Love Serving with Elder Metz

Things have been moving pretty quickly here. It's hard to get it all down because so much is going on and there is so much to learn. Because of that, last weeks email didn't contain all the details that I would have liked it to so I will try to do a better job today of informing you of how things are going.

I think I mentioned we live with the AP's. That's tons of fun. There's only a few places in the mission where multiple sets of missionaries live together and my last two areas have been two of them. It's fun to come home and hear how the other companionship's day went. And they have fun stories because they're AP's. Elder King and Elder Snow are their names. Elder King was my Zone Leader in Pasco so it's tons of fun being able to live with him.

We live in a 3 bedroom 2 1/2 bathroom town home. It's way nice. Missionaries have been living there for around 10 years now but despite that it is still in good condition. There was a tempurpedic mattress left behind so that's what I get to sleep on. The reason the house is so big is because whenever new missionaries come in they stay the night there for their first night. Also, whenever we have MLC, the missionaries from the west side of the mission drive over here and stay the night so we can start the meeting early the next day. There are 7 bunk beds in the three bedrooms. Another perk of living here is that all of our shampoo, conditioner, body wash, toilet paper, paper towels, etc. get paid for by the mission because of the large amounts of people that come in and out. So we get to save a lot of money that way.

The town home we live in is in a larger apartment/town home complex that has a club house and in that club house is a gym and a sauna and a tanning bed and a pool table soooo when we have time we use those. We work out in the gym every morning for our 30 minutes of exercise. And if we have time in the evenings we usually go to the sauna. Super nice! It's way fun. There's also a pool. Everybody has a pool in Tri-cities. (I guess I should say Kennewick and Richland. Not Pasco). But of course we don't use the pool or hot tub :(

Elder Metz and I drive a 12 passenger van. It is known as "megatron" across the mission but Elder Metz and I call it "The Truck". It is the transfer van at transfer time so it gets taken away from us for a day or two to transport people across the mission. Because it's the transfer van we get unlimited miles. It is so nice not to have to worry about going over our mileage allotment!

There are 28 missionaries in the Zone. The biggest zone in the mission. I think I have everyone and their area's down now. To be honest everyone is kinda struggling right now. Nobody got good numbers the past two weeks. We don't know what's going on. Nobody is teaching. It's kinda concerning but we will have a zone meeting this week and we hope that that will help.

As for our area. Things are picking up. We found a few new people to teach this week. Austin and Madeline Stickely are the main ones. Their dad just returned to activity and their step-mom just got baptized. Their mom lives in Sunnyside which is about 30 minutes away from tri-cities. They are with their dad every weekend and will be with him for the whole summer. They have been attending church a lot recently. We were able to invite them to a child of record baptism this week. It was great to have them there. We would invite them to be baptized but we want to talk to their dad first and also get ahold of the bishop in Sunnyside to make sure they would have support there during the week. Bishop Hoke here is trying to get in contact with Bishop Linde in Sunnyside. It's looking promising.

We also have Carol Eddy on date. She is doing okay. She just needs to stop worrying about dying and understand that God isn't the one that makes bad things happen. She kinda has a closed mind. We need to get her to church.

We have a few other people in our teaching pool. It's growing. I feel a lot more comfortable about our area this week than I did last week. We taught 16 lessons which isn't bad at all. Things are going in the right direction.

OH! Another thing we do sometimes is we will drive up to Badger Mountain (it's more like a hill) twice a week and we will run up it for our morning exercise. It is killer! I almost threw up the first time we did it.

Oh man. I would love to write more but I'm probably boring you. I love serving with Elder Metz. He is a great companion.

Nothing else to report

Love,

Elder Paxman