Craxy week!

Well it sure has been a crazy week here in Centreville! With it being the week leading up to transfers and getting close to Christmas there has been a lot of stuff out of the ordinary going on haha. We had that Conference Monday I mentioned in my last email and then we had that day of driving around to various doctors appointments and then we had our Wednesday P-day that I sent my email on. Then Thursday was a good solid day of normal missionary life, which was awesome haha. But then Friday morning was our mission wide Christmas Party, it was really sweet! We had a lot of good food and a really good talent show, it turns out we have a lot or musically talented missionaries here in our mission! That was fun getting to see everyone again. It's not often that all of our mission gets together for things, usually its just a part of it that gets together, so it was really great to have all of us missionaries in one spot. After the Christmas party we went with our Zone Leaders to pick up our mission shirts for this year and they are really cool too. Then Saturday was our wards Christmas Party and it was alot of fun, mostly because of how many non-members were there haha. That was really great. There were a few people we have been teaching that were there and then lots of people who had brought their non-member friends that we got to talk to. A few of the ward members also put on the play Scrooge and did a really good job. This week is a very very stressful week though because it's transfer week and I really don't want to leave here but I'm pretty sure I am :/ I feel like this has kinda been a short email but I don't really have too much I can talk about this week because of how late in the week my last email was haha. It was a good week here in Centreville though, just a crazy one haha. I hope everyone is having a great week back home wherever you are though! Hopefully my next email will come from Centreville still! I love and miss you guys lots!

What a week! 12/12 email

Well it sure has been a crazy week here in Cenreville! But everything is really going great! This week our P-day got moved to today because Elder Packer of the 70 came and spoke to the whole mission Monday morning and man was it awesome! It went really really long though haha, we were there at the chapel for 6 and a half hours. He shared some rally great things wih us hough and promisd us los of blessings for working as hard as we can. So just a quick note just in case you noticed haha my typing isn't the best today. We have a third computer in our computer lab that we have to us when the oher ones are in use and it's keyboard doesnt really work how it should haha so it is really frstrating to ry ad get it to type, basically the buttons are all broken from people pressing them too hard so now sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. So at random points in the email today you'll probably notice I'm missing lots of letters haha. So because of the conference on monda our p-day would have been movd to yesterday but Elder Skinner had a fw doctors apointments he had to get to that were way down in Fredricksburg where his las area was at, which is close o a two hour drive haha so we spent the whole day yesterday in the car oing to those and got permission to take our p-day today instead haha. This past week I was really excited to get a whole bunch of packages in a row! I got 2 from my Family, one from my Grandparents, and 2 for some stuff I ordered off LDS.org all in a period of 5 days haha it was awesome! So thank you to all those who have sent me ackaes this past week! We had a few really great lessons his past week as well. We had one on Wednesday with a lady we are teaching that wants to stop smoking, so we taught her about this plan that missionaies use that can get anyone to stop wanting to smoke for good after just 7 days, so far it's worked awesome! We have been calling her every night since we taught her the lesson and she has stayed smoke free all 6 days! If she does everything the program asks her to do today too she should be completely smoke free! We are really excited about that and will be having a paty for her tomorrow night o celebrate. We also had a great lesson with our Korean investigator who is the best friend of the Bishops son here in our ward and he is set and excited to be Baptized on the 24th! We finished reviewing everthing he needs to know to be ready for the 24th and man he is stoked! His friend will e the one doing the baptism too so it should be an awesome experince all around. This past week we have also had some major bike trouble too though unfortunately. Elder Skinner broke his rear derailleur and derailleur hanger, which the derailleur can just be bought from any old bike shop but the hanger has to be special ordered. So we have been borrowing the Sister's bike since tuesday haha. Since Elder Skinner unsed to downhill race back home e likes to take his bike off any jump he sees on our way to our appointments haha and e can't really do that on the Sister's bike because it's completel rigid (no suspension) so I let him ride mine while I used the Sister's and he ended up getting a flat on my back tire with a pretty good sized chunk of rusty metal then after we patched i up and got it back together we noticed that my back brake caliper is broke and doesn't stop he bike anymore... so I've got to go buy one of those at the bike shop today so I can have more than just my front brakes haha. Neither of those breaks were his fault though they were both just chance haha. So a lot of the P-day oday will be spent doing some bike repairs haha. It was a great wek here though! Our weather is cooling down, which I'm super excited about haha, and hopefully we will get some snow soon! Well that's about it for this week, I hope everyone has had a grat week wherever you are! I love and iss you guys lots!

A Great Week Here in Centreville 1st!

We sure have had a great week here in Centreville! We had a lot of great lessons and some great progress with a woman we have been teaching for a long time now! She and 4 other people we are teaching all came to church this Sunday, it was awesome! We think that she'll understand what we are talking about a lot better now that she's been to church before, it was her first time coming. I got put in charge of entertaining her two kids so that she could listen to the speakers. One little boy who is 4 years old and all over the place, I probably looked at every picture in my Gospel Principles book with him 2 or 3 times by the end of sacrament meeting haha. By the end of it he started to figure out which one Jesus was in each of the pictures, which made his Mom really happy haha. The other was a little 7 year old girl who was much easier to keep busy because she appears to have a crush on me haha, so all I had to do was give her my study journal to draw pictures and let her lean on my arm the whole time haha. We think it really helped the woman we were teaching focus on the people speaking, she really seemed to enjoy it. Hopefully they make it back next week! We also started teaching a few new people this week, which is always good news haha, one is the boyfriend of a member who has just recently started coming to church and the other is an 18 year old boy who is the friend of a family in the ward. Both first lessons with each of them this week went great. We're really looking forward to teaching them some more. Something else cool that happened this past week though that I always enjoy is I got to go on an exchange over to the Spanish Elders' area again this Friday and Saturday. That was now my third exchange with the Spanish Elders here so I'm getting a little better at sharing the Gospel in Spanish but still not too much better haha. I was able to bear testimony in Spanish though at our lesson Friday night, Elder Ursenbach (my temporary Spanish companion for the exchange) was teaching them about what sounded like the Law of Chastity because I had heard them use the word "Fornacacion" a few times haha, so we were reading a few scriptures with the couple from the book of Mormon about it and I was able to say afterwards in my not so great Spanish "Yo se este Libro es la Palabra de Dios y es verdad, es por Usted y por Usted y es verdad" Which translates to "I know that this book is the Word of God and it's true, it's for you (looking at the one) and for you (looking at the other) and it is true." It was a very cool experience and I'm pretty sure that because of that they both thought that I could speak Spanish because they asked me to say the closing prayer, which I definitely don't know how to do in Spanish haha so I had to ask them if it was okay if I said it in English, which they said was fine haha. Then the next morning I was able to give out a Book of Mormon in Spanish too, which was a lot easier haha just "Quire este Libro?" or "Do you want this Book?" haha. It was a fun exchange though. Well that's about it for this week! I hope everyone is having a great week back home wherever you are! I love and miss all of you!

Pictures!



Elder Gronning's district

Sight seeing in DC