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
