First Baptism

October 19, 2015

Dear Family,

This week went by so fast, it was full of hard work. On Monday, Canadian Thanksgiving, we played rugby with the Charlottetown ward because we were invited, which was so fun, but definitely left all the missionaries sore for the week. We are just not as physical as we were before our missions I guess. We ended up eating three dinners. So here's what happened, we were spending the day with the Charlottetown Elders and Elder Larson bought us all pizza around three o'clock. While we were eating the DeVries called and asked if we could move dinner from five to four...so we did. I was full after eating with them and then we had another dinner at a recent converts house, Bernice. Oh man I was dying in that appointment, I have never forced so much food into my system before, haha. Oh well, is was our fault, but definitely a good day. After being that full we helped a less active stack firewood for the winter for the rest of the evening. Woohoo! First Canadian Thanksgiving!

We taught one of our investigators, David, about church attendance and the sacrament this week because he hasn't come to church yet and that is the next step for him. He did pray at the end of the lesson though which was a huge surprise to me because for the past several weeks he would always say,"you do it, I will do it next time," and he never did. So that was a big step for him.

Friday morning we get a call from John, who we didn't know, and he asked us if we could meet and that he was sitting in the church parking lot waiting... uh, yeah of course we will be there. We got to know him and I thought he would become a new investigator but it turns out that he is a lost less active that lives in our area but is on different missionaries records, so we hope to work with him more now. It was amazing that he came looking for us, it shows that people do still want to change and have God be a part of their life.

That same evening we were knocking and got a referral to go see a Catholic minister, I was like uh oh, here we go. But Tim, the minister, was really nice and we ended up talking for like an hour and a half. He was so interested in learning about our Faith just not in the converting part, he just wanted to know more. So we discussed religion and I learned quite a bit about the Catholic faith that I had never known, so it was a new experience. I love that being on a mission you learn more not only about your own faith but others as well.

Sunday evening was the best way to end the week. We had a baptism for Tom, the person that we have been working with and past missionaries have been working with for quite some time. It was amazing to see his life change in just this short time that I have been in Montague.

I love the area and hope to stay here for a while, even if it is pretty small.

Autumn may already be coming to an end, we woke up to it snowing outside this morning, first of the season.
Winter is Coming.

I love you all!!

Love, Elder Ray

Tom's Baptism! (Tom on the right)

New Brunswick East Zone Training

PEI Fall

I don't want to leave PEI!!

It's only mid October... too soon.

This is the Dourte's "personal beach" It is not too far behind their
house and no one ever goes there. ....I just want to touch the water

This is the ferry that is always coming in,
thought it was beautiful. (always bringing tourists)

Canadian Thanksgiving

October 12, 2015

Dear Family,

Winter is Coming.
Where did the sun go?
Definitely not ready for the cold.

There is this less active member that we have been trying to see for the past two months and finally this past week we met with her, patience and persistence were definitely involved.

It's funny because the church choir that we are singing in may not even have us at their performances because we might get transferred by then. Oh well, it is still enjoyable and we are getting to know all the people there.

On Thursday we helped our branch President with digging holes to make a pathway for his horse, yoshi, to go from his stable to the field whenever he wants in the winter.

The excommunicated member that we have been working with is planning on being re-baptized this Sunday! Glad I get to be here for it.

Friday night we had a games night that we the young men planned and we made a facebook event and passed out fliers but not as many people showed up as we would have liked, but It was still a good night of playing games and fellowshipping.

Happy Thanksgiving...It's Canadian Thanksgiving today and we had a Thanksgiving dinner with some members last night and we have two dinners tonight, who idea was it to accept two Thanksgiving dinner invitations, oops, it was me, sorry Elder Shambrook...we will let you know how it goes.

Because it is a holiday and P-Day today, we met with the Charlottetown ward and elders and played rugby for a couple of hours, which was awesome because it was the first time that I have played rugby.

We teach about two to three lessons a week so things are fairly slow right now, but hopefully we can see something good come from it. Love the area, love the people!

Love You!

Love Elder Ray

Defrosting frozen soup.

Had a cold all week, better now.

Got to love working on a farm.

We are so Fresh!

There are literally pumpkins all over the island, I guess that's what
happens when Thanksgiving and Halloween are three weeks apart.

Conference

October 5, 2015

Dear Family 5,200 kilometers away,

It's transfer week...again. But luckily I will be staying in Montague and so will Elder Shambrook. He will be my first companion that stays with me for longer than a transfer.

On Thursday we attended a fireside about things you could do to survive without electrical power. The lady that was doing the presentation was Dian Thomas, who is supposed to be somewhat famous in this category. It was really cool some of the ideas that she had, some which I may use later in life.

This week has been kind of hard, more for one of our investigators than us, who had a stroke. They were in the hospital for a couple of days, and we didn't get to teach this week but we visited quite a bit. They probably won't fully recover and are weak, bad/slurred speech, etc. We will continue to teach and help them with their goal toward baptism, even if they forgot our names...

Because Conference here doesn't start until one o'clock, Elder Shambrook and I had the opportunity to attend another churches service on Sunday. Since we are in the Hillcrest United churches choir, we thought that we would go there. The experience was pretty good, but different. I think this may have been my first time attending a different church. It was cool to see how other faiths celebrate the Sabbath, but I was kind of confused. All the prayers we had to say and hymns we sang, it was hard to follow along and know when to do what when, but this nice lady that we sat by helped us out. I guess that because we weren't regulars that we didn't know how to do anything, but I could see the same thing happen to visitors in our church as well.  At the end of the service we asked where we could get one of their hymn books, and they just gave a couple to us. I don't know if any of you have been to a different service but it was a whole new experience for me.

That General Conference tho, definitely the highlight of my week. I have received so much personal revelation, not only how to better myself but things I need to do to help the area of Montague. My favorite, most inspired talk was by Jeffrey R. Holland, that touched me. I hope that all of you have had some witness of truth as you have enjoyed the many wonderful topics this past weekend.

Though this mission may seem hard, and baptisms don't happen often, I know that that is not what matters, though that is our goal, but that I am here to serve the Lord and to teach people the gospel, regardless of who accepts it or not. Though some days seem empty, it is the people that make all the difference. Invite a friend, invite a loved one, make a difference.

I love you all so much!
Stay Gold Ponyboy
Love, Elder Ray

Welcome to the Saturday afternoon session of General Conference,
where everyone stayed home to watch it...

Four way chess is so much more difficult than you would think.

This is my baby velociraptor cut...
okay you caught me, a three year old did it.

Singing for Others

September 28, 2015

Dear Family,

Everyday it seems like PEI keeps getting more beautiful, and we are going into fall, so the color here should be really cool. The mornings and evenings are starting to get colder though and I have to prepare myself for the crazy winter to come, Aagh!

Last week when I talked about the 70 mile yard sale, and the Hillcrest United church gave us a plate of cookies, yeah, we joined their choir this week. A few weeks ago we were knocking and we were talking to this lady who is a part of the church choir and she invited us to go and sing with them, so imagine two missionaries walking into someone else's church unexpectedly and asking to join their choir. It was kind of awkward at first but they were very welcoming. So now I need to learn like ten Christmas songs for it, let's just hope that I will be here until Christmas because it would be sad to devote time and learn the songs and then move to a different area. It's a great way to get more involved with the community and even with other churches.

Pretty busy week for the Montague area, we had three lessons on Tuesday, which is quite a few for one day in this mission. We have committed our investigator David to baptism on November 14th, but he has been committed to baptism by many missionaries before and decided not to go through with it, so we are trying to focus on having him receive spiritual witness of the truth and that he will commit to his decision. We are also trying to help an excommunicated member come back to the church and rebaptism, which is very interesting because I have never had a situation such as this before.

We had personal interviews with President Pratt this week and they are always good, he definitely helps with anything we need, even if it is just to talk.

At all our dinner appointments this week we played Would You Rather... for the spiritual thought and related it to Agency, it was a fun activity and it really gets you thinking about the decisions you make and the results of them.

We did a little bit of service moving couches for one of our investigators, which I have moved quite a lot of couches on my mish, you would think I would be a professional at it by now.

On Saturday we had no appointments, just a full day of going out and talking to Heavenly Father's children. We had a referral from a few weeks ago that we tried to contact for weeks but no answer. So we dropped it. But all that morning I kept getting the thought that we should stop by and try one more time. So that is the first thing we did. There was a lady, her name is Rose, outside mowing her lawn and when we walked up she stopped right away and asked us to come in. We sat down and she gave us some orange juice and then started talking as if she already knew us. She expressed how she knew she needed God more in her life and that she had been waiting for something, then we showed up. We taught a short Restoration lesson that was very powerful, you could feel the spirit as we told the Joseph Smith story and bore testimony of the First Vision. She was sad as she asked us why more people wouldn't believe this. It was one of the most spiritual Restoration lesson's we have taught, and she wants to learn more and is excited to start reading the book of Mormon. Lately I have been saddened by all the daily rejection but I know that I am here to have moments like this one, to bless the few that are prepared to hear the gospel.

I love you all more than Dory loves her squishy!

Love Elder Ray

2 Nephi 32:3 Angels speak by the power of the Holy Ghost;
wherefore, they speak the words of Christ. Wherefore,
I said unto you, feast upon the words of Christ; for behold,
the words of Christ will tell you all things what ye should do.

This is what a lot of PEI looks like, farms.

Training from a Seventy

September 21, 2015

Dear Family,

This week flew by pretty quick, even though it wasn't a busy week. Right now we have five investigators, but are really officially teaching two at the moment. Joe, who already tells everyone that he is Mormon, wants to be baptized but struggles with the word of wisdom, which he has been trying to keep for years but hasn't done so yet. He will get there though. Our other investigator is David, who has been taught before and was going to be baptized but he talked to his minister who talked him out of it. We asked him what he felt he should have done at that time and he said he should have gotten baptized. So we are helping him get to that point again where he will be ready to make that commitment.

On Wednesday we had a second zone conference this transfer because Elder Perkins from the Seventy came to do the training. He selected a few missionaries, including me, to have a personal interview with him to ask some questions about us and the mission so that he could receive revelation on what to train us on, I thought that was pretty cool. I learned a lot from the training and had some questions answered.

We have a member who has been out of work for over two weeks so we went over and mowed his lawn for him, which he appreciated. The grass around here grows wicked fast and it is so green, I enjoy mowing it a lot more than mowing the dirt back home.

So apparently every third week in September the island does this thing called the seventy mile yard sale, where people from all over the island set up garage sales all along the streets for seventy miles. so the traffic everywhere was crazy and no matter where you went there were garage sales. Yes we did go to some of the garage sales but it was a great opportunity to talk to people from all over the island and share the gospel with them. We went in to one of the churches doing a sale and the missionaries are on good terms with them. They were selling cookies but gave us a plate of them for free.

We had the most people at church this Sunday since I have been in Montague, a whopping twenty-eight.

Other than that my week was good, and we fixed the bikes.

Love you all!

Love, Elder Ray

I am grateful for my dad and the things that he taught me, like how to fix a bike.

Helaman 9:28 And behold, he shall say unto you, Nay.

Biking

September 14, 2015

Dear Family,

For P-day on Monday we went and spent the day in Charlottetown with the Elders there and we helped one of the members do some gardening, which was new to me because a very small amount of people at home grow gardens because you really can't, it's hard. But here, everything grows without having to do much, you just have to take care of it. We got some fresh tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers out of it though so I'm going to see what I can make with those.

At one of our lessons with our investigator Joe we shared Jeffrey R. Holland's talk, Where Justice, Love and Mercy Meet, which I personally love the story in the talk because it shows that Christ will never let you fall, he will always be there to catch you and lift you back up.

We are working on helping two people to stop smoking, and they both are still struggling, but have cut down a lot and smoke a lot less. The majority of people here in the maritimes smokes, and I don't know if it is like that everywhere else but maybe I have just noticed it here more.

I do enjoy riding bikes, though some days I am more sore than others, but at the moment we are not riding them because Elder Shambrook popped his tire, so hopefully I can fix it soon and we can get back on them.

On Thursdays we have dinner with the branch President and his family. His wife, sister Dourte, attempted making some potatoes a new way and it came out with the consistency of glue, and then tried to add more in and it became chunky glue. But we still ate it. She asked us what the worst thing we had eaten on our missions was and honestly, it was the potatoes, but that's not what I told her. It was funny though and we all laughed about it.

Because Montague is a small town we have been trying to branch out to the surrounding areas, and a lot of it is farms. In Montague we would go knocking and a lot of the people would say that missionaries were here not that long ago. Yes, the town gets knocked a lot but very few are willing to listen, it is because they are so devoted to their families, which is good, but it makes it so that they won't even think about changing. So we picked a street on our map that hadn't been knocked that was a ways out, and we planned to go knocking for about two hours that day. We drive up, pumped for a new street, and come to a long, dirt road, and find out that there is only one house on that whole road, and they weren't even home. :(

Some people are just too funny. We were knocking and a ladies window was open and when we knocked on the door, we could hear her say to her sister to tell us that she wasn't interested. So her sister comes to the door, says that she doesn't live there, and that her sister is in the bathroom...lame excuse, I know. I just looked at her like, really? I can't really describe my face at the moment but it was almost like a mix of trying not to laugh, making sure I didn't call her out, and are you serious...some people.

Even though you do the same thing everyday, the people is what makes it worth it, what makes the days seem different. If everyone was alike I would not be able to have even made it this long, haha.

Love you all!
Be Safe, Be Strong
Live long and prosper.

Love Elder Ray

Our wonderful PEI district

Biking for days

...I am never not surprised when knocking

Do you ever have one of those moments
where you are doing missionary work and then SQUIRREL!!

Eternigator

September 7, 2015

Dear Family,

On Tuesday we had a zone conference and we were supposed to be in Moncton for it but the bridge across PEI was closed due to high winds, so all the missionaries waited at the bridge for over an hour in a line of cars waiting for it to open up again but it didn't, so we had to go to the Summerside chapel and skype in, thank goodness for skype. But it was kind of boring because we weren't actually there and it was a six hour conference. That took up most of the day but I never leave a conference without learning something.

Most of the week was finding though and our mission has a standard of talking to at least 140 people a week and at least 10 hours of finding. Because Montague is such a small area yet spaced out because everyone lives on a farm, reaching the standard is difficult. But we persevered and we did about 15 hours of finding and talked to 150 people. We did it, I felt accomplished, though I am exhausted, but that is one of the words to describe a missionary.

We are helping two people in this area to stop smoking, helping them make plans and goals to succeed.

We found a new investigator while walking down a dirt path, but at the time we didn't know he was someone who was taught before. In the record it says he is an Eternigator, someone who may neer fully commit but will continue to meet. Hopefully we will be able to help him progress if he so desires.

Yes we have bikes! Now I feel like a real missionary, and maybe get some muscle too, haha.

Love you all more than the pillsbury dough boy loves his belly poked!

Love, Elder Ray

Branch President is raising some turkeys for Thanksgiving.

Stacking wood for the winter, it's gonna be a bad one.