Letter from Tacoma #66: January 30, 2017

 Hey Everybody!

So a lot of cool stuff happened this week.

First off, this week on Wednesday, there was a world-wide missionary broadcast. In it, they changed quite a bit about the missions everywhere. The change is meant to make the schedule more flexible and adjustable to the needs of an area/mission, so now there's really going to be a lot of differences between missions in different countries and how they work.

We only saw minor changes over here though. For one thing, we no longer do our planning for the day the night before. Instead we do it in the morning before we start studies. Now between 10 to 4, we work in proselyting time, as well as companionship study, language study, 12-week, and all that stuff at whatever time works best for us. With these changes, the church is trusting us with our agency to decide what will work the best for productivity. It's an interesting change.

P-Days got changed up the most. We still wake up at 6:30, but we don't exercise in the morning. We get showered and ready, plan for 30 min, study for 30 min, then P-Day begins at 8:00 and it goes until 6:00. That's two extra hours for P-Day to get stuff done. I thought that was awesome... at first. But then I woke up this morning and found it isn't as great as it seems. I'm so tired right now as I'm typing this. I've already had to catch myself on misspelled words at least ten times now.

So, I'll hurry up and finish this email quick.

This week our investigator, Harrison, got back to us about him praying about baptism. He said during the time he prayed that night, he had never felt God so close in his life. He knew he needed to be baptized, so now he's on date for baptism on Feb 4th. I'm going to have a baptism on my birthday, which will be awesome. It's going to be awesome for Harrison, too, because that night is Stake Conference, and Elder Murray of the Seventy is going to be there at the church that night, and there's a pretty good chance he'll pop in to see it, too.

Also, we found a new investigator this week. His name is Marcell, and he apparently just moved into the area 3 weeks ago. He's originally from Maryland, but he's living with his uncle right now. He looks like he's at least 19, but he's only 16, still a sophmore in High School. He's super solid, has a small belief in Christ, but he loved the message of the Restoration, and he came to church this week. It worked out pretty good because there are some young men in the ward around his age, who go to the same school he's transferring to this week. So by the time he goes, he'll already have a couple familiar faces. He seemed to enjoy the start of Sacrament, but by the end he looked like he was getting kind of bored. But he still enjoyed it. We have a return appointment with him on Thursday this week. He's also on date for baptism for Feb 25.

Lastly, not really important but still really cool, we stopped by a members' home the other night, the Eastman's. While we visited, they brought out what they called their "S'mores Bar". They lit two kerosene candles on the table, we each had a wooden skewer, and they laid out four different kinds of Graham Crackers, four different kinds of chocolate, and six different flavors of homemade marshmallows that they make themselves. It was so awesome!@!#!!~ I made a S'more out of a chocolate graham cracker, a Reese's peanut butter cup, and a banana flavored marshmallow, right at their dining room table. That had to be the most genius thing I've seen this week!

​S'more's BAR!

​My other S'more: Raspberry marshmallow with white chocolate and cinnamon graham cracker! YUM!

Thank you so much for the birthday video. It really touched me to see everybody there singing. It was like I was there with you... er, minus the cake.

Happy Birthday, Dad! I sent you a birthday card the other day, you should be either getting it today or tomorrow. I hope you get a laugh out of it!

Love you all, and I'm looking forward to a good birthday this week.

Thanks for reading!

-Elder R. Austin Moe

Wa-Tac Missionary