Elder Kade Haviland

An old man and an old missionary

Hello beautiful family and friends!

Sorry I haven't sent emails the last couple of weeks; I got kind of lazy. I've got to make sure I get emails out while I'm still out here in the field. I've not got much longer! (I will not say how much longer though. That is a number that is forbidden to be said in our appartment. As far as our verbal conversations go, I've got about a year left. Gotta avoid getting trunky somehow)

Yesterday, we went to a park to try calling some people. While we were there, there was an older guy fishing near by, and once we were done calling people, I really felt like we should go talk to him. So we walked over and started up a full on 30 minute conversation about fishing. Now, I know almost nothing about fishing, so I was absolutely scraping from the bottom of the barrel with my contributions by the end of the conversation. Thankfully, I have a lot of practice of fake-it-till-you-make-it in conversations from my first few transfers speaking French. Talking about fishing was a lot like speaking a different language, so I guess the gift of tounges still applied. At the end of the conversation, we shared a message about the Restoration with him and gave him a Book of Mormon. He seemed pretty touched by the message and said he would pray about and read the Book of Mormon. We have his number, so we'll call him later this week to follow up.

About a month ago I gave a baptismal interview for someone we'll call Peter. This Saturday, I had exchanges and had the opportunity to go out to lunch with Peter and his mom. They were both hilarious and I had such a good time with them. Peter's mom had some questions about the church, and Peter's had been doing his best to answer them, but he had some he couldn't quite answer. We had the chance to explain to Peter's mom the importance of having the proper authority in baptism, and the blessings of baptism not just being that you show your commitment to God but thsy you make a covenant with Him. Peter's Mom is super in tune with the Holy Ghost, and as we answered her questions, she eventually asked "I'm going to have to go under, aren't I." It was really cool to see her recognize the power of the Holy Ghost testifying of the truth of what we said.

We had another cool experience kind of like that this week with another friend of ours. We had asked her what she believes and eventually she got to the point where she told us that she doesn't think it's possible for any of us to know for sure what's true in the Gospel and that she doesn't know if God will tell us what is true or not. We were able to boldly tell her that God does want to teach us the truth, and that because of that, He restored the fullness of the Gospel through Joseph Smith. I'm not very good at being bold in lessons, but I felt the Spirit strongly as I bore that testimony and our friend did too. When we finished telling her that she can know the truth, our friend said "I feel in my heart that what you said is true." As missionaries, our teaching means nothing if we don't have the Holy Ghost with us, and it's really cool to see how powerful He is in lessons like that.

Today was district Pday and we went to the park to play GaGa ball. If you don't know what that is, don't worry, I didn't before this week either. Look it up though, it's pretty fun!

Elder Bridenstine is pretty old for a missionary: he's 26. As a result, we have started making jokes about how old he is. It started with me, but he picked up making the jokes too. Last week, at one point, I told him "thanks for joining in on the jokes. They never get old" to which Elder Bridenstine replied "Yeah, unlike me." That was literally the joke I was setting my self up to make, so I told him "Dang, you beat me to it," to which he replied "yeah, by 6 years." I've really had to step up my game around Elder Bridenstine; despite his age, he's pretty quick to the punch! There's never a dull conversation in our appartment.

That's it from me for this week. I love you all and hope you have the most fabulous of weeks!

Elder Haviland