The Zachtastic Movie Blog

Well, I am still in Davenport but now   I have a brand new companion! His name is Elder Gray; he came from Waverly, Iowa where he served his first four transfers, and he is currently waiting for his visa to go to the Brazil Sao Paulo South Mission. He also hails from Wasilla, Alaska, so I find that to be cool. Either way I am excited to serve with him, for he is an obedient, hard-working and determined missionary. We will continue to work hard. In my last few days with Elder Hooser, we did our best to work hard, especially since we did not have the car.  These are the two new ties I got from Elder Hooser before transfers. The red one is a result of trading, and the one I'm wearing is my horrendous Heritage Tie (if I ever train someone I'll have to pass it down to him)! Elder Hooser and me at Bishop's house. For some reason I forgot to put my tag back on. I must admit that between serving with Elder Hooser and Elder Gray this week, things have been tough. Ap...

Training is just about done now. It's crazy to think about. As of now I do not yet have my transfer doctrine, so   next Monday   you will know where I will be and who my new companion will be. It will most likely be that I will stay here in Davenport and that Elder Hooser will leave, but that remains to be seen. It is sad because I really have had a blast here with him despite our struggles, and we have been able to do plenty of work in this awesome area. It will also be sad to see Elder Nichols leave for Brazil (he will be there for about 11 months before he goes home), and Sandy recently left for Florida this past Wednesday . I will miss all of them, but oh well. When you are on a mission you have to get used to seeing people come and go every transfer. This is me with Sandy before she left. In our (presumably) final week together, I have truly come to understand what it means to accept full responsibility over what happens in your area. Elder Hooser has been tr...

It seems that Spring is finally coming! Even if we had a surprise snowstorm late   Saturday   night, the warmer temperatures made the work so much easier for us this past week. We were excited to not have to wear thermals and heavy winter coats for proselyting, haha! A couple of times during the week we had to run home (since this was a week to walk) from appointments, so we would have been sweating very heavily if we had those items of clothing on. Elder Nichols and me toward the end of our exchange last week. My parents sent me the "Swords" t-shirt as a Valentine's Day gift. Anyway, on to more important and interesting things from the week. We had 17 lessons, and among those were a number of lessons with less-active members. A couple seem to be progressing, but there are also a couple of sad situations surrounding some others. One is a recent convert of about three months, and she is the bishop's daughter. I won't go into details on her but we are ve...

Hello to you all! This week was pretty good, especially since we think the weather is finally warming up for good. Let's just hope I don't jinx it! Anyway, we are very excited for today, considering that we technically didn't have a P-day last week. Because of my temple trip on March 1st, I had to take my P-day time then. As a result we went out and worked last Monday. It was all good fun though, for we did our best to work hard, and as a result we taught a few lessons to people. That was consistent throughout the week since we tried many people in our potentials, investigator and less-active pools. We met with many less-active members (including two new families), taught Tim, and also met a new investigator! His name is Archie. Archie is Latino, so he understands Spanish a lot more than English. Because of this we had to take a fluent Spanish-speaker in our ward to teach him. He literally taught the whole Restoration lesson and then Elder Hooser and I testified in Eng...

This has been a most crazy week! For one thing Elder Hooser and I thought that the week of warmer weather we had was signaling the end of winter, but we were dead wrong. We are now into March and Iowa is still suffering from heavy snow and sub-zero temperatures. As a result, on two days last week we were banned from walking (we didn't have the car this week, so that led to some problems). So what we did on one of the days was deep clean the apartment. My friend Amber had sent me a box of cake mix for Valentine's Day, so I baked it on our deep cleaning day. It was quite good. Then the next day we had people drive us to all of the appointments we had. With the circumstances though, we did a decent enough job staying busy. We met with Tim, Tracy and some other investigators along with a few other less-active members. We also got a new investigator! Her name is Abby, a 10-year-old girl who lives with her less-active grandmother. We will definitely see how that goes. We were...