Called To Serve: Week Fifteen

At Breakwater

Well everyone I'm officially a greenie now. It took a long time but I made it. Ya know it's kinda nice though. They say you're not really accountable for anything as a missionary until you're not a greenie. So basically everything I do wrong or if we mess up on something it's on my companion😂😂 so that's one benefit.

Holy cow though this transfer went by fast. I'm scared to see how fast the rest of my transfers go. I can only imagine what they feel like when you've been out for like a year and a half. I made it over 3 months now so that's cool. It feels like it's been more than 3 months,, but they have also been the fastest 3 months of my life.

Well here's the news/ update on transfers...................... I'M STAYING IN ROCKLAND! yeah boiiiiiii. All I wanted was one more transfer here and my wish has been granted. I’m staying with Elder Petersen for at least 6 more weeks. Crazy thing is our zone was nearly untouched. Yesterday we all got up and sang at stake conference with the youth and President and Sister Blair were there. After practicing with the youth all of us went down and started to talk to all of our members. When we finished Elder Petersen and I went up to President Blair and started chatting with him. He literally gave us our transfer calls on the spot😂 He told us how well we were working and that this next transfer we were going to really click. So we didn't get any of the excitement from waiting for a phone call, President Blair just gave us the lowdown right then and there. After stake conference we held an impromptu meeting and he told us that when he prayed about switching our Bangor zone, the Lord basically slapped him and told him to keep it the same. So only 4 companionships from the entire zone are changing. 3 of which have to change because the Elders from them are going home. Peace out elder Sabisky✌️😭 It's crazy how some people you just have that instant friendship. He was in my zone not even my district. I only got to hang out with him probably 5 times, but we are already planning on partying after my mission. Haha no need to worry about that though. Still got a lot of work to do.

So there was a storm this week. It was quite the storm I guess you could say. It happened on Monday morning. It was raining and there were some pretty strong gusts of wind. Since leaves were on trees still and it had been raining a little bit before the storm hit, the leaves were holding a lot of water. So all of these trees became top heavy. Then these powerful gusts of wind hit and it just began uprooting all sorts of trees. It was crazy. It was the worst storm here in Maine since the ice storms of ‘98. Over 500,000 homes lost power. Ours included. So we lost power on Monday and it didn't return until Saturday. It was a pretty humbling experience. We had no water either. I really respect you foreign missionaries without running water and power out there. I was washing my clothes when the power went out and so I didn't really have much to wear either. Luckily my branch is awesome and a sister from it washed my clothes. Btw I don't know why no one has ever enlightened me, but FABRIC SOFTENER MAKES YOUR CLOTHES SMELL SO GOOD. Hot dang I can still smell my clothes today. I got like 5 compliments on how good my clothes smell. So we stayed with the Belfast Elders until Saturday. Haha President and Sister Blair separately told us on like 5 different occasions to check and clean our fridge. Luckily our fridge is all safe, and nothing went bad in it. The neighbors ran an extension cord to it and hooked it up for a few hours twice a day.

This week was crazy though. With a lot of people without power and a lot of trees everywhere we set out to go help some people. It was all fun and games until this dude had us help him lift a wheelchair into his truck. This wasn't your everyday wheelchair. This thing was like the xxwheelchair5000xx. It was honestly probably 300 pounds. After a lot of creative thinking we were able to lift it up and move it sideways into his truck.

A lot of cool experiences this week. Turns out I have 25 Catholic grandma's. We volunteer at a Catholic church. This past week we helped set up for a Christmas fair for them. There were like 25 old ladies there telling us what to do. Then they bombarded us with food and tried buying us a bunch of stuff.

I'm glad our power was out so long, because it would have made our week sooooo different and not as exciting. I'm alive though and I'm still healthy. Even if I had to survive off of Halloween candy, and the soda we had in the fridge. Good times. I can say I was part of the great windstorm of ‘17. Haha

I hope all of you had a safer week than I did and continue to do so. Byeeeeee.