First Week in Mint Canyon

Being back in the Santa Clarita valley is really crazy. It’s so much fun and it’s been a bit overwhelming as well.
Tuesday was the sad unfortunate day of transfers. It was sad seeing so many of the Spanish-speaking missionaries that came out with me leave, for my same fate lies ahead in not so much time. I met my new companions, Elders Clark and Carter and drove to our new area. Much to my dismay, I had to drive. Ugh. I wasn’t really wanting to drive again in California on my mission, but it was only for a few days. It was also the first time driving since our mission got TiWi’s (blackbox for cars to monitor driving and alert the driving that any maneuver is wrong (aggressive driving, speeding, seat belt not plugged in, etc), but as it turned out I was pretty much usually driving the speed limit while I was driving previously as it felt quite naturally. I met a goodly portion of the relief society in the evening as we were invited to a relief society taco dinner to “taco bout general conference.” A favorite subject of mine!
Wednesday, we commenced weekly planning. It quickly brought up an issue which should make the next few weeks extremely interesting. We get really side tracked together, especially during planning sessions. However, we did finish and we got out to work at a decent time. We had a bad luck streak with some of the investigators here dropping us all in one day, which also led to Elder Clark getting a cold, possibly a depression cold. But just because these investigators dropped us, it wasn’t the end of our contacting them.
Thursday, we first had an interesting lesson with a less active person. Afterwards, we had an awesome district meeting about the power and authority of our calling and another training on how to invite our investigators to attend church.
Friday, we switched up the schedule a little bit because of a few things that went weird. We were going to have personal study at the library because I am now doing MyPlan, but we didn’t realize that the libraries didn’t open until 10am, so we had companionship study at 9am and then went to the mission office to swap our car which hit the church’s mileage cap this past week out for a brand-new 2017 Toyota Corolla. It’s safe to say everybody’s been looking at our car the past few days. Anyways, we then went back to the library for personal study and stopped by a bunch of people.
Recently, President Henrie has asked all of the missionaries to have bikes so we can all be bike/car areas to be more visible to the public. Elder Carter is a visa waiter so when we were at the mission office to get our new car, he went with the mission bike office couple to get him a bike from the storage shed. Saturday, was our first day of biking, even though it came with a few, albeit funny setbacks just to get started. While biking, we found somebody who was moving and helped them get some of the heavier stuff out of their apartment. We went back to the apartment to freshen up and had the opportunity to attend a Jewish Passover ceremony/meal.
Sunday, which was Easter, was no reason to not go out and work. To my great joy, Church starts at 1pm which means we were able to go out and do some solid few hours of work prior to church, and we had several hours of visiting lots of people to remind them about the true meaning of the holiday, to reflect on the life of our Savior, Jesus Christ. It was made to my remembrance during a personal prayer I was having during the day that we normally say, “The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” He is resurrected, and because he never truly died it is all his life. We had an Easter dinner with a family in the ward and that pretty much concluded our week.

 

Elder Blodgett

California San Fernando Mission
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints