Jacob Dyer Missionary Blog: November 23, 2015

Transfer weeks are always fun, especially when they end in a baptism! Angel got baptized and there was a great showing from the ward. Lots of people there! Everyone was being so warm to his mother even though she doesn't speak English. Gotta get my Spanish good enough so we can just teach her. Just kidding, we'll pass her over to the Spanish Elders. Their Spanish is a little bit better than ours'.

We had our new companion, Elder Westenskow in the apartment now, so we have three beds lined up in our room - the pod. It's really fun. He got a full does of office life with all the trips we have to take to the airport and all the places we need to drive. Early mornings, lots of training, lots of food. Transfer weeks are tiring and not very healthy.

Elder Fischer retired from driving the big 8 seat Ford E-150 van so I did it this time. That van is a big vehicle... It is fun taking the outgoing missionaries to the airport because at a certain point in the ride (usually when we can see the airport or airplanes flying really low) it suddenly sinks in that they're going home. Very bittersweet moment for them, they've been devoting all their time, energy, and strength and they're just about to go back to the "real world." Nerve wracking for some! It was sad to see Elder Anderson go. He was Elder Fischer's companion before I came in and is an awesome missionary.

Bringing the incoming missionaries to the mission home is fun too. They have a bunch of crazy assumptions about Riverside and the mission. The great thing to see is the fire they have in them. They could go out and baptize a city with that energy. We just hope it stays as they go throughout their two years or 18 months.

I always like to share a message about gossip to the trainers when we are training them the day the pick up their new missionaries. A lot of people are straight out of high school so they naturally like to talk about other missionaries the same way they might have talked about people back in school. The message we share is that "gossip robs The Atonement." It does not allow people to change and in fact can be something that prevents people from changing. It brings back the past even when people have moved on. They tend to like this message a lot.

The fun part about being in a trio is we can go on TRIPS, as in triple splits. A split is when we each go with a member to get more work done, but now we can do even MORE. When we were teaching some of our investigators (actually the ones in the dog pictures below), I was on splits with a member who works at Disneyland. I told the kids he works at the happiest place on earth and asked them if they knew where that was. They promptly replied, "CHURCH!" I laughed at that and said, "well I guess it's the second happiest place on earth... Disneyland!"

At the airport, taking Elder Anderson home (he used to take people to the airport, now it's his turn to actually go home!). We did blue, black, blue ,black (for the suits) always gotta have the patterns.