27 - Tract or Treat!

Welcome to North Dakota!

Ok, spent a LOT of time sending pictures, now to talk about the busy week that I will not have time to talk about. Whoops.

Sister Nelsen

First off, we left shortly after emailing last Monday to drive up to Fargo for a big missionary conference that the mission holds only once a year. If I'm lucky I might get another one of these, but I might be gone before then. 

Sisters Summer and Andersen

Sister Christiansen

Sister Springer

This conference is special because this is a multiple zone conference, aka, the most missionaries gathered in one place that you'll probably ever see outside the MTC. There were over twenty Sister missionaries and way more than twice that many elders. It was three zones that were there, and I got to see a whole bunch of people that I served with in Bismarck!!

You don't realize how much you miss people sometimes until you see them again! That was definitely how I felt with Sister Springer!

Multi-Zone Zone Conference

And what makes this conference super special is that a member of the seventy comes and gives most of the training. Man, I want to go into more detail, but my time is short. Elder Nash was the member who came, and he is in the first presidency of the seventy, so right up there just under the apostles, the same guy who spoke in Sioux Falls' stake conference. What a privilege! Something that stood out to me was how he used the scriptures, particularly 3 Nephi 11 and put himself in the story to make it so much more real. He is such, such SUCH an inspired man.

Oh, and the drive to and from, and sleeping over at the Sister's apartment in Fargo, was all super fun. Got to know lots of Sisters and know better the network of Sisters in the mission. Piece together who came out with whom, who served together, where people served, all that good stuff.

Wednesday the wards had their trunk or treat. Sister Burt had never been to a trunk or treat before. 

She is a convert, joined the church when she was eighteen, and no elementary schools did trunk or treats in Oregon I suppose. 

There were so many great games and costumes, as per usual at church Halloween parties. 

It was a pretty cold night (winter is on it's way, all the trees have basically lost their leaves,) but it was very warm in the church! haha.

And, we had fun distracted times during weekly planning. Had to take pictures.

Now to talk about Halloween.

Sometimes for Halloween, the mission President will tell all the missionaries, send them a text, saying do be in by 6:00pm or something of the like. Sister Burt was really hoping some sort of text like that would come because tracting on Halloween.... eh.... probably not going to go over well. ...Well, a text did come, but it informed us that it would be a normal proselyting day. Well, it would just be an experience. But Sister Burt was still not enthused.

Halloween though turned out to be a day full of food. haha. We went to drop something off at a member's house, the one with the adorable german shepard, and they fed us soup for lunch on a whim and it was super good. I also taught brother whats his face about highfive turkeys and about how your reflection is upside down in one side of the spoon and rightside up on the other. So we were all looking at spoons for a few minutes. It was great fun, haha. Good memories.

And then we had an appointment fall through that a memeber came with us to and we unfortunately had no backups, so she took us out to DQ for icecream, how nice!

And then! For dinner, we were dropped off dinner actually and it was a total Halloween dinner, at least, in my opinion. It was this sweet potatoe chilli, chilli with sweet potatoes, which was super good, and a festive orange, and then really good cornbread. It was a treat!

Then, the dreaded tracting. It's true, when we went to tract at around 6:30 in a nieghborhood, people came to the door with the candy and their faces fell as soon as we said 'we're the missionaries' and they told us haistly they weren't interested. BUT! One of the people was very kind and had friends who were memebers and we gave her a copy of the Book of Mormon, because she wanted to be informed but assured us that she wouldn't convert. Time will tell.

And when full force trick or treating started, we went to some apartments. Nobody trick or treats at apartments. And guess what! We were let in! And they were a super nice young couple and they need to be baptized! Not that other's don't, but yeah! The restoration lesson went very well, and we just hope their 'consulting of their (lutheran) parents' won't deter them from continuing to see us.

And we got some candy too. Halloween was a success!

Then on Saturday we helped someone move. 
It was a long long day. 
Moving for 5 hours is exhausting.

P.S.

Christmas! Wooo!