He shared his great wisdom once again with me

I’ve officially entered into my last transfer. I'M SCARED!!!! Today was a huge day! Let us start with today and see how far I get.

Today the president gave his farewell talk... along with his wife, a senior couple and a lot of beloved fellow elders. It was a wonderful meeting and my brief explanation of what they said would not do them justice, so I will leave it to this: "It was wonderful". Lots of people came because almost everyone knows the president. But the biggest visitor for me was ex-Elder Sagripanti. That is right, my trainer and papi. It broke my heart to see him again. We all left the meeting to take a picture of all the missionaries and while waiting for the picture I saw him. After the photo I ran up and gave him a huge hug. We were able to talk for a bit and he shared his great wisdom once again with me. I know that my group and I are the oldest people in the mission (including the president) but Elder Sagripanti was just so much wiser than us. I truly felt like a child with his father again. He is well. He is dating and continuing the life the way it should be. I didn't have my camera, so I hope he sends me a photo.

To go along with this, we had interviews with the president this week. It was weird going into his office and talking to him for the last time. We always need to recite a memorized scripture, so I did Luke 2:1-18... it took on new meaning with him. He liked it a lot.

Something else to go along with that... one of the elders I trained is about to train. They will both be in my zone this transfer, so I’ll be able to see them both. Elder Mortensen is going to train. That means that in the mission they would call me a grandfather if we were to still use such language.... but seeing as we don't... don't worry about it.

Cool experience... we went to get investigators on Sunday morning. And while walking with them to the Church I saw a man stuck in the mud with his truck. It has been raining here a lot and there is a LOT of mud. I told my companion we needed to help... he looked at me, and then at his freshly shinned for Church shoes, then at the investigators, then came with me. We pushed and pushed and finally got the truck out. We didn't even really get muddy (the shoes were not shinny). But we just waved at him as we walked past and continued on our way. About 2 minutes later he pulled up next to us and gave all of us a ride to church... saving us about 1.5 miles of walking. We did a contact with him and will be sending missionaries to his home... I LOVE doing service and seeing it pay off.

One more cool experience:
We did a map system to get references from members. We draw a map and have them write all the names of the neighbors that they know. We did this with a fairly popular guy and got a lot of references. Over the past few weeks we have been slowly contacting references from him with little luck. On Friday we were contacting the last of them and had one left... it was pretty far away, and we were thinking about going to another area to work. I meditated on our options and felt we should contact the last reference. My companion thought I was crazy, but we went anyway. We clapped and out walked a lady we had seen earlier that day. She is a friend of Karina (who got baptized a little bit ago). Earlier that day she had blown us off and we thought she didn't like us... but we started chatting with her and found out how much she was suffering. We shared a brief message about The Plan of Salvation and entered into her house to read a part of The Book of Mormon. It was a really spiritual lesson. It was good to help her and see the spirit touch her. We have a return appointment tomorrow.

One cool note for my mother:
We just changed our bishop. Bishops normally change every 5-8 years around here... and in the 4 wards I’ve been in... 3 of them have changed while I’ve been in them... but that is not what I wanted to share. Bishop Monaco is our new bishop. We ate with him this last week and chatted a lot about The Lord of the Rings. He knows elvish and basically everything about The Lord of the Rings. He is also really excited work with us because he has been working with the stake for awhile and hasn’t been able to help us much. So we will be working hard with him soon.

That is about it. I guess I’ll just finish with that and tell you all how weird it is having everyone tell me that I’m going home soon. I don’t feel like it. The president today told us that we all have 6 months left. And if we focus on that we will not begin to slack off. I suspect that with the change of president I will not have 5 seconds to think about home, but we will see. I know that I should be humble though and ask for your help. So, don’t let me get trunky please.

I love you all,

Tommy

PS I’ll send pictures soon... I promise.

PPS I know what I want for my birthday. If people want to chip in so that I can buy new scriptures that would be cool. I know what I want, so I would like to pick them out... but if you want to help me buy them I would love you forever.