Chapter 23: A Frantic Morning

Hello! Hope everyone's doing well! Just a few things from this week:

We had zone conference on Wednesday. President Merritt turned on a spiritual firehose in the morning, including an insightful discussion about a "Continuum of Faith" we follow in our spiritual growth. Rather than being had as a perfect whole the moment you decide to act on it, faith begins with a simple desire for good things to be true, then it progresses to belief, then to trust, then to reliance. In the afternoon we had some helpful trainings on being more effective with daily planning, doorstep contacting, and asking members for referrals.

My zone with the Merritts at zone conference.
The senior missionaries on the right are the Youngs,
and they gave their departing testimonies that day. We'll miss them!

Just before zone conference we went up to Rancho Bernardo to give those elders a ride, but after picking them up we discovered some other elders in our zone were in the hospital all the way over in La Jolla and needed us to grab something from them and take it to the mission office. This added an extra 30-40 minutes to our travel time, and I had the opening prayer in zone conference... we were a tad stressed, but we kept the AP's aware and we arrived a whopping 2 minutes before the start. Also, on the way to the hospital, the ocean suddenly appeared on our right! It was an exciting morning to be sure.

We and a couple ward members helped our friend Medet with some weeding around her house. She had a "light lunch" prepared for us afterward which turned out to be a magnificently presented feast.

We went on another exchange with Rancho Bernardo, and after trying to pawn some surplus Takis off on me, Elder Creasy, and Elder Meilstrup in turn, a member family finally found a home for them in Elder Blake, who was visiting our area for the day.

A family moved into the ward this past January, and we haven't ever seen them at church, so over the course of the next month we periodically tried to meet them, but with no success. When we talked with the ward council about them we discovered they had the same experience. But, last week we finally tried their door when they were home and they set up a meeting with us! This past Sunday we got to know them better and discovered them to be wonderfully friendly and very interested in the support a ward can provide. They were simply apprehensive about meeting this ward because the past couple wards they were a part of were not very welcoming. But little do they know this ward is absolutely fantastic! They're going to meet a member of the relief society presidency this week, and we can't wait for everyone else to get to know them.

God be with you,

Elder Tolman

Photos:

See that inconspicuous tree in the background of the selfie?
Elder Meilstrup and I have a personal relationship with it,
cause we moved it from the back porch to the front porch at a member's request.
We were dropping by, but no one was home, so we took a picture with the tree as consolation.

Sadie the cat atop her trusty roomba steed

The ocean as we passed through La Jolla! 
Both my areas so far have been quite a ways off from the coast
and we're not allowed to go to the beach,
so that was the closest I've been to the water on my mission!

Coming back at ya again with some random sky photos: