July 22nd, 2013

Hey Family,

 

Everything here is going great!  My new area is...Bow Valley in north west Calgary.  This area is huge compared to my other areas.  The roads are also really weird as well because almost nothing is on a grid like in my old areas.  But now I'm actually serving in one ward instead of 7 wards which is a relief and the members here are super supportive over missionary work.  The apartment that we're living in was trashed though.  The past missionaries were actually killing themselves (meaning they were both going home) and the area book was a wreck, so we're trying to pick up as much as we can from when they left off, but overall we're pretty much starting from scratch.  The area is nice though but when I got here it was really weird because I'm in a city again and I haven't been in one for 9 months.  But in the end the Lord did bless me because finding investigators is a piece of cake.  We've been working closely with the one ward mission leader and one bishop and they've just been pumping out names of people for us to teach, so we expect to get some new investigators this week.   We also went to PEC this week before church and developed a ward mission plan to help the growth of the ward.  I definitely see a good future for the area.  My new companion is Elder Bennion from Arizona and he's fresh from the MTC, so I am training again.  I'm also still district leader and in my district we have a couple of Spanish speaking elders which is cool.  They cover the Spanish ward and they're a fun bunch to work with.  The Calgary temple is also really close to our area and it is a pretty nice looking temple.  I also noticed that Calgary looks like something out of a doctor Seuss story because a lot of the homes here look identical to one another.  I'll see if I can get some pictures of that for next week.  But overall I love the area.  Oh we also helped out at High River this past week and it was crazy how high the water rose.  Some water damage went almost to the roof in some houses!   But I know that this will soften the hearts of a lot of people in that area in the end.  Our area didn't get hit at all though because we're pretty high up.  Well that's about all for this week.  Hope all goes well for everything back home and can't wait to hear from you guys next week.

Love Elder Justin Gagnon