February 24, 2020 Wow, I have lots to share this week but I don't have a lot of time to write because my district is going to play soccer today and then go to the Queens Mall! So, I am going to make a list of the things that happened in an attempt to make things a bit more concise. 1- First, and probably the most exciting thing, Elder D. Todd Christofferson (a member of the Quorum of the 12 Apostles) is coming to NYC and wants to meet all the missionaries this Saturday! We have a meeting with him in the Lincoln Square chapel, which is actually inside the Manhattan temple, and I am so excited! We were told to show up a little early to get a picture with him and the whole mission, and then he will share a message with us. 2- We met a lady on the street named Maria, and had a great conversation with her where she happily agreed to come to church! On Sunday morning, the trains were down for maintenance. So what did Maria do? She walked 26 streets by herself to make it to church...

February 17, 2020 Hello everyone!! Hope you all had a great week! This week, we continued to focus a majority of our efforts on finding new people to teach. With how many people live in New York City, I am surprised at how many people do not want to talk to us! But, we were able to make some progress and some things are in the works right now to make this area overflowing with people who want to hear the gospel. We came up with a bunch of creative finding ideas, fingers crossed some of them work. First of all, we helped teach an English class at the church on Thursday, which had 4 non members there! We decided to just serve them and become their friends so that we could establish some trust, and then try to teach them the gospel another day. So, we did that, and it worked really well! The class loved us and kept asking us how to pronounce certain words in English. They had a lot of trouble saying "thirty" and "eleventh" which was kind of funny, but I am sure the...

February 10, 2020 Welp, I am not going to lie, this week was the hardest week of my entire life.  I don't even know where to begin explaining the situation we are in. First of all, long story short, we didn't have any food! My new companion, Elder Larson, is VERY intensely obedient, and did not want to go grocery shopping on transfer day just to be safe (even though we had permission to buy the things we need). So that was frustrating, and we have been eating PB&J sandwiches every day. But, we ran out of bread! Luckily my mom sent a package with some food in it, which saved us for a few days. Then we ran out of food completely, so we visited members towards the end of the week and just hoped they would share something with us (and they did!). But that is not the only reason why this week has been so hard... We realized that almost none of the people we are teaching are progressing, and they aren't willing to keep the commitments that we have invited them to do, so ...

February 3, 2020 My 12 weeks of being trained is OVER and its time for transfers! Saturday night we got a phone call that said Elder Stanford is going to Inwood (in Manhattan) to Elder Martin who was my MTC companion! What are the odds that my 2 only companions I have ever had are going to be together now, out of the 200+ missionaries in NYC! We were freaking out! I am sad to take off my training wheels and see Elder Stanford go, but I am excited to not be the "new guy" anymore and to see what the future holds for me. I also found out that I will be staying in Richmond Hill a little longer, and my new companion is Elder Larson. I have never met him before, and the only thing I know is that he has only been on his mission 6 weeks longer than I have! Stay tuned until next week to see how that goes. My whole district got switched around so I will be working with an entirely new group of people, which will be fun. At church, Kiko told me something that changed my life! He s...