Monday, April 21, 2014

April 21

This week Monday we took the car in and found out that the recall on the Cruze's affected our car and that it has a hairline fracture in it so it will have to be fixed soon. We then e-mailed and went bowling with a recent convert from Saskatoon and her boyfriend who is a return missionary. 

Tuesday we went and visited D one last time before I left and then we went out to Carievale and said bye to C and K and helped put up his new garage door only to take it down, had a good message shared with them and then came back to Weyburn to have basketball night, which got cancelled because the church scheduled something else that night.

Wednesday we were pretty busy and later saw K and helped them put together some book shelves and talked a bit more about the experience he had with his father the other day. Then we went out to Francis and said good bye to the L's and K's and had a great dinner and lesson on mormon.org with the L's. Then we visited G at A&W and had a good chat with him; he can always feel the spirit stronger when we are around he always says.

Thursday we spent most of the day packing and preparing to go into Regina for the mission conference and picked up my suit from the dry cleaners (got it dry cleaned for the first time) then G took us out for dinner and Brother Morrissette was there so we ate with them (Brother Morrissette's wife is out of town in Calgary watching her grand-kids for like a month and ever since she has been gone he just eats out at least two sometimes three times a day! It's pretty funny, reminds me of what Grandpa Schultz would probably do :) ) Then we visited the J's and had a good meeting with them following a good lesson with P and A.

Friday was crazy day. We left and drove up with Estevan elders to Regina and went to Subway and right after that, since almost all of the members in the entire mission were in Regina this weekend because of the Priesthood leadership training, or because there was a huge Winnipeg Stake temple trip, so one of the members who elder Dillon and Elder McGregor knew insisted that we all meet them at East Side Mario's and we ate another meal.... Then we went to the church and it was crazy. I saw so many missionaries there that I had never before seen in my life. Around 4:30 all of the missionaries in the whole mission showed up and then we ate again and then we had a good conference together to prepare for the visit from the Apostle. Then we drove around all night taking luggage places and different missionaries to their billets.

Saturday morning we left the 6 elders in our apartment and had a breakfast appointment with a member family and got a call from a lady who had a card form Elder Beacham a few months ago and asked us to help her so that was good. We then went to the church and waited and studied our scriptures until Elder Christofferson arrived. When he did you could just feel his presence as he walked in the Chapel, it was amazing. He had us all sit down and then everyone in the entire mission got to go up and introduce ourselves and tell him where we were from, then we got to shake his hand along with Elder Soares of the Presidency of the Seventy and Elder Spackman, the area seventy who lives in Calgary. It was a super great experience. We then heard from Sister and President Thomas and then Elder Spackman and Elder Soares followed by Elder Christofferson speaking and then he opened up about an hour and a half for the missionaries to ask questions. The talks were super good. Elder Christofferson is super funny too. It's really interesting to see General authorities when they aren't at general conference. They are completely different. I remember when I saw some at the MTC they are different than when you see them at general conference. They are super funny yet extremely dignified and can go right back to powerful doctrine just like that.  Too many things to choose from to talk about. The thing that stood out the most was what Elder Christofferson said. How he considers us his companions and that he would hope that he and the Brethren would never do anything to disappoint us and he hoped that we would do the same. He was super humble about everything, that definitely was one great attribute you could see in him. You could just feel their true and deep love that they had for us the entire time. The spirit was so strong the entire time. Definitely a superb experience! He is such a great scriptorian as well. Every question that anyone would ask him he would only have to think for a few seconds and would through out a scripture or a few relating to the topic. He bore the most powerful testimony I have ever heard before. His simple yet very powerful testimony of Christ and that he lives was so powerful, you could literally imagine and see and know that Christ was a person and that he lives. I can't use words to describe how powerful it truly was. After that the mission dispersed and all headed back to their areas and we made sure that everything was taken care of then Elder Christofferson had a four hour meeting with all of the Priesthood leadership in the Winnipeg and Saskatchewan stakes. Wish that we could have sat in on that but we weren't allowed. We then went to lunch with the Assistants before they headed back to Winnipeg and then met a few members and then we went to meet some potential investigators and later had dinner and met C, our 73 old man who is going to be baptized soon, I can just feel it. He wants to, just has to get a few things sorted out with himself.

Sunday was pretty crazy. We studied and went to church early to welcome people. We are in the Wascana Ward; there are three wards in Regina. But the first person I saw when I walked in the Chapel was Ali'i Lafontaine, but he is in the new ward, Sunrise. We had a good sacrament meeting and two people were confirmed, a child of record and a man who just got baptized on Friday. C came and went to all three meetings which was super good. He is such a great guy. It was weird being in such a big ward, even though there were only like 125-150 members it was the biggest I had been to in a year, and it was weird going back to 3 hour blocks because in Weyburn they only had 2 hours of Church.

But yeah, so after that we had lunch and stopped by a few other people, and we also had a lesson with two guys that speak almost 0 English and only speak French and Spanish. They are from Colombia and were working in Quebec before they came to Saskatchewan, so that's why they speak French. We brought a Recent Convert  with us and he is from Cuba so he translated for us. It was super funny because he kept forgetting to change languages and would sometimes speak to the other guys in English and then us in Spanish. But it was super good we gave them all copies of the book of Mormon and the pamphlets in English and Spanish and had a prayer with them and A translated that and it was super powerful, you could totally tell that they felt the spirit. We then had a dinner appointment with the C family, who used to live in Medicine Hat 1st or 2nd ward, I cannot remember but I recognized their faces and they did mine and had a good conversation of things back home.  So yeah anyways I literally have slowly been moving closer and closer to home, saw tons of people from Medicine Hat. After that we had some other appointments but they fell through so we stopped by a few other people before going home and collecting indicators.

Was a pretty crazy week but I loved it, looking forward to serve here!

-Love Elder Shane Dola


P.S. We don't have a car to drive anymore....all we have is a 2014 brand new Chevrolet Silverado with 2400Km's on it to drive around