Mission Life in the NWP: Week 6 - I died. And my Companion is pregnant

So, this past week I have realized something. All the missionaries I know have a title for their emails besides what week it is. Most of them are clickbait titles. But I am starting to realize how good they work, or maybe I'm just really gullible. So let me know if my title works

Anywho, highlights for the week:

Trunk or Treat - on the 30th our ward did a trunk or treat and so thanks to the Hymas family we had decorations and we invited lots of our friends to come. One of them came! She is a less-active and has a child, and she wants to come back and get to know people. She actually asked us to introduce her to some people and that's when I realized that I really need to start memorizing lots of names. And we didn't really dress up so we just changed name tags except Elder Herbst lost mine so we both just ended up being Elder Herbst.

Member Baptism - The father is not a member and so we got invited by the ward mission leader who was asked to conduct it. And because of some missed calls he wasn't sure if anyone was giving the baptism and Holy Ghost talks, so the morning of, he calls us and asked us to do that, plus teaching the Restoration while the boy got changed. And so we were prepared, I thought of this object lesson (because baptism talks always have object lessons) and it turns out the older brothers had prepared talks so we didn't have to. Which was great and all, but that means that I lugged a 60 lbs bag full of weights for nothing. You know, the weight of our sins and Baptism can take them all away so you don't have to go through life with a bag of weights. I thought it was pretty good, but I bet my Mom is shaking her head as she read this.

5th Sunday - We were asked to give the 5th Sunday lesson, and being missionaries we did it on missionary work, specifically how member missionaries. We talked about the Love, Share, and Invite in the general handbook and it went pretty well. We were able to break the ice pretty well and taught how to do it simply, natural, and normal. Bishop came up to me afterwards and said that I have definitely got better at missionary work, so I'll take that as a compliment. He also let me have a handful of peanut m&ms from his stash in the car because someone asked what our favorite candy was.

The Many Mess-ups - Okay, here is the fun part that will definitely have many of your heads shaking. So... remember when we locked ourselves out... well, it happened again. This time I got a video. We went on exchanges and I was in charge of the area for the day, which wasn't a good idea. Elder Halversen forgot his Tiwi card (what you need to drive) twice. I accidently had us go to a member lesson an hour early, so we left and visited a potential friend who said she would love to study the bible with us, so that's awesome. And then because we were close to having no more miles left to drive, we were supposed to take the bus to district council, we missed the bus and ended up having to drive. We had two miles left for the month on the 27th, wups. It all ended up working out tho.

Elder Herbst is Pregnant? - We helped some people move in and were talking to the lady afterwards about families. Elder Herbst starts teaching her about eternal families and keeping families together with sacred covenants and then says, "yeah, I just can't wait to be a dad." And she asked, "Oh really, are you pregnant?" It took all I had not to bust up laughing. Elder Herbst then tries to explain that he is looking forward to it in a few years, not currently. It was pretty funny.

I Died - So our whole area had a goal to teach 500 principles about the Restoration. At each hundred mark they got a prize. The first three were for them to watch their District leader and his Companion feel discomfort. Because we are all the way in South Whidbey and we were running low on miles we couldn't go up for them to do it. Until last Monday. The prize for them was to 1) throw a whipped cream pie in our faces, 2) dump a bucket of ice water on our heads, and 3) watch us eat a habanero. So they had us eat the habanero, get a pie to the face, and then the water. After I had chewed it was already way too hot, and then the water being dumped on me surprised me and made me gasp. That in turn made some of the pepper go in my air pipe instead of my stomach. That was when I died. It was kinda funny tho because everyone immediately started to feel kinda bad for how much I was dying and I eventually got better after drinking a third of a gallon of milk.

So that was my week pretty nice, and hopefully this week we can find more people to teach. But before I am done I wanted to share two other parables/analogies that I heard this week.

The first is about how whenever you talk with a friend after a time of absence it feels nice, or when I receive emails from all of you it makes me smile and I love it. Well, that is how Heavenly Father feels when we pray. He hasn't seen us in a bit, and we can't talk face-to-face at the moment, but every time you pray He gets so happy. And so I invite you all to pray a bit more this next week, give thanks for what you have, and maybe send me an email too and you can make Heavenly Father and me happy.

The next one is about the straight and narrow. Right by the Island is a straight and narrow strip of water (it's actually kinda big but in comparison to the ocean it's not). Life is like that straight: Sometimes we will veer towards a side and start hitting sandbars or floating trees, or maybe we had a super bad day and we ran ashore. I know that if we keep trying and keep up our effort we can make it to the Ocean, a place where God has promised us so many blessings we can't even comprehend. We just have to keep trying, keep reminding ourselves of the reward at the end and press onwards.

I know that God loves all of you. I don't say that every week to be monotonous, but to tell you all that His love never ends, it never falters, and I want each of you to be able to feel that too. I love ya too, and I look forward to all of your emails . Talk to you next week

Pictures and videos- yes what all of you have been waiting for
Click here to watch us break into our apartment again, and burn my face off eating a Habanero