As For Me And My House, We Will Serve The LORD!: August 5, 2015

Dear Mom and Dad,

So this has been a stressful week. Let me tell you what happened. So we cleaned up our apartment from top to bottom and stayed up late and got up early to gather records and update our area book, and we cleaned our apartment really well because no Elders would be returning there. We went to our transfer meeting and then two Elders came up to us at the end and slapped a wad of keys in our hands gave us an old crappy phone, told us we had two lesson that night and walked away. So we spent some time waiting in the mission offices so we can find out what to do with our keys and phone, and we still had no idea where we were going. So we found out that we had to personally give our phone and keys to the sisters who had already left the building so we made a trip back home and then packed our stuff into Brother Bakers' truck. We then headed over to Taylorsville UT. We found our place and opened the door to the most disgusting apartment I have seen so far on my mission. I should've taken pictures but I was so mad at the Elders who left it this way. They left so much of their crap everywhere, the place looked like it hadn't been cleaned ever, there was a thick layer of dust and nasties all over the floors and the carpet, our coffee table was broken, there was a disassembled bike in our front room that had left tons of grease stains on the carpet, I cannot even continue describing it. We had to clean for 5 hours that Tuesday and we took out 6 full garbage bags of their crap that we had to just throw away. All the white boards they had here they wrote on with permanent marker so we had to throw those things away too. Oh boy and our area book had nothing in it. we logged into our area and it was completely blank. Many of our recent converts and investigators are children, many of which did not have an address or phone number to find them. We had two people with a baptism date and we had wrong addresses for them and spent all day everyday riding our bike around and finding all these people, to which we had absolutely no success. We had nothing to go off of. I was so frustrated and still am. Our area is pretty cool, but way different than our last area. There is a major highway that runs through our area and there is a Walmart and many other stores and food places. We have a cool little river that also runs through some of our neighborhoods with cool trails and awesome scenery. There are a lot of older people here in this stake. We are managing well though and have biked so much that we know the area quite well now. We cover 6 wards and a care center branch. It is hard to keep track of all these people though. I am so glad that I got to spend my time in the 5th ward for the time when we were so concentrated in our work with only a couple wards. They are all so close to me now and I have really good relationships with them!

So today we went to a couple of stores, I got really into apple sauce lately which is kind of funny and weird. I bought a lot of those little GoGo resealable applesauces that you see babies munching on. But I am a man and still enjoy them! Anyways, moving on. I finally went to Taylors Bike Shop where I bought my bike and bought a bike pump, a new light and two thorn-proof inner tubes. I made myself a Casadilla for lunch and we are just going to chill around our apartment this Pday because we have no where to go and its raining.

It is so easy to see why Elder Dawson and I were moved here together, because this place was a mess and needs to have a fresh start. The Elders here baptized way to many kids that will never come to church, they often call them "kiddy dunks" and they make me so frustrated. way to many of the recent converts that we contacted this week told us they didn't even know why they were baptized, and didn't remember a single thing about the church, and their family is all inactive and not supporting these kids coming to church. They just have been making a lot of less actives. We have put to an end a lot of wasted time and things they used to do here. They were not very obedient and still are not. There is no accountability that comes from the missionaries of the other mission and it drives me crazy. I am so glad I was with President Swain in the West mission, its a night and day difference between the two groups of missionaries, and that is why a lot of us "West missionaries" are in the other areas now. We biked 126 km's this week. It is so much easier here though because there are not as many hills here.

This last week was hard though because of all this new stuff and people and all the responsibility we've been given, but it was a hard week because I found myself thinking of home and school and the future a lot. It seems that time slows down and things get harder the more I think on those things. While I have been here I have been guided to people and places that are formulating my future, many of which things I had not wanted before in my life which leads me to believe I could be guidance from the Holy Ghost. All these things about my future are righteous desires but are I am being pulled and guided contrary to my normal plans of action. I hope you can understand my thought process about these things, especially when I do come home because these plans may seem new to you but I have been thinking and pondering them for quite some time and asking God if they are right.

I love you all! Here are some pictures!

Love Elder Patterson

Us and Brother Baker