Monday Dec. 5, 2016 - The One where I lead a Choir

This has been a pretty good week again here in Pineville. 

Monday night was a bit if a wired one. We got a call from the Sister missionaries in our
ward saying that they had just got off the phone with President
Alexander and Sister Stensrud was going to be emergency transferred
out of the area. They were in a trio and there was a Sister going home
so they needed to have someone replace her. It was super sad. We were
eating dinner with a member family afterwords and they stopped in to
say good bye to the member and to us. We got a picture.

Tuesday we spent half of the day in the car. We had to leave super
early in the morning to drive two hours through traffic in Charlotte
to be miles efficient and get all the way to Statesville. Elder
Merrill had a doctors appointment there since the doctor is a member
of the church he can usually get missionaries in faster than other
places. He left with two prescriptions (which have done nothing) a
shot to the head (which did nothing) and some blood work (which showed
nothing). We are working on trying to get him an MRI done.

After District a meeting in Wednesday I went on another exchange. I
went with Elder Garrett in the Providence Ward and we had a good time.
We went to a Five Guys for lunch. I haven't had that in forever and it
was really good.

The rest of the week was a blur. We did missionary stuff, had a couple
conference calls with President Alexander. I had forgotten how hectic
things get around Christmas time with meetings. It was the exact same
last year. Plus we are trying to figure out all of these exchanges we
have to go on.

We did have a super crazy busy day on Friday. We had teaching appointments
in the afternoon, a dinner, and we had to be in Catawba at 6:00 to do
baptismal interviews. Our member for dinner had asked us to help him
mount a TV so we had to go by on Saturday to help him out since we
didn't have any time. We were hoping to split up but no one could drive
us so we had to move our dinner up an hour to 4:00, eat super fast and
leave so we could fight traffic to make it there in time. We we ended
up ten minutes late anyways. But oh well. The great thing about the
interviews is out of the about a dozen I've done it seems like the way
it goes I always end up interviewing the kids and teenagers. But on
Friday I interviewed my first adult. I thought it would be a lot
different but I've role played it enough times so it wasn't. Oh well.

Saturday night was the Nativity festival in our stake. All of us
missionaries did a choir and sang a few songs. So I was put in charge
of directing it which was crazy since I've never done that before. I
spent some time this week printing off music for everyone,
highlighting their parts, making arrangements for the different songs.
It was crazy. And to top it all off, we only have 45 minutes to
practice and put it all together. By the grace of god we were able to
do it and it sounded pretty good. President and Sister Alexander were
there watching us.

Funny side story to that, so apparently I was bouncing up and down as I was
conducting so President came up to me jokingly and said that I needed
to read the missionary handbook because he's pretty sure dancing is
against the rules. He then goes around to like everyone making fun of
me. He was cracking up.

Sunday was really great. Now I don't want to sound prideful when
telling this next story but it really warmed my heart. We had
testimony Meeting at church this week obviously with it being Fast 
and Testimony meeting and little DiDi Hernandez got up there and bore 
her testimony and talked about how I was her favourite missionary of all 
time and she was grateful for all the things I taught her. Then there were 
so many people who came up and said the same thing. Linda Ladans who 
was baptized back in September was going around telling a couple of visitors 
that I was her favourite and that I was "her missionary" and how I baptized her
daughter. It was really nice. One of my goals as a missionary was to
"be someone's missionary" looks like I got it!

Overall a good week!
Send me pictures, read your scriptures,
Love you!
Elder Galvin