. 

Every day, because missionaries are struggling to find things to do while they are stuck inside all day. They post daily scriptures, they will have QNAs, put things in their stories and other stuff that we are growing tired of. 

Me, personally, I don't want to do anything on Facebook and become only Facebook oriented. I still want to focus on face to face contact, be it at the door or in a video call. 

Missionaries are being heavily affected by the virus, it's not at all like we expected. Lots of missionaries have been scheduled for home. Our APs are being sent home and half of the zone leadership are going with them. They are even sending those who have small or physical struggles home early to accommodate for the virus. We can only sit and wonder, how bad does it have to be until they send us home?

Mountain Biking for the First TimeFun,
but my companion the "expert mountain biker"
got dehydrated so it was cut a little short

Each day things appear to get worse. The confirmed cases double almost every day here in Washington.

The church keeps sending emails to us, stating that they take the safety of missionaries very seriously, and they would not want to put any in an unnecessary risk.

We also have the Lord at our side, and if there was any risk to our lives we would be pulled out. 

The work is slow, but we are making progress, lots of the people we normally work with are dealing with new problems and situations. We try to go through all the phone numbers we have in our area book and and few times we find someone promising, but nobody texts back. It drives me crazy. We would have so many lessons planed for the future if people only got back to us more often.

The members have been awesome. They can do almost anything. They are willing to fellowship in video lessons for us and still feed us throughout the epidemic.

Exhibit A of members feeding us

With all that in mind, we were able to get our baptism rescheduled and everything. April 3rd will be our next goal, now all we have to do is avoid Corona and keep them excited for the Baptism. 

Nothing much else to mention at this time that you probably don't already know about. 

Nice view, and a rusty car

What We Do in our Free Time

Wow, Things Are Getting Out of Hand 🧻

The Last Monopoly Game

Once again, we have lived through another week of what everyone keeps saying is the apocalypse.

Already people are using hand sanitizer, water, and toilet paper as currency. For those we teach who don't have toilet paper have told us that they at least have lots of old clothes. Gross!

So the way we work has completely changed. Because everything is canceling, we thought we would be able to actually contact some of the people who are never available. But our mission president just told us that we can't knock on doors anymore. 

So our thoughts on the whole "everything is canceled" bit, was that everyone would now have nothing to do, and would be available to respond to our texts or even be open to video call lessons. We were wrong.

We Made Orange Rolls

It appears that people are even more busy than before. Apparently Netflix is more important than Exaltation. 

We just got another update: starting tonight at 6:00 we will be doing all work inside of our apartment, no going out, no home visits. QUARANTINED!  

So we had a baptism lined up for last week, but the mother of both kids we were teaching got herself tested for Corona. We won't know results until tomorrow, but all we know for now is that she tested negative for Influenza, bur she has flu symptoms. Her doctor said that she may want to quarantine herself. 

We have been in frequent contact with this lady for the past few days. (before she got quarantined). We did service for her, we taught her and her kids, and we even interviewed them for baptism, so if she tests positive for Covid-19, we probably will be showing symptoms pretty soon. 

Baptism has been moved to April 3rd though. 

My companion does not stay clean during service.
He forgot about the paint later and it all dried up

Our week has been pretty slow. We spent the last few days getting all the Facebook names and numbers that we can so we can keep in contact with all of the people. Hopefully we can stay busy for the foreseeable future, because if they ask us to keep finding and teaching, we may grow limited in our options. 

We took off the frame, instead of the trim, oops

Well, there isn't much else going on that you probably don't know about already. 

I hope you all stay safe and Corona free.

Cough medicine is gone

Stores are looking pretty bare.

Stores are looking pretty bare.

Get Spammed!

Baptism! Be it by Fire and Water or Virus

My next FB pict -
My companion is obsessed with taking good picts to post

We are going to have a baptism!

A pair of kids we have been working with, from the space of time I've been here to now (about 3 1/2 months). 

We had to delay it a bit, it was supposed to be on Tuesday, but because we needed written consent from the father it had to be postponed. 

I will have pictures when the time comes. 

 Groceries x2

I know there has been a lot of scares about Covid-19 (Corona) but I was told to inform you all that we are okay. If we ever have any problems of the sort we will be in quarantine. We have already bought more than two weeks worth of food and are prepared for all other issues we may encounter (water and toilet paper included).

Hiking. It was not a good as we thought it would be

No toilet paper to be seen here as well

We are super smart. 

So we took a fire cracker we found, 

put it in a nerf dart and shot it at each other (1)

We ate really good the other day. That was the first steak I cooked.

We found Corona while tracting

Not too much has been happening lately. Most of the people we taught were Swahili, so we have been doing a lot of tracting and contacting, not much promise yet though.

Because I don't have too much time or much to talk about. 

We are doing good. 

The Hawaiian Excursion

The old crew is back together at last. (sorry Elder Ferrell)

I only touched on alit for a bit last week, but I'm going to start explaining from the beginning again.

Starting a few weeks ago. This lady a walks into the family history center to see if there were missionaries she could talk to, by divine intervention we were there at the right time. 

As we came to know this lady, she had felt close to God all her life, she even described being guided by the Spirit to learn and to study the things she needed to better serve God and His church. 

She all throughout her life had studied in psychology and had graduated with flying colors. Once she was done with her pursuit of knowledge, she began her chase of finding the Lord's church.

She had told us that she had been looking for an overwhelming period of time in her life. It wasn't until she had made friends with some members, and from that she was able to learn from them she found what she was looking for.

Spokane can be pretty sometimes

After further research of the church, she told us that she found God's kingdom on Earth once again.

So we taught her once a week for the past few weeks, doing our best to make her ready for baptism, because that is her new goal, to join the church! The only problem we had, was that she was moving to Hawaii in the next few weeks. 

Once the move had commenced we spent a long time trying to set her up with the other missionaries over in Hawaii. This took forever. 

We tried all the church phone numbers we could find on Google Maps but non of them worked. After many failures we managed to get ahold of the branch president of Honolulu. He said that we should try the Assistants to the President missionaries (or AP's for short). So we called them, many times. It wasn't until she had already flown to Hawaii that the AP's called us back and we were able to sort things out. (They are really busy missionaries.) 

Finally, at the end of the day after she had flown and arrived at Hawaii, she texted us apologizing for the confusion she caused, but she was taken care of and was going to join the church in Hawaii. 

(that was a long story, it was an even longer ordeal, but we managed.) 

My new companion Elder Shepherd and I get along well. He is a fun guy to teach with. 

Just yesterday we knocked into some college kids and had a great contact. We talked with them and got to know them better, they were all seniors and were doing about whatever they wanted to "hang out with the boys". 

We eventually started talking about the Restoration and they were receiving it well. They had good questions and were a big part of the lesson. It was like we had set up a "podcast" they gave us a dud mic, and we talked into them as if we were professionals, it was neat. 

My new companion at our podcast.

We met the most crazy man the other day.

He started by telling us his dad did in his arms and that his mother died ten seconds ago. Then went on telling us about his time on the Navy, whet his ship was destroyed, he died three times, and was underwater for longer than thirteen minutes, and a great white shark was about to eat him, but he was able to call a dolphin to bring him to the surface.

This is just a little taste of the crazy here in Spokane.

I have been asked to sing in sacrament meeting on the 16th day of March. 

It's about time that I started using my talents on my mission. I actually haven't had many opportunities to sing so far, maybe here a little and there a little but not much. 

I don't have to much more to say for now, so I will tell you that the new Come Follow Me study for the Book of Mormon is awesome, and I am getting so much more out of my scripture study now than ever before. I invite you all to stay on top of you scripture study so you can increase your capacity to hear the voice of the Lord throughout your life. If you prepare in this way, the prophet, Russell M. Nelson has promised us that this next General Conference will be one we will never forget. 

My companion took an old apartment Nerf gun and painted it up.
I think he could make money from doing this when he gets home.