Letter from Tacoma #95: August 21, 2017

So this week... was kind of long. That was mostly because I've been sleep-deprived through most of it. You see, last Tuesday night, I started feeling this pain in my tooth, and that literally kept me up until 3 in the morning, just tossing, turning, and hoping the ibuprofen would kick in sometime soon.

But the funny part was that I felt like I acted more real and sincere around people when I'm exhausted. Guess I was just too tired to care what people might think about me. In that way it was a bonus, but my tooth still hurts pretty bad. But today a member is going to get me an xray of it to know what I should do with it, and now I also have another dentist in mind that will take Mom and Dad's dental insurance. So hopefully it all gets taken care of this week.

So yeah, an eclipse is happening today over here, so everyone is freaking out and looking up at the sun with either their special eclipse glasses or welding masks on. It's been an interesting day; a random lady let us look at the eclipse with her glasses, and afterwards she thanked us for 'sharing this moment with her'. I thought that was... interesting. Cool experience though.

This week we had zone conference, and we talked a lot about getting our recent converts to the temple. Sure, baptism is essential and it's a good goal to shoot for, but the end goal should be temple attendance. I liked how it was phrased in this way: "Stand in the font, but point towards the temple". In this area, we're really starting to think that we aren't finding any new investigators partly because we haven't really focused on getting our less actives and recent converts to the temple. So, that's something we'll be focusing on.

Speaking of focus, at zone conference, I got this impression that I needed to give my best focus for these last eight weeks I have left. I felt that in order to do that, I needed to send a few things home so I wouldn't be distracted by them (ie. a board game, a card game). So, while I was at it, I also threw in a few books that I don't need right now, and I just sent them off today. They should arrive at Mom and Dad's later this week, so please look for it and stick it with my other stuff. I'll take care of it when I get back!

The funny thing is, when I made up my mind to send that package home, we started finding a lot of potential investigators. Coincidence? I don't think so. So now that it's sent off, I'm hoping to find some solid investigators, cause we really need 'em!

Really our only solid investigator is Willy, and he's doing really good right now. He says he usually drinks about four cups of coffee a day, but on Wednesday he said he had been slowly cutting down and now is only having one a day. He's making good progress, so it looks like he might actually be ready for baptism on Sep 2nd!

We're still having loads of fun as a threesome! We all get along, and this transfer has been going by really fast!

Some funny things that happened this week:

1.) It's great that we have a car, but that also means we still do park days, where we don't use it, so we can save miles. Since we are at the church every Sunday for 7 hours, we decided to take a park day yesterday. Haha, so we ended up biking to church in our suits, and then biking back. We got some funny looks from people driving past, as if they've never seen that before. I feel like that just checked off a box from a missionary bucket list.

2.) One day it got really hot and sunny, and we were knocking this boony road in Oly 4th's area. But then we saw this, and I couldn't help but crack up.

​All the cows in this pasture are huddled under this one tree to escape the heat. But to me, it looked like they were huddled in a circle doing their 'cow secret combinations'.

That's about it from me. Wish I had more time, but I have a dentist appointment to get to.

Love you all!

-Elder R. Austin Moe

Wa-Tac Missionary