The three jarritos - Mission Week 91

Hey buenas tardes 

So I dont think I mentioned last week that we were having transfers but...we had transfers haha. Luckily I'm staying here in Kennewick for another 6 weeks and I got another companion so we are in a Trio! The crazy part is that our new companion is Elder Peirce haha. I lived with him for 3 months when I served in Prosser and he trained E Faleumu sooo it's kinda weird. We all already know each other super well and it's been a lot of fun. Our zone got a bunch of new missionaries too which is always loads of fun 😊

Mission life is still good we are still locked down pretty much but I've realized that my experience during COVID is almost entirely dependant on my attitude so I'm doing my best to stay positive and have lots of faith. We have been doing a lot of stuff for the Facebook pages, mostly administrative stuff so it's not very interesting to talk about but I'm learning a lot. 

We've been trying to get to know our zone and stuff but they rolled us back on some of the things we are allowed to do with other missionaries so it's a little harder now. We played a little bit of ultimate frisbee with out district which was a blast. 

E Peirce likes to cook a lot so we bought a ton of good meat this week and we're gonna eat like kings haha. We also discovered that KFC started selling a half gallon bag of soda so we had to get one for the memes 

Time is flying! I've been trying to catch up on some of my journaling and it's a really long process. I hope it is worth it though, there are definitely experiences I don't want to forget from my mission. I'm sure it will be good when it's done 😂

Anyways thanks for the prayers and support as always! Les quiero y espero que tengan una semana buenísima. Nunca olviden que Dios es consciente de ustedes.

- Elder Thompson 

1. The three jarritos 

2. The KFC Half gallon 

3. The three jarritos at the temple 

Hope Drive Thru - Mission Weeks 89 & 90

Heyo I got lazy last week and didn't wanna write an email so here's a little catch up: 

The beginning of last week (2 weeks ago now) some Elder in a different zone thought he had COVID cuz he couldn't taste anything. They had recently been all together as a zone and so they made the whole zone completely quarantine till he got his test results back. We got dragged into this cuz the APs are in their zone and we live with them so we didn't leave our apartment for 5 days....yeah not fun. At all. Here's the kicker...the Elder tested negative and realized that he had eaten extremely spicy wings from Bdubs and that was why he couldn't taste anything. Sooooo dumb but it's ok we survived. We still had a lesson or two during that time. 

So we spent the 4th of July inside, but some sweet members dropped us off icecream and some barbecue supplies so we made some good burgers and watched a movie. We finished it off doing some zoom pictionary with our zone! It was actually super fun, we'll definitely do it again. 

The next week we had our first in person Mission Leadership council. Everyone was social distanced, we had masks, and we were outside so, a little....different than normal but it was cool to see everyone. We had a good talk about missionary work during the corona time. One thing I'm realizing is the missionaries right now that are struggling, they are that way because they are too focused on themselves. I won't rant about it here but that's they key haha. I hope missionaries will learn to focus on their areas more than themselves.

This week was super good! We saw a ton of awesome miracles! The first one was that Elder Faleumu put a post on a few local Facebook groups about offering free service. We got like over 500 likes and more than a hundred comments which resulted in about 40 referrals being sent around the mission. 

Another miracle was the Hope Drive-Thru. This was an event that Sister Jensen and Sister Lowe have been planning for a few weeks. Basically it was a drive through thing where people would stop at a booth and get a little message about a topic like service or family history and then we offer to come visit them later to talk about it more. Our whole zone was involved in setting it up and manning the stations. It ended up being super fun! We had more than 90 cars come. I'll include lots of pictures from it  

Another miracle we found a new person to teach. Her name is Maria and she used to talk to missionaries like 2 years ago. They helped her to stop smoking and she was super grateful for that. She's a little stubborn but I think she has some potential! 

So yeah things are good. I got my flight plans this past week and that's a major bummer but I'm surviving haha. Thanks for all the prayers! 

Les quiero, que tengan una semana súper buena!

- Elder Thompson 

1. Hope Drive Scripture Station 

2. Post hope drive snow cones 

3. Hope Drive Popsicle Station 

4. Tennis lessons in the morning with Diane! 

5. Morning Hike 

6. Hope Drive sign painting 

7. Hope Drive