Out of the Norm

Hello everyone,

This week was a pretty average week for me.  Throughout the week we did our usual service projects along with a lot of contacting and tracting.  Due to it being summer, there are a lot of tourists here and a lot of the people who normally live here are gone on summer break, making it tougher to find new people to teach.  We did find a couple new people though, and I know that as we continue to work the Lord will bless us as we keep moving forward in faith.

There were a couple things that happened though that were out of the norm.  To start, on Tuesday evening to Wednesday evening, my companion Elder Bushman went to his end of mission temple trip in Portland.  While he was gone I was with another Chinese missionary named Elder Huang.  He is from Taiwan, and while talking we found that we both came from similar families which was fun.  Chinese speaking missionaries usually work in the YSA wards in Eugene and Corvallis, but President placed him on the coast to have an English transfer or two.  It was a fun time.

After that, on Thursday we learned that one of our investigators had someone close to them pass away, so the Woolley's, our senior missionary companionship, bought us a rose to drop off for her.  It helped a lot, and now she is calling us her "favorite people".  On Friday night another interesting event happened.  We went over to another investigator's home to drop him for never letting us teach him, but this time he let us in.  One thing led to another and at the end he was on date for baptism!  The Lord works in mysterious ways.

One final story that happened occurred on Saturday.  As we were walking around town a car pulled up next to us.  Inside was President and Sister Russell on their final p day of the mission for them.  They took us to have ice cream and have small talk with them.  It was a fun, extremely random experience we had, but it was good.  On that day I was also able to Skype in and see three of the people I got to help teach in the past be baptized.  There were some technical difficulties in the wifi and all the calls were at the exact same time which created some confusion, but it was a good experience and amazing to see these people continue on their spiritual journey.

I hope that everyone is doing well and remember to always trust in the Lord and pray for strength to face your day to day trials, and as you do so you will be able to truly go out in the strength of the Lord.  Thank you for all of your support,

Elder Baxter

Tag picture

Sunset on the ocean

Temp companion

Back with his companion

Ocean breeze messing his hair up