Dear Mom and Dad,
Thanks for the Email, and I'm glad
to hear everything's still going well there.Thanks for all the
questions too. I guess I'll start with that.
1. I don't think
you need to bring my bike down, because I'm all the way down in Central
Point Oregon (right by Medford), and that would be a long drive. We have
a car, but we're only allowed to drive 200 miles a month, so we pretty
much have to bike everywhere, and then we use the car to go to Wal-Mart
to get groceries on P-day. So I guess we're supposed to just use our
bikes so the members can see that we're out working. It seems kind of
weird to me though, because it takes about 40 minutes to bike to some of
the farther places in our area, so we can't get nearly as much done
when we're only on bikes.
2. I think I'm good on rain gear, because it doesn't rain too much
down here, but if you want to send something you could send just a cheap
pair of waterproof pants that I could slip over my slacks when I'm
biking through the rain, because I get pretty whet when that happens.
3. Actually they don't let us use Ipods in this mission for some
reason, so I don't think that would work. Everything has to be on a CD.
If you have time, I would absolutely love a copy of the vocal point CD
too, because I'm not allowed to listen to it when it's on my ipod.
4. None of the other Danish speakers are with me. I think they're
within about a half hour driving distance from me, but I'm not sure
exactly where.
5. Church went great. I met a bunch of members and two of our investigators came to church, so that was good.
6.My companion is from Tokyo, Japan. He's been out in the mission
field for a whole year, and to be honest I think he speaks really good
English. Sometimes when we're talking to people they don't understand
everything he says because of his accent, but I can understand him fine.
I asked him if he wanted anything and he jokingly said he you could
send him a plane ticket to Japan haha. Don't worry he was joking haha.
7. Umm, my eating is going fine. I generally eat cereal, yogurt, a
banana and a protein shake for breakfast. Then for lunch I make a
sandwich or make pasta roni or macaroni, sometimes I eat rice with some
cool spices my companion has though. Then we have a dinner appointment
pretty much every night, so we get at least one good meal a day.
8. Yep we have one pretty much every night.
9. No, I actually had no clue there was an earthquake. Where was it and how big was it?
10. Yep, I'm still wearing my Danish nametag.
11. So on a typical day we generally have around 2 or three
appointments with investigators set up, but it seems like at least half
of them cancel at the last minute. So we generally have at least one
good appointment a day. Then we generally try to go to some other
investigators or potential investigators houses to see them. It takes a
lot of our time each day just to bike everywhere though honestly. Most
days we end up tracting for at least around an hour also. We also visit a
lot of less active people too.
By the way, my address is, 226 8th St. Central
Point OR 97502. If you send stuff to the mission office they'll forward
it to me too though. It would be great if you would post that address on
Facebook or something. So now I'll just tell you how everything's been
going for me. The first day I got here I was really tired from flying
and everything, and then we had a really long training in Eugene that
was pretty good. Our mission president is really nice and we all got to
talk to him, and then we all found out who our companions would be and
then we drove three hours to Medford. I randomly started feeling super
sick and threw up in a paper bag in the car haha, and then to make
things worse, we didn't get back until about 11:40 at night, so we
didn't get much sleep either. So the next day I still wasn't feeling
very good, but luckily we had the car that day or else I might have
died. I honestly don't remember what happened that day very well, but
I'm sure it could have been worse. The next day I know we taught a
lesson to some inactives, but as I recall all of our appointments got
dropped, so I was definitely a bit discouraged. Then we went tracting
and had someone yell at us and tell us we don't believe in Christ and we
should throw away the Book of Mormon. So by then I was really
discouraged. Then we met Andrea though. She had requested a book of
Mormon online, so we went to deliver it. Her Dad was a member of the
church and it's just an amazing story how well she's been prepared to
recieve the gospel. We've already taught her the first two lessons now,
and she came to church and started making friends, and we have a
baptisimal date set for June7th when her Dad is driving down. So her Dad
is going to be able to baptize her into the church. So now everytime
I'm feeling discouraged I just think of her, and all the happiness the
gospel has bringing her, and I don't feel so bad anymore. I'm just
thankful that I was able to be one of the people to meet her. I admit my
mission is really hard and discouraging at times already, but I'm
really starting to feel love for the people and I'm really enjoying my
mission. I hope everything keeps going well for you. I'll be keeping you
in my thoughts and prayers.
Love,
Elder Redd
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