Elder Evan Baer: Canada Calgary Mission: Water You Wating For?

November 6, 2023

大家好！今天的戰鬥進行得怎麼樣？

Hey Everyone! How was the week? Did you get to do any fun family stuff? I luckily found some time to do some indexing this week, and I tried out some family recipes as well.

Side note: It’s amazing what a day of 10½ hours of sleep (set my alarm wrong) followed by Daylight Savings can do! I feel unusually energetic right now! (as evidenced by this email's silly formatting)

Alright, on to the good stuff. . . starting with a quick update on some friends here, of course:

Yesterday was a H*CKIN’ good day! Our friend Jing made it to church yesterday, so I got to sit by him and attempt to explain what sacrament was and also pretend like I knew what he was saying (oh, what fun). I don’t know if you remember the other guy from last week who came to church before we taught him (his name’s Stone). He came again this week with his son! AND he’s been telling some other friends of his in our area about church!!! What a legend!! We thought we’d see another couple people at church from other lessons, but alas, it was not to be. Hopefully we can meet with them again next week.

Jun was (as he always is) open to everything we were teaching and reading about this week, and he now accepted an invitation to a member participating in our lesson to meet together and read twice a week from the Book of Mormon! We hope he enjoys that!

In talking with Winson this week he said he doesn’t understand scripture that well, and he just feels weird when he reads it. We may just switch over to reading some scriptures with him during our lessons if nothing else works better.

This last P-day and this Thursday we helped unload moving trailers for the old German lady, her husband, and her family. They were using some trailers from a new neighbor. I got to see some really funny stuff with this experience, like how grumpy the missionaries were about working on P-Day, and how close the husband was to punching his neighbor who just kept flaming him with sassy comments. (Moral of the story: don’t insult the German-speaking Scandinavian head of the household. . . not a great plan.) I think they’re having us over for dinner at their house this week as well, so that should be fun.

We couldn’t do much proselytizing on Halloween (go figure), but we did have a good meal at a branch member’s house. I got my fair share of spooky when I tried to figure out how to eat some whole crawfish on the table in front of me. I luckily figured it out and didn’t have to go Mr. Bean style. I never got around to the crab legs though. . . (spooky)

I got to try my first time tracting on Wednesday! Aaaand we found a total of 1 Chinese person who spoke fluent English and said he already knew Jesus and wasn’t interested. We did find two places that definitely have Chinese speakers, but they weren’t home/didn’t answer. We’ll see what happens with that.

On Thursday I hopped out of the shower and saw that the shower basin was all flooded and the drain was clogged. Pretty cool. It’s always good to turn back time to the stone age and live with no showers and no bathroom sink for 24 hours. . . .

Luckily we were introduced to civilization again when the mission handyman, Brother Brimhall, came with some equipment and unclogged our shower so we could see ALL the SIN that had been washed down there. (Who knew, my Scottish Spring does work.)

I’ve decided that my emails every week are not long and boring enough, so in order to make them more long and boring I think I’m gonna add a lil’ Philosophy Corner to make them longer and more boring for you :)) (feel free to skip to the pics at any time)

Philosophy Corner - (Name subject to change)

Here are two things I’ve been thinking about WAAY too much this week:

Action or Inaction? - What is the greater risk to run? : doing something with the possibility of better consequences but the risk of poor consequences and making a situation worse; or not doing something and thus avoiding the possibility of your actions making things worse, but also risking the possibility of missed opportunities for the better? I’m still tryna figure this one out, so I’m gonna try a bunch of things in the next couple weeks and let you know how it goes. You let me know any thoughts you have on your end as well.
On a much LIGHTER note, yesterday was fast Sunday! (I suppose I do feel lighter when fasting.) Have you ever considered how much of a paradox fasting is? We say “It's fast Sunday” but the day always seems to go so slow. There’s also the paradox that when we fast, we wait and refrain from filling ourselves with life-sustaining food and water, yet instead we are filled with gratitude, with faith, and with the Spirit—we are filled with things that are eternal-life-sustaining. See John 4:13-14 for reference.

Alright, that’s enough School of Athens for one day. Keep with it everyone!

愛你們！

-熊長老

fotos:

fun family foods

Honey-Dijon Ham & Swiss Chicken