Canada Vancouver Mission: 3/23/15 - 5th LETTER FROM WESTBANK

Colton was able to celebrate his birthday with service and pizza...a missionary dream come true! ;-) Here's the latest and lots of photos!!!

Hey Peeps,

So...are you ready to have your concept of Canada shaken even more? Because I just got back from a kangaroo farm. Yeah. Let that one sink in! This week has been insane. So much awesomeness and craziness and...yeah...just another day in the life of a missionary! I am loving it. So, we had fun on my birthday. It didn't feel like a birthday at all, but it was amazing nonetheless. We started it off by heading up to an investigator's house. She lives with these awesome members, and so we were prepared to share a message and help out with their move, and then all of the sudden, the unthinkable happened.

The members that she lives with left the water in the downstairs washtub running and didn't think to check it for a while. Elder Boehmer and I were outside working, and then we open the front door and we just see a miniature ocean in their downstairs main hall. The Flood of Westbank has begun. As two teenage guys would do, we closed the door and walked upstairs the back way, thinking that they had it under control for some reason. As we were working on their dry wall, we asked Sister Mazey what she was doing about the flooding downstairs. Well....that was the first time she had heard anything about that. Oops.

So DEFCON 5 erupted in the house, and we were down there with a Shop-Vac and a squeegee quicker than you could say, "service opportunity!" It took a little bit to clean up, but we got it...so that was my birthday. Fighting a flood and then going out and teaching people about the gospel. It was pretty sick.

We also had a zone conference in Kelowna this week, and President Burt came up for that. It was super fun and we learned a ton. It was also catered by Subway, so that may or may not have made it the best zone conference ever. I love my mission! I met an elder who's serving in Merritt this week, because he and his companion stayed the night in our apartment before the zone conferene, and guess who he knows? Nelson Brown! Small world, eh?! So, THAT was cool. Tons of crazy stuff happened this week, but it's all happened so fast and I don't really remember a lot of it...

I had a pizza party with my district. Love those guys! Today was sweet. We headed up to Kelowna with the Rutland elders, and on the way, we stopped by a doughnut place called Dolicious...I had a maple long john with bacon on top of it. It was heavenly. We went to this super good Mediterranean deli to have some fancy sandwiches, and then we went to a kangaroo farm. Now THAT was awesome. I'll send pictures of that. I got to hold a baby kangaroo, got to pet an albino kangaroo, got to see come capybaras, got to chill with an emu. It was awesome. Buy yeah, the mission is treatin' me great. Once you figure out that missionary work is actually, like, also the funnest thing you can do, then life just explodes with awesomeness.

This week, I have truly seen how powerful prayer is.

Prayer is literally a two-way communication between us and our Father in Heaven. When we pray, sometimes it's good to imagine ourselves walking with God. Talking with Him openly, telling Him how our day has gone, asking Him questions, truly developing a personal relationship with Him. Because He is ready and willing to reach out to us. I have discovered that our prayers are the way that we indicate what kind of relationship that we want to have with God. The more often we say prayers, the more sincere they are, really determines how close we are with our Heavenly Father. What a wonderful tool that we have been given to connect with Him, and to receive guidance in this life. Because I'm sure we've all realized that life is crazy. So it's such a blessing to be able to talk to the one who knows all, right? Prayer has truly helped me so much in my life, and I know that if we truly use prayer for what it has to offer us, then we will be so much happier because of it. It's no coincidence that prayer is woven throughout the doctrine of Christ so much. To build our faith, we pray, and ask God if He's even there to start out with, then we ask if the Book of Mormon is true, if Jesus is the Christ. Prayer is a huge part of repentance: praying for a desire to change, for forgiveness, and for determination and strength to keep it up. Baptism and confirmation both are done with a special prayer, and as we pray always (Alma 37:36), we are able to endure to the end so much more.

I hope that we can all find something we can improve on in our prayers, and that we can build an even better relationship with Heavenly Father because of it. Because that's what we need. Christ died to save mankind, but He also died so that man could talk to God. Have a great week!

Sincerely,
Elder Stock

From top to bottom, left ot right: Elder Heiner, Elder Eschrich, me and Elder Boehmer. #kelowna