22 October 2012

this past week has been an interesting one! we went on exchanges with the AP's on wednesday. it made me thankful for elder weaver and his fun attitude. the elder i was with on wednesday was pretty dry and it made for a quite boring day.

friday was exchanges again. this time with other elders in the zone. it was good. nothing ground breaking. just knocking on doors most of the day with no seen success.

saturday we found out that our only Samoan investigators are now meeting with the white ward elders. we we're pretty mad. we're trying to figure out how we can steal them back for the samoan ward :)

yesterday the stake had a missionary fireside for all of the high schoolers who want to go on missions soon. with the age change things are going CRAZY.
this is what the guy doing the fireside told us:

36 hours after the age change announcement Salt Lake surveyed utah bishops and the average number of missionary interviews they had done was 10! in 36 hours! one had done 28!

he also said that, on average, salt lake processes 700 missionary applications in a week. 2 weeks ago they processed about 5000! they expect that number might double in the coming weeks.

right now there are about 55,000 missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints around the world. its been estimated that with this age change and the resulting spike in missionaries that number could bee over 100,000 this time next year!  thats absolutely crazy and im excited for it!!!! all the missionaries are. and the youth as well.

AND today we went on a hike and i was super excited for that as well! we went 3 miles up a mountain. it was super cold and windy! as much as i dislike the desert, high mountain desert is pretty cool and no doubt is one of the most intense environments. it was cool to see all the things that live up there. REALLY interesting plants. lots of bristle cone pines (oldest living things on earth, super cool) we even saw a bit of snow! we are all really tired now though, because none of us were even close to in shape enough to do that. but it was a lot of fun :)

transfers this week! not sure if im moving or not. not sure if im staying zone leader or not. we'll see. my vote was i want to go back to riding bikes! cross your fingers for me.

love,
elder donovan