Why do goodbyes have to be so hard?! I'll come back for you, Ogopogo..... ;-)
Beautiful Okanagan Lake and West Kelowna!
Leaving West Kelowna. Bittersweet moments...
Kelowna Zone Leaders. These guys rock!!!
Lee Counsell...recent convert in Westbank...and his dog, King Pedro Chico Yoda
Me and Elder Boehmer with Pedro at Lee's house. Memories!!!
Bishop Wellington. What a boss!!!
Some members from the West Kelowna Ward. They're fun!
Ogie come back!!!!!
Me and my MTC companion, Elder Ricks! We met up in Richmond because he's a zone leader, too! Sons of Mosiah moment.
Hey, Elder Stock here...How are you doing?! Sick! Good to hear. Love it. Anyways...this week has been amazing, disorienting, mind-blowing, and just flat out fun as usual. Burnaby is crazy! It's weird for me, going from small, laid-back and rural areas like Duncan and West Kelowna, to now all of a sudden I am thrown into the big city, in a suburb city of Vancouver! Needless to say, we are on transit. Buses, skytrains, the whole lot. But, as zone leaders, we do have a car. And it is a sleek, red 2015 Subaru Legacy with a touch screen dashboard panel! That's how it's done! We use is sparingly, but we do need it sometimes in the work. Also, another cool perk of being a zone leader, and being one in the lower mainland and being so close to mission headquarters, is that we get mail every week instead of every month!
My companion, Elder Spencer, is hilarious! He's from Zimbabwe, and so he has a cool international perspective on things. And now I'm in a super multicultural city, so needless to say my Arizona white-boy perspective on the world has been drastically changed already! Which is a good thing. I mean, when your knowledge of Japanese culture comes from the Godzilla franchise, and your knowledge of the city of Dubai comes from Mission Impossible, it doesn't hurt to actually start getting to know stuff... But yeah, it's been super fun! I love how much street contacting we can do here. I can literally just walk out of my basement suite, walk down to the main road, and boom! There's people. In my last areas, this was a little harder to do... I'm still in the honeymoon phase of Burnaby and the whole transit system. When I go on the skytrain, I feel like I'm on a rolleroaster, so I'm way too excited and as a result start talking to everybody haha. That's good, though, so I'm down!
Also, there's this mall here called Metropolis, and it is literally a small city indoors...it has it's own skytrain station, for Pete's sake! So I love contacting in there when it's raining... But do you all want to hear a tender mercy of the Lord?! So, I'm walking with Elder Spencer, talking to some filipino guy named Kenneth, and I look over and just flip out because right there at the outside edge of the mall is a CHIPOTLE!!!!!!!!!!! (Colton's mom here......too many of his tender mercies are food related!) Yeah, a member in Burnaby Ward owns, like, the only Chipotle in Canada. (I just checked on their website and saw one in Burnaby, BC and one in Vancouver, BC) And it's in my area, I am so going there today or this week or everyday, or yeah....what a miracle. ;-)
The ward is nice, too. Lots of young families who work in the animation industry! Boo-ya! And plus, tons of movies are filmed in Burnaby. Elder Spencer was telling me how Godzilla was filmed here. Yeah, it's officially the promised land. ;-) Also, there's a Brother Johnston up here from Tempe, AZ, that looks just like the Johnston's in the Islands Ward...so...someone investigate that...he's probably related. ;-) I asked him, but haven't gotten a straight answer yet...
My zone is awesome! The elders here are amazing and the work is progressing. I am a zone leader over this Korean-speaking tri, and they're hilarious. Two of them are Korean, and then there's a Utahan thrown in there. He's still grappling with the language, but hey...so would I! General Conference was such a cool experience here. We had so many language translations going off around the building for the different branches, and then in between sessions, each branch had a different potluck with food from their respective cultures, and so we basically had, like, a world tour of food. Lots of sushi, some Mexican food, etc. It was sick! I am loving it here. Oh, and cool miracle: I was on the bus with Elder Spencer, coming home from the mall, and I look over at the guy next to me. He's huddled up against the window, on this familiar looking website...mormon.org! he had been on his Facebook stream, and his friend had posted the "Because He Lives" video. So this guy watches it, right, on the bus. He's super touched by it, and then looks over at me. I'm like, "Man! That's the video I've been sharing with people today! Nobody watched it but you! That is sick! How'd you like it?" Turns out, he only speaks Spanish. Boom. Brain files: Spanish curriculum. Arizona schooling. Dust. Cobwebs. Nothing. Wish I'd studied harder... But I managed to kind of have a small conversation with him in the broken Spanish I knew, which he laughed at. Then I got his number and names, and we're handing him off to the Vancouver Spanish Elders! Isn't that amazing?! Seriously, missionary opportunities are out there. One of them was handed to me because someone was cool enough to share the "Because He Lives" video on Facebook. So share it, people! It is literally changing lives!!! I love you all. Have an amazing week.
Sincerely,
Elder Stock
Elder Spencer in the flesh
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