Letter from Tacoma #70: February 27, 2017

Hey, Family!

Ah, man!!! The new house is almost finished?! That's crazy! I can't wait to see what it looks like when it's all done and moved in. I'll need pictures! Lots of pictures!!!... or I could just wait until Mother's Day when I call home to see the place. Either way, I hope everything goes smoothly during the closing and move-in!

This week has just been horrible when it comes to seeing our investigators. We weren't able to meet with any of our investigators, save for some short contacts and phone calls with them. Probably the most stressful night this week was Thursday night, when all of our appointments fell through and we were left trying to figure out what else to do.

Those kind of nights are pretty rough. But thankfully for the month of March, the Brownsville Ward is shooting to have every family have the missionaries over to work out their individual mission plans and goals. Each family will sign up for a different night for 8 PM, and that should fill up that last hour of the night for the whole month, which I'm excited about. These wards are awesome because the members really do want to make the effort to be missionaries themselves, but they just don't know how sometimes.

What I've learned during the mission is that missionary work relies heavily upon making conversation. If you can have good conversations naturally, and you have a testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ, then you already have the tools necessary to share it with your friends. It's all about finding a way to lead into that kind of conversation, and it can be very simple. Preach My Gospel says that while you are talking to someone, about their life, their family, anything important, there will always be some kind of topic of which you can bear testimony.

Also, this week we had zone conference and one of the things we learned there is that a testimony doesn't always have to start with, "I know that..." or "I believe...". A testimony can be anything you say, as long as you are saying it with sincerity and conviction. With that attitude behind your words, others will notice it and then the spirit will have the opportunity to bear witness about what you say.

I didn't really get any pictures this week, so instead I'll use one that Sister Blatter took at Zone Conference:

I just happened to look up at the right time.

We tried to meet with Gordon last night, but unfortunately he wasn't home. We'll be trying back later this week.

As for Harrison, we still haven't been able to meet with him. But the good news is that this week his Basketball team is going to state. With their place in the brackets, they'll be in the top 8 teams by their first game there. They're super excited about it, and we'll be cheering him on before he leaves for it.

Not much is going on besides that. I feel kind of bad nowadays because I would like to give a basic overview of what happened this week, but everything is going so fast that I've found myself thinking that something in particular happened this week, but it really happened the week before that and I'd already written home about it. It's an odd feeling.

But hey, thanks for reading!

Love you all!

-Elder R. Austin Moe

Wa-Tac Missionary