Church Tour

So this last week we were able to give two of our investigators a church tour. I've never really been able to do that with investigators here before so that was a good time :) It was the first time I've opened the doors to the baptismal font and I hope I get the chance to do that again before I leave the area :) But out of all the church my favorite part was talking about the sacrament. I've gained such a testimony of the Sabbath and the sacrament this last year. It doesn't help that for a long time we had a Sabbath day portion in district meetings but, it's been good. I truly felt the sacredness of the sacrament as I was describing what it means to our investigators the other day. It was so good :) As Elder Thurston says all the time "The church is true".

Also this week we finally broke the plateau that we were on last week. It was nice to be getting lessons and new investigators again. It was actually with some of those new investigators that we did the church tour with so that was great :) 

For the out of the ordinary we went to Saskatoon this week. It was great to see Elder Lee again and it was kindof fun to see him be a Zone Lord. After ZTM we all went to Kentucky Duck and I tried their popcorn chicken poutine which was pretty unique but good :) If only they had the same gravy as KFCs down in the states it would be so much better :) But, I guess you can't have all the good things. I'm just waiting for a poutinery to be opened in Utah at this point :) 

Another fun thing that happened was I got to meet the "biggest indian" in Northern Saskatchewan. This guy was a solid 6 ft. 5 in. if not more and 300 pounds. He was a big boy. But, the fun part is he was visiting from Saskatoon and he wanted to come to church because he was just baptized in February. He wasn't able to make it but we did get to go talk to him and him and Elder Wilson caught up on things. It's fun how the Lord prepared a man who a ton of people know here in the Battlefords. His family is the largest group of Natives in the area so almost all the Natives know of the guy. It's great :) 

Welp, I honestly can't think of any other really interesting things that happened at this point. I wouldn't mind having to call the cops again or something if I knew it didn't mean something serious had happened. Oh well... It'll probably happen again since it's happened at least once each transfer I've been here ;) Don't worry everything turned out fine and I've never been harmed. 

Anywho Love youz and I hope y'all have a great week. Potatoes gonna potate

The Foreign Literature

Clarification:
So I've been receiving a lot of emails on me being a "loose cannon missionary" I would like to clarify that I am still doing my best to be strictly obedient to the white handbook. For example: my list of music that I regularly listen to has been severely decreased in the last few months because although some of it could be bent to be white handbook worthy, that's not how being strictly obedient works. That being said, I do have a certain style of doing things that may not be according to the social norm of the mission or other norms that made Elder Wilson conclude that I'm a loose cannon missionary :) I'm thankful for all of your concern on my well being and such so keep it up :) 

The Foreign Literature:

So other than tracting all week long because everyone decided to cancel our appointments without letting us know so that's fun. But, in an appointment that didn't lunch us I found out some interesting things. The guy that we went over to talk to was a Seventh day Adventist. Tangent: I've decided a lot of the colored people in North town go to the Adventist church in town so that's fun. Back on track: So we had a great discussion with this guy and I not knowing much about Seventh day Adventists was interested to find out that they very much believe in the apostasy and modern day prophet(s). So we were like "We've presented our message and really the only way you're going to find out if it's true is if you read the Book of Mormon and pray about it" and after a bit of thinking he decided to make a deal with us. He told us he would read and pray about the Book of Mormon if we took some Adventist literature. So I now have "Steps to Christ" and "The Great Controversy Ended..." By Ellen White (I think..) I can neither confirm nor deny whether or not I have read some of both books. But I'll just say that their church would be very complemented if they used the Book of Mormon and I guess if they did that you might as well call them Mormons but hey it's all good :)

On top of that I finally got a silver bullet from the Jehovah's Witness church. I'm not entirely clear on whether or not we can read translated Bibles so I've just been reading it. It's no replacement to the King James Version with JST footnotes but it's unique reading the bible in modern day tongue. If you want an idea on something that might be lost in translation in this circumstance if you find in your readings of the bible the word perish switch it out with be destroyed and see what kind of difference that makes. But other than that it's quite interesting :) 

I think that's all I've got time for but I'm sure I'll have more stories for next week. 

Love yous and have a great week

The Rez

So I've finally gotten to visiting one of the many Rezez around here. This last Saturday Elder Wilson and I made it out to the Sweetgrass Reserve. It was honestly one of the nicer Reserves I had been on so that was good. Elder Wilson was telling me that the Carry the Kettle reserve was about the same as it. He was out on CTK for five months before he came here so that's why I felt like we could be successful in going out to Sweetgrass. It was kindof nice to be out on a Rez again because of how often I was out on the Rez in Yorkton. But yeah we'll have to get out there again soon because the Band Office was closed so we couldn't get a map. It's good :)

So another fun thing that happened this last week was since I'm now the good old Battleford DL I get to report indicators to the Zone Lords. Well I tried calling them when I was supposed to but they were probably talking to some other DL at the time so they missed me. But, because we needed to get out and do some work we started going by some houses we had tracted earlier in the week and the first house we stop by we get into quite a good discussion on how, according to him, our church is different from "Christianity". He had quite a few questions for us and what we taught and honestly it felt like he was trying to find some major doctrinal difference from what he thought Christianity was but since our church is literally where Christianity came from he was having a bit of difficulty doing that. It seemed like he was trying to fish for something that wasn't there. It might've been the fact that we have temples but, like I said, we told him how temples started with the tabernacle that traveled with Israel in the wilderness and how the Temple of Solomon was the permanent placement of the temple. We also told him how many prophets when talking to God would go up into the mountains which acted as a temple of sorts. So yeah it was kindof a unique conversation :) I hope we showed to him how really we're not that different from what is taught in the Bible. But, an hour and a half later Elder Wilson let me know that we had four missed calls, three from the Zone leaders and one from the Assistants. So whoops :) I guess I'm important enough now to hold back the entire indicator process :) I got rebuked enough but it's all good. Elder Wilson after this week has been calling me a loose cannon missionary because I apparently don't care about the rules :) 

Welp that's all I've got. I hope y'all have a great week. I think I have enough time to send pictures so that'll be good :) Potatoes gonna Potate

 With Elder Peterson

 

So this happened

So this is how much rice three cups makes :) 

I'm a lot more used to minute rice so this was quite the surprise to me 

I'M PROUD TO BE A 'MURICAN

Happy 4th of July! I hope you're all having a very patriotic 4th of July. It's not so good where I'm in an unindpendent country but I'm still waving the red white and blue in my heart. Even if on the outside I'm Red and White I'm very proud to be an American.

So I've been dropping cliffhangers to a lot of people I've emailed already and they could probably guess what happened but I'll tell you I could've never guessed this would happen. So to provide a setting of how this happened Elder Bassett in my district was told he was going to train but somehow his trainee isn't showing up for 2 weeks. We're not sure why (maybe the MTC thought it was getting bombed with all the fireworks going off) but it happened. So Elder Peterson persistent to the end saw his opportunity. He requested to President one last time to at least have a 2 week extension. When he called him President was like "Wait Elder Peterson are you being serious about this?" When he affirmed he was indeed being serious President Craig took a step back and thought about it and said "I hadn't thought about that" So he made some calls to headquarters and came back with a negative and that it couldn't happen. Not two hours later he calls back and informed us that he had called back and was a little bit more persistent and reported that it could indeed happen :) So Elder Peterson made some calls home and asked his parents if he could and got an all systems go from them. So now he's kicking around up in Ghetto Lake with Elder Bassett who happens to be from his hometown just having a jolly good time :) It was quite an eventful day to say the least :) That's the big news for the week and I don't think I'll ever see that again in my time as a missionary. 

As for Elder Wilson he's a pretty great missionary. He's been out on the rez for his last 6 months so he's got plenty of stories about the rez. One of them being having to carry around spikes to ward off rez dogs :) He's from Salt Lake the city itself and is probably going to die in the Battlefords as well. I'm excited to see where this goes. 

That's all I got time for but I hope y'all have a very patriotic 4th of July and throw some fireworks for me :) Love y'all and till next time Potatoes gonna potate