Hey everyone,
Another week has passed here In the beautiful city of Swansea, I'll tell you partially why the email is called what it's called at the beginning, and the other part at the end. So to start out, huge congrats to Sam Dayton on her mission call to Chile! She's gonna do so great out there!
By the way, when I start out a paragraph my saying on this day, I'm writing the draft on the actual day itself so this is a bunch of drafts combined.
Also, I hit my one month mark a few days ago! It's been the longest month ever, but the fastest. It feels like I haven't seen my family in a year, but it feels like I was at SJHHS like two weeks ago, weird how time works. I hear it only gets faster.
Now going where I left off...after emailing last week we had a lesson with a guy named S! So he actually called us the Saturday night before, asked about church, came to church, and set up an appointment! He is such a cool dude, The lesson went amazing!
On Tuesday, we did a Ton of finding people to teach. Me and my companion did a contest with elder miner and smith to see who could get to four potential investigators first, winner gets candy from poundland, which is like the dollar store! Me and my companion actually tried something new, we had a survey about religious stuff and we used that to lead into conversations. It's amazing how well people responded, they were a lot more open when it started with a survey rather than a totally random conversation! We found some pretty solid people! For lunch we went to some random,chinese restaurant, which I'll never ever ever do again. Ever. I also had my first dinner appointment with members. We went to the Bxxxs house, an middle aged couple and their kids who are probably In their 20s. Super cool family and fed us amazing food!
Wednesday wasn't too eventful, the only two things worth mentioning are that we found a subway to eat at! It was so amazing, I fetching love subway! It might be the one place I've had that reminded me of how things tasted at home. And also we walked SO much, my legs were killing me after, but I guess I'm more fit because of it. Thursday we had zone meeting, which was just a ton of missionaries meeting up. I sent a few pics of the zone, in one pic we were doing
gang signs and I accidentally did the peace sign reverse, which is flipping off here. We were all dying haha. We had exchanges with the zone leaders and I was with Elder Miner. He's from Northern California, crazy funny guy! We had a dinner with R and his friend. He's super energetic for an older guy but he's hilarious, he's a vegetarian so we had salads and this cheese bread thing with pie and I actually loved it! We hung out for an hour or so, it was sweet! Also, he had just bought some nice shoes for the rain, but they didn't fit right, and it wasnt refundable, so I just got £55 shoes for free and they fit perfectly! Us and the zone leaders slept at the same flat and elder miner was telling us some crazy stories til like 12:30, like the craziest I've ever heard.
Friday we continued exchanges, we knocked on some doors. We were talking to one mom and her son who was 25, and out of no where that fetcher starts rolling a fetching joint, and the mom was totally not caring, freak guys. The smell reminded me of concerts haha. It brought back memories but I still hate the smell. Crazy thing: we are teaching them next week! Haha. Honestly Friday was such a hard day, it probably is one of the hardest days I've ever had, it was long, I was homesick, I felt literally sick, two of our four appointments fell through which
sucked. But we had a sweet lesson with a guy named Axxxn, from last week, He's awesome. Super engaged in the lesson. We also got to play volleyball at the chapel which was fun. The lyrics from a song called ballidino, which I quoted a few weeks ago, rang in my head through this crappy day: "I believe that there is light up ahead, I can see it through the words that you said". Everyone check out Ballidino by Atlas Genius, it's beautiful, and that lyric has helped me a ton. There is some good ahead and I just need to push for it.
Saturday was pretty good, it started out super hard cuz I was still sad from the previous day, but as I forgot about my problems and got to work, those feelings went away. We knocked doors for a while with some success, we'll see where it goes. Not much else, but nevertheless, it was a good day.
Sunday was pretty simple, we went to church, which was sweet. I love the members here, they are truly incredible. Also we had a cool lesson with a guy named Dxxx, we'll see where that goes. There is a guy in our ward named Shaun, the byu guy I talked about last week, who reminds me so much of hunter Hartman, big byu fan, but loves to just mess with people. Hunter, I compare you two in the best way, don't worry.
This morning for preparation day, we got breakfast with Axxx. He said he'd read the Book of Mormon and come to church so that's sweet. We met up with elder miner and smith, I sent a few letters, like actual paper mail haha. We went to tesco, not too much, we will probably start having some super fun p-days soon.
Tender mercy of the week: we were at lunch as a district on Friday, and there was music playing in the background and I was just in kind of a depressing mood, but then one of my favourite songs "I Bet My Life" by Imagine Dragons came on, which seriously almost made me tear up cuz I needed a tender mercy, it was such a hard day, but hearing a song that's brought me comfort since it came out almost two years ago really made my day.
Jeez I miss music so much. I love church music and David archuleta is sweet, but it's so hard. It's nice that music rules aren't too strict here, so I can listen to pretty much any acoustic music, so send it over email if u have some! Byu vocal point is sweet too! I'll forever be in debt if any of you email music over to me.
And last, but not least, the Avacado. Some random guy came up to us as we were talking to someone and argued with us, or tried to, but when he realised we wouldn't argue back, he said fair enough and gave us an Avacado. People are interesting here...
A quick spiritual thought to end the update: there's an amazing quote by President Monson, he says "We become so caught up in the busyness of our lives. Were we to step back, however, and take a good look at what we’re doing, we may find that we have immersed ourselves in the “thick of thin things.” In other words, too often we spend most of our time taking care of the things which do not really matter much at all in the grand scheme of things, neglecting those more important
causes." I am not an exception to this, I have wasted so much time on things that are good, but not very important. There are so many things that we might waste our time on when we could be spending our time really helping other people, and developing our relationships. I regret the time I completely wasted on things that didn't matter too much. I challenge you all to evaluate how you spend your time, and think of it through an eternal perspective.
I hope you are all well back home, thank you for the emails, keep up the words of encouragement, they DO help. I love you all. God be with you till I write again soon.
Elder Varner
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