"How great is my calling!": Happy Birthday America!

Happy Birthday America!

So Canada day was so disappointing. We could barely see any fireworks from our apartment and other than that pretty much nothing happened. However, I still like it because now back home I have an excuse to shoot off fireworks nonstop from July 1-4 to celebrate my two great countries. At least July 4 will be awesome because an member from Utah invited us over "So we can be American together without offending anyone" haha! Flag cake baby :)

This is the first week in like 2 months the computers are letting me email home pictures, so I sent a few emails of pictures. ISN'T MY NEW COMPANION ADORABLE?? Haha one of the other sisters at the office for transfers was like "She's sassy, I want her!" Her name is Sister Williams and she stinking rocks. She's from Calgary, so I finally got myself a Canuk! Carrying on the tradition of every companion from a different country. I guess Calgary is also referred to as Northern Provo, since Alberta is the Utah of the great north. She was the only sister coming in this transfer so when she saw me she ran over to hug me, she was so sick of being around all Elders for 2 days.

Training is so fun, basically because I'm not training. She's got guts man, and she knows her stuff. I keep telling her she'll be training in 6 weeks and she keeps threatening to throw up if that happens. She so could though, it's been a fun week.

We're teaching someone new named Ashleagh, who is awesome! She set s date for July 22 to be baptized, she's not sure about it but she said she should know by then if it's what she wants to do and the 22nd is her lucky day so she was pumped when we challenged her to that date. We talked to her and her boyfriend on the street, and he's planning to come to church with her with week. Technically he lives in Oshawa, but we'll just steal him. We're also teaching an investigator from another area who's house sitting in Bowmanville for a few weeks. She's been meeting with missionaries for 9 months so she's fun to meet with, we read from the Book of Mormon and talk about it. I think we're going to reteach her the lessons for practice this week.

So get this- we set a goal for 65 baptisms in July and we hit 56. Awful irony huh? It was still the best month we've had in a long time, President's email talked about learning from it and how next time we'll need to raise the bar fully to hit our goals. I loved this story from his email though...

"Some years ago, it was proposed to send logs from Canada to New York, by a new method. The ingenious plan of Mr. Joggins was to bind great logs together by cables and iron girders and to tow the cargo as a raft. When the novel craft neared New York and success seemed assured, a terrible storm arose. In the fury of the tempest, the iron bands snapped like icicles and the angry waters scattered the logs far and wide. The chief of the Hydrographic Department at Washington heard of the failure of the experiment, and at once sent word to shipmasters the world over, urging them to watch carefully for these logs which he described; and to note the precise location of each in latitude and longitude and the time the observation was made. "Hundreds of captains, sailing over the waters of the earth, noted the logs, in the Atlantic Ocean, in the Mediterranean, in the South Seas-- for into all waters did these venturesome ones travel. Hundreds of reports were made, covering a period of weeks and months. These observations were then carefully collated.... and discoveries were made as to the course of ocean currents that otherwise would have been impossible. The loss of the Joggins raft was not a real failure, for it led to one of the great discoveries in modern marine geography and navigation. "Failure is one of God's educators. It is experience leading man to higher things; it is the revelation of a way, a path hitherto unknown to us. The best men in the world, those who have made the greatest real successes look back with serene happiness on their failures..... "Failure is often the turning-point, the pivot of circumstance that swings us to higher levels. ....Life is not really what comes to us, but what we get from it. "There is no honest and true work, carried along with constant and sincere purpose that ever really fails. If it sometimes seems to be wasted effort, it will prove to us a new lesson of "how" to walk; the secret of our failures will prove to us the inspiration of possible successes.” SO GOOD!

Sorry this email is so late, we've had an awesome p-day. A member took us to pick strawberries at a berry farm by the church. It was her and her 4 daughters, we got rained on for a bit but that just cleared out the farm so we could find all the big ones for ourselves. Then Sister Williams and I went out for Chinese food. She was sad because she'd been told it was so good here and it was pretty typical, albeit delicious, Chinese restaurant. I told her she probably needs to actually get in Toronto to notice a difference, and it may cost more than 6 bucks. So fun though!

That's pretty much everything....Thank you SO much for the emails, I heard from everyone in the family this week (well, if dad and mom are the same person lol), best week ever. Dad happy early retirement haha I flipped when I read that, crazy! Someone’s moving to Utah soon.... Glad everyone had a good week! Thanks for the photos! Love you!

Pictures of the week: