Good ol fashion emergency transfer

 

The last 2 weeks have been awesome!

We had an unexpected transfer this past week. A really awesome elder in our zone had to go home, so President Ashcraft had to make a few changes. Elder Checketts got sent away to Melbourne (sad because he's def one of my all time favorite comps), but we picked up a brand new missionary to take his place here in Merritt Island! His name is Elder Ahlstrom from American Fork, Utah and he's been really great so far! Training him will be a breeze. He was originally assigned to Paris, France, so our trio is quadrilingual (is that even a word??) with portuguese, spanish, french, and english.

I'm also the new district leader here and that's been pretty fun opportunity to get to know all the Elders in my district.

Before Elder Checketts left, we got to celebrate his birthday in STYLE. We threw him a surprise party, where everyone in the district came over to our place before he woke up. We took him downstairs and gave him a good ol fashion surprise. We topped it off with some birthday basketball.

There was this one really funny dinner appointment we had. It felt like the dinner party episode in The Office, where it seems like Michael and Jan are trying to make their guests as uncomfortable as possible. The dad showed us a surprisingly long video of his flag football defensive highlights from a ward Turkey bowl (keep in mind this is a man in his 50's haha). We endured a lot of other cringy homemade videos (it felt like they were observing our reactions to the videos so we had to act entertained) and some political rants. The family is really great though! They have the biggest hearts, especially for missionaries.

We had a really special Restoration lesson with the Laplants. They had us over for dinner and we gave a message afterward. Well, we were originally supposed to finish tearing out a tree from their yard so we showed up in our non-missionary clothes. Then when we got there, they were like, "Nope, you're not allowed to work today. We made you dinner, though." Haha it felt so weird to have dinner and teach a lesson in a Flamengo Brazil soccer jersey. Afterward, I told the greenie Elder Ahlstrom, "yeah so that pretty much never happens." Haha. The lesson went SO good though. 

We saw Prison Mike on a motorcycle. Will include a pic.

As a companionship we studied the talk "His Grace is Sufficient" by Brad Wilcox. That talk has some major heat in it. There are so many important principles I learned from it. 

One thing I learned is that life is practice for heaven, not a tryout. We need to learn to live God's law and follow the Gospel here on Earth so that we can keep up with Their work up there in the next life!

Lots of love

<3 Elder MacLay

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