WEEK 13 - Shipped Off To Sealy (pics)

It’s incredibly rare to leave your trainer in the first 3 months of the mission. It’s even rarer for your trainer to leave you. Yet, both of those things happened this last week.

On the mission, every six weeks these things called transfers happen. Transfers are new location assignments that are sent out to all the missionaries within one mission. Missionaries stay in the cities they’re already living in or move across the mission, keep their companion or get a new one, and receive new assignments like becoming missionary trainers or get released from assignments. So, kinda a big deal. 

The area I was covering with my trainer, Elder Elmer, was closed. It doesn’t exist anymore. Another pair of Elders now oversees it, but that meant Elder Elmer and I had to move elsewhere. We were split up, he went to the city city of Houston and I was shipped off to a small city named Sealy. When we found out he exclaimed, “I’m going to the Celestial Kingdom and you’re going to Outer Darkness.” This is true. Sealy is the boonies. It has fewer people than my hometown of San Elijo Hills has–and that isn’t even classified as a town but as a community, let alone a city–and is one of the places that everyone, especially those who speak Spanish, pray they don’t get assigned to on transfer day. And so now, Sealy is my new home. 

And I love it. 

There is so much work to do out here. It’s labeled a “dead area” as far as the rest of the mission is concerned, but I’m going to be grinding to bring it back to life–or birth it since it has never been alive. One of my goals is to revive the Spanish side of this ward. My companion and I, Elder Lawyer, are technically Spanish and English missionaries because we cover a city called Brookshire, too, but are the only missionaries there so we bring English people closer to Christ. In the past, the Spanish members in Sealy had a Spanish branch–a little smaller than a ward–but since they merged with the English ward in Sealy (mainly people from Brookshire) more and more Spanish speakers went inactive. Now, we’re going to change that. It’s been tried before but I thoroughly believe that this is one of the reasons I have for coming out here (especially since I can’t do as much video stuff because I’m an hour or more away from the city). Already, I’ve started. I have a list of every single Spanish speaking member who is no longer active and I’ve begun making my way down the list to bring those families back, and–what’s different about this effort–we have active Spanish member support. Little by little, we’re going to grow this ward and Spanish branch. I am beyond excited. 

Other than that, not much else has been happening. I am in Texas, Texas for sure, though. Like so Texas if I say I’m from California, they say sorry. Yet, I love it here. The Lord continues to do marvelous things among the Children of Men. 

If you want to see all the pictures ever, go here. 

HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM: