"All the Canadians Are Thawing Out"

Most Canadians just close themselves up in their houses and hibernate

for the winter, so when it gets nice out side it seems like they thaw

out. Everyone is outside. This week has been the first consistently

warm week in a long time. The trees are finally starting to turn

green; just a week ago everything still looked dead, now it is coming

back to life. Even night time was warm, it has been just great. The

past few days it has felt like it would rain and thunderstorms have

been in the forecast, but we haven't seen any yet.

This week has been more preparation than going out and doing the work.

We went up to Edmonton for a special multi-zone conference. We would

have gone to the conference in Red Deer last week, but President

wanted us to come up for a special meeting. We got to go to the

temple. This was the first time in a long time that I've gotten to go

there. At first I was feeling like we would be spending the whole day

without doing any real mission work, but the spirit told me I would be

doing some of the most important missionary work. I had a sweet

experience in the temple. We stayed overnight with some missionaries

in Riverbend, the only area in Edmonton I don't know like the back of

my hand. Everything that could have gone wrong seemed to go wrong, but

everything ended up ok.

The next day we had the new missionary training meeting. We talked

about the basics for being a missionary. We had to get some things

taken care of for Elder Rodriguez's visa, then we headed back down to

Innisfail. It was about 2 and 1/2 hours. Then I got sick, so we ended

up spending three days without hardly doing any missionary work. I

guess we needed that through. The Lord gives us what we need when we

need it.

We found some cool people. One guy kept referring to us as soldiers.

He said he wants to be a guard in God's kingdom. He was fun. We met

with a super born again Christian family. They thought they knew our

religion better than we did, which obviously they didn't. Talking with

them was fun. Then we met a girl named Sam who had no religion at all.

The difference was Day and night.

We are doing well here.