Week 8, 11/16/15

This week was really good! Towards the beginning of the week I was still pretty sick and coughing all the time, I coughed up blood a few times so I decided to go to the doctor (I might have been influenced a little by my very concerned mother), and I got some antibiotics and I'm doing a lot better now.

my favorite Canadian dog/furball

The highlight of this week was definitely Saturday.  One of our investigators had a grandson recently pass away, and the funeral was on Saturday.  That whole entire side of the family is Catholic, so it was a Catholic funeral service combined with mass, and they asked elder Payne to do a reading at it.    It was pretty funny, he had no idea what he was doing and was kinda freaking out but he did a great job - haha.  The funeral was different than what I'm used to, but it was a good experience.  

After the funeral, everyone went over to our church building to have food.  There was seriously like 120 non members/ Catholics in our building, eating, visiting, having a good time.  There is definitely a different spirit in our church building than theirs, and I know a lot of them felt it.  We handed out a few Books of Mormon and pamphlets to some people as well, it was pretty awesome.  They were super grateful and appreciative.  After that we had about 45 minutes to clean everything up and get ready for the baptism of Sadie and Gage! It was an awesome, memorable experience for them and for me as well.  I was lucky enough to be able to baptize both of them and it was obvious I hadn't had much practice.  I forgot to say Sadie's name and I let Gage's toe come up out of the water. Oops ...hopefully I'll have other opportunities to hone my skills. So that was a pretty productive day!

The rest of the week prior was basically full of getting Sadie and Gage ready for the baptism and helping in preparations for the funeral.  We did teach a few lessons though.  Last Tuesday night we taught our investigator XXXX and his super nice family.  They speak Spanish so we had them Skype the Spanish speaking elders and they taught lesson one.  That was a big mistake haha....  The lesson went an hour longer than it was supposed to, and you could tell the whole family was getting irritated.  When it was finally over we told them we were so sorry for how it took, and if they let us come over again we would only take 20 minutes of their time.  We are going over there tonight, hopefully it goes well!  

We had three other investigators we were hoping could get baptized soon, one of them already had a b-date but she is moving away:(  The other two we were confident were going to commit to be baptized during our lessons this week but they declined.  Both of them are older, super nice guys who would make great members, they just need to make sure they're going to be 100 percent committed.  They'll get there eventually! All in all it was a really solid week.

I really have no idea what I'm doing here...

When I get back I'll need someone to go to a hockey game with me.   I went to part of one here, the Slave Lake Winterhawks.  It's like as close to a pro sports team as a town this big can get, but it was freaking cool to watch haha.  It's not like football when you're like "oh he should've done that", or you compare plays to other plays you've seen before.  I was just in awe the whole entire time cuz I can't imagine myself ever being able to do anything remotely close to it!  And they fight sometimes…so that's pretty awesome...

My teaching has gotten much better than what it was before...  like night and day.  I have gained a lot more knowledge about what I'm teaching so it helps me teach it more simply, but there's a lot of room for improvement.  I feel like I still have a long way to go until I'm actually good at it.  I've noticed the best way for my teaching style is just to bear simple testimony, that brings the spirit every time.. 

 Love you all, let me know how you're all doing!