Week 15 - Transfer 3

This week Elder Beattie told us about a cool pilot program his mission is participating in. Right now there are 2 different types of missionaries, proselyting and service. Service missionaries stay at home and serve in different capacities locally (temple service, local food banks, bishop store houses, things like that) while the proselyting missionaries serve as Elder Beattie is doing. Both super important.

His mission has it set up right now where the Mission President is in charge of both proselyting and service missionaries in his area instead of the Stake President directing the service missionaries. They are all put on the transfer board on transfer weeks so that the missionaries can see if there are service missionaries serving in the wards they are over. That way, they can reach out for help when needed, either to sit in on a discussion, help with a service project or whatever it is. They can help each other out. Super cool. 

Onto his email:

Howdy everyone, 

I hope y'all are doing fantastic over there. Down here has been pretty fantastic, Transfers are happening today which is great. I am staying here with the same companion, Elder Phelan, and the same flat members, and in our district we have the same sisters as last time. The only thing that changed was that we got 2 new elders in a small town called Lismore about an hour south of here, so we probably won't be seeing them all that often. 

But this past week has been pretty average, not much has happened. On Tuesday we had a district meeting where we talked about how the areas are going, it was the last one of the transfer, so one of the sisters made the district some brownies, They were really good, not as good as moms though... not even close. Later in the day we made a Facebook post relating volleyball to life, it is pretty sweet, I recommend watching it and sending it to all of your friends. *The shares and views have surpassed the previous video and this one has a great shot of Elder Beattie getting smoked in the face with a volleyball. 

Wednesday was really busy, we had 2 services scheduled. The first one was for a guy named Monte and we did alot of digging gravel at his house. It was pretty hard, but it was fun. The second service that we did was helping someone move some of the things in their apartment to a storage unit. It was pretty easy. On Thursday we got our MSF (the money we get every 2 weeks) so we did an Emergencey Shopping, because we desperately needed dish soap and laundry detergent and later that night we did a deep clean because flat inspections were the next day. 

On Saturday we were supposed to have a normal day, we were about to get ready when one of the sister missionarys called us because she needed the keys to the chapel to fill up the Baptismal font. So we raced over to the chapel in a hurry, because it was 8.45 am, the font normally takes 3 hours to fill up and the baptism started at 11.00 am. We were on a time crunch. We got there, started to fill up the font and got a hose that could be attached to an outside tap (for extra water). When we started to turn on the outside tap, the top came right off and soaked me and Elder Phelan. So he tried to fix it for like 5 minuites. After that I saw that there was a peice on the ground, so I picked it up and put it on and it stopped. So we sat outside for a minute for us to dry off a bit before we got back in the car. The rest of the day was normal. Just visits and finding. 

Emoji of the day:🈲️ 

Slang of the day: Mossy (mosquito) 🦟 

TTYLXOX, Elder Beattie

Brayden did mention a couple of other things in his call worth mentioning. It was haircuts this weeks and an inactive member will give the missionaries haircuts for free so they went to take advantage of that deal. Sadly Elder Phelan became subject to an eyebrow accident and has had to resort to a bandaid to hide his unwanted, but sweet, eye brow slit.

Another adventure to share was they made it out to a dinner appointment early one day and so they drove a little bit down the road to a stream and got out of the car to explore a little bit. Elder Phelan lifted up a rock to find a startled tarantula jumping at them. After a little manly scream from Elder Phelan, Elder Beattie got his camera out for some pictures. He did say that he was watching the spider through his camera screen while recording and at one point the spider jumped and he lost visual totally freaking him out. He had to leap back and give a massive shutter making sure it wasn't jumping on him. Haha. Reminds me of the Philippines. 

I can't say that this was the most situtaionally aware position to put themselves in but it's a refreshingly normal activity for young men their age... right!?