Baling Hay and More Baby Animals

Baling hay 

My chap stick melted in the 100 degree temperatures and I clearly didn't handle it well.

My take on "Horton Hears a Who"

Elder Stephenson and I getting lost in Nice

The latest installment of Elder Ellis with cute baby animals

Hello everyone!

Well this week was pretty slow, I'm not going to lie. Elder Stephenson and I have tried to do a lot of finding but to no avail. So a little bit rough of a week but it's all good. Hope your expectations aren't too high for this letter!

Well, my new companion is Elder Stephenson, and I love this guy so much! He is from New Hampshire, and is the only boy out of five kids. He goes home in July so he doesn't much time left. We have concluded that we indeed are brothers. We are always laughing, we like to work out, we have the same interests, (he's homeschooled so he's just a little off), but I love him! He can't spell worth a dang, but I'm sure that has something to do with the homeschooling, (just kidding!) We also are both very adventurous. We bought frozen dragon fruit and made smoothies. Clearly we live on the edge.

We got a media referral named Vincent and when we went to contact him and he was surprisingly receptive. Normally media referrals aren't even remotely interested, or claim that they never requested missionaries to begin with, (which is ridiculous considering we didn't get their phone number, full name and address on accident). But Vincent was super welcoming and so was his father. His family use to live in Lehi Utah so they are very familiar with the church and missionaries. The father actually had many employees who left to serve missions. We had a very good conversation with them, but right now we feel he wants to learn more for educational purposes rather than a desire to come closer to Christ, but I'm sure that will change when he starts to read the Book of Mormon and comes to church.

So District Meeting went really well - it's really not that hard to prepare district meetings.

We have to go to Cloverdale to a chiropractor to have Elder Stephenson adjusted because of his back problems. I have no idea when that will be, but it should be sometime soon. I seem to get a lot of companions with medical problems. This, and then there was Elder Eccles of course, who is the most broken young man I have encountered while out here - ingrown toenails and insomnia for days. He was a medical disaster. But driving to Cloverdale will be wonderful and quite possibly scenic. We also have an all mission conference coming up, interviews, the Albas departure and much training, so it'll be a busy next couple of weeks.

We had a day full of service on Saturday. We helped a random family move in, and we helped a family bale hay.... It was a lot more interesting than it sounds I promise!

So since I'm a straight up mama's boy, I complied when I was asked by my mom to make a short video about serving a mission to show at girls' camp, and it was so incredibly hard! Elder Stephenson and I took a while to finally get our act together and make this video. We were struggling on not messing up and trying not to laugh for too long. Elder Stephenson and I have made a lot of videos so far, but when we are trying to make a serious video it's when we struggle greatly.

Well, not the most interesting week. Everyone in the mission has been charged to double their efforts this week. It seems the mission is kinda starting to get complacent with mediocrity. I'm not implying I haven't been guilty of this at times, but it's important to remember why we are here and to stay focused.

Love, Elder Hayden Ellis