The One With the Mosquito Bites

Me in Brother Champagne's hat!!

This has been one of the most up and down weeks so far. Not because of how high or low or got, but because of how frequently everything shifted back and forth. So many days started awful, got good during the day, then were awful again it wasn't even funny. Just as frequent were the great start to a day, then awful most of the day, then good in the evening. It's hard to keep up with everything that's happening and it's very draining. Balance is impossible to maintain. But onto the week.

Monday night we had dinner with the Champagne family. Brother
Champagne picked us up in full army gear. I took a picture wearing his
hat. It was great. After dinner we role played with their family. It's
something we have been doing with our dinner appointments. Our goal is to get people more comfortable with talking about it. We all know the
points of the restoration of the gospel, but we hardly ever speak
them. It's a really unique experience teaching the gospel for the
first time as I'm sure every missionary will agree with. But it's
really helpful.

Tuesday I went on exchange with Elder Valgardsen. He came here to
Albermarle and Elder Burkhart went to Albemarle. (That's supposed to
be funny) We had a really great day. We went to Wendy's for dinner and
then saw Sister Champagne at Snobiz afterwords for some fancy shaved
ice/ice cream concoction called a gelatti. It was tasty. Tuesday night
I also finished volume one of the Elder Galvin Mission Chronicles, or
in other words, I finished my journal.

Wednesday marked a reunion I wasn't expecting. While in Kanapolis for
our District Meeting I met Brother C from the Lenoir Ward! He
was at the church tuning the piano. The even crazier part was after
district meeting we were at the church in Albemarle syncing our area
books and he walked into he relief society room there! He was going
around and tuning a bunch of the pianos in the area. He was going to
say hi to everyone for me.

Thursday night we had some interesting experiences with the
mosquitoes. We were out visiting a less active member of the ward and
normally when we visit her we sit outside in her backyard. So we
sat outside and talked to her for only about 10 minutes because the
mosquitoes were so bad. They're normally pretty awful but this was
worse than normal. Elder Burkart got about fifty bites on one arm. I
was using this technique to be constantly brushing my hands over my
arm so none of the mosquitoes were able to bite me. It worked out
pretty well. I did get a few on my face though but nothing too bad.

Friday we planned am meeting with the other elders in the area. We
were going to talk about the fireside that were planning on doing for
our ward at the end of September. It ended up taking over an hour and
a half to start because they were teaching a Facebook lesson. The
Facebook listen clearly went on for a whole lot longer than they were
intending but we're glad that it went well. Elder Burkart and I were
basically stuck at the church waiting for the meeting to start because
we kept on getting five more minutes, five more minutes, we ended up
going to Orange Julius at one point. Delicious.

So this weekend marked episode two of poor Elder Burkharts stomach
problems. He's been having really bad stomach pains after he ate for
the past three days. It can be really hard to feel the spirit when
your stomach is making more noise that you're unable to hear yourself speak. 

We ended up calling our mission doctor and he sent us to the Walmart pharmacy.
Hooray for probiotics and Tums!

We had a miracle field Sunday. We were so blessed to see J
come to church. I've been teaching him for about the last week and a
half and he came to church this Sunday. It was amazing! He really
enjoyed it and we're teaching him at our bishops house tonight. He's
coming over for dinner and we are teaching him afterwards.

This week was pretty good I hope yours was as well.

At the top of a mountain with my district and a ward member  on P-Day

Elders Valgardsen, Burkhart and myselSend me pictures, read your scripturLove,

Read More

The One Where We Get "Illegal Hand Sanitizer" ;)

This was a really good week until Saturday but more on that later. 

We had a great Pday last week. We went to the same trampoline park we went to a couple of months ago. 

Tuesday night we taught a lady in our Ward and her son who is eight and we are preparing for baptism. She works as an overnight cleaner at a doctors office and they rotate the hand sanitizer there so frequently that they throw out so much. So what happens Is she takes the hand sanitizer they would throw it into the dumpster and keeps it for herself. She has so much of it overstock at her house that she decided to give it to us. We're not sure what we're gonna do with it but at least your hands will be clean! It's even really good hand sanitizer that the surgeons use. It's in the upside down foam canister it's amazing.

So on Saturday we have to set up for the others baptism. We filled the font for them and it was pretty interesting. We opened up the doors and there was two huge brown recluse spiders in the front. The one of the most poisonous spiders down here in the south and one bite would probably kill me. Luckily Elder Burkart is a champ, and he used to corn broom to kill the both of them. That was after we tried flushing down the font but they decided to walk on water. That's why I named one of them Peter. 

We had a bit of a miracle with a man named J this week. He was someone that we had found about a month and a half ago but it kind of been in and out of contact over the weeks. We found him again last Sunday and he started wanting to learn more again. On Tuesday we went over not expecting to have any miraculous lesson but he ended up accepting a baptismal date. We taught him a couple times this week. Unfortunately on Saturday when we went over to teach and he told us that he was too old to change churches but he did say that he was going to come to church next week and he wanted to continue to meet with us. We're not sure how well this is going to turn out in the end but hopefully he will decide to continue with it.

This was also the week of everybody dropping us. All the good people that we found last week and people that we've been working with previous to that one by one began texting or calling us or not showing up two appointments. So many people told us that they weren't going to continue learning about the gospel it was pretty sad.

Even with all the down side to this week it was still pretty good. Had a great birthday this week and we had a great district lunch. We went out to this nice restaurant had a really tasty southern cooking!

Birthday Cupcakes from my Mission Mom

DQ treat on my B-Day from Artie!

Artie, Me and Elder Burkhart

My Cake from Artie and Sister Johnson

Elder Burkhart, Me and Sister Johnson

 Lots of people wished me happy birthday and I'm grateful to all of you who did. I even had two birthday parties this week one at a dinner that we had on Thursday night with Arthur Bailey and Sister Johnson. 

Send me Pictures, read your scriptures

Love you!

Elder Galvin

Read More

The One Where We Hang Out With the President

This has been a pretty decent week. We're teaching a few more people so that's nice. We have been doing a lot of knocking on doors to try and build up our teaching pool because all of our other efforts aren't working.

Wednesday night we got a call from our mission president, President Alexander. He asked us what our plans for the next night were. We didn't have a whole lot planned but he said he wanted to come teaching with us.

We had dinner with a great family we are working with and he came afterwords to teach them with us. Then we went out with him and Brother C. We got to see and teach a couple of people. We met this one family that was
really nice. We got let into the house since they were a media referral from forever ago. The man who answered the door said we could come sit down while he went to get he lady we were trying to see. She was not interested but our mission president convinced her to listen to us. So we got to teach her. It was great. We also taught the kids of a less active family. It was a bit of an awkward situation but it turned out alright.

Friday night we were out with our High Priest Group Leader. We had an appointment set up but they weren't there when we tried to see them. Instead what happened was he took us to see his friend. He was like, hey I know someone who lives over here, let's go see him. We taught him the restoration and he accepted a return appointment with us. We
should be seeing him this Wednesday.

Sunday we gave talks in sacrament meeting. We were called at 9:45 the night before by our bishop to speak. I spoke on the Plan of Salvation. It went really well. I'll pridefully say that it was referenced twice throughout the day on Sunday and I was told by the high councillor that it was the best talk on that subject he has heard. ;) Clearly he has
never seen a general conference before but whatever. I basically just took the long lesson plan outline from preach my gospel and inserted a bunch of scriptures. I made a fun puzzle analogy too.

Today was really hectic and busy, that's why the email is so short. We had a zone activity at defy gravity which was a lot of fun.

Hope you have a great week!

Send me pictures, read your scriptures!

Elder Galvin

A Picture I took for my new Profile Picture on FB

The Police had the road shut down because they were chasing some guy in the woods!

Me and my Mission Pres!!

Selfie Time :)

Read More

The one where I have a lot of late nights

This week was very average. Not a lot happened, which for most people
is great but for us it's basically the worst thing. We did go on two
exchanges this week. They were a lot of fun. But I'm getting ahead of
myself.

Monday night was good. We went over to a family in the wards house for dinner
and they served us a pork loin. Unfortunately, two very bad
circumstances came into play. One, Elder Burkhart is allergic to pork,
two, Elder Burkhart is unable to recognize if the meat he is eating is
pork. Long story short, he had to excuse himself from our reading of
the Book of Mormon and we left with a
bottle of Pepto Bismol.  So I had to punch it
home, 80+ mph on backroads, passing semi trucks like its my day job,
just so we could make it to the church in time. There was no way he
was having round two in the passenger seat. #jesustakethewheel

Tuesday was the first of the exchanges this week. Elder Kristensen,
came with me to our area. It was great. It poured rain which put a
damper on our plans but it all worked out in the end. He felt really
bad because he called one of our investigators intending to teach a
phone lesson and set up an appointment but ended up getting dropped
instead. Oh well. Our next exchange was Thursday. This time I went
with Elder Kristensen to his area. That was a lot of fun too. We
talked late into the night.

This Friday we had a zone meeting. The wonderful Sister Champagne
brought us donuts. They were delicious. We learned so much at our zone
meeting about being consecrated. Granted it is a bit of a confusing
topic. We got told last time we had zone meeting that we are supposed
to be using our personalities. This time they told us that we have to
give up anything that makes us unique if we want to be an effective
missionary. It's weird. There are a lot of contradictory things about
missionary work. So I just do what feels right.

Love you all!
Send me pictures, read your scriptures

Elder Galvin

Me and My Mission Mom Sister Champagne at our Zone Conference

Read More