The Ballad of Our Car

Bonjour à tous!

As an English missionary I feel slightly left out at all the random

bilinguality (not a word. Should be though) of missionary letters. So

y'all get a French salutation today!

This week ended up being a pretty slow week overall (partially due to

people being out of town, partially due to us getting dogged a lot,

and partially due to something I'll talk about later on), though there

were still many good things that happened, one of which was yesterday!

We got to visit with the Hydes yesterday with our Ward mission leader,

Brother Heath and taught them the Plan of Salvation. The lesson went

super well and Sister Hyde had a ton of questions (though you could

tell that she is struggling with a lot of the ideas that she hadn't

heard about before (such as the kingdoms of glory)) so we left her

with a bunch of scriptures to read from all of the standard works and

promised to answer any questions she had when we came back. I am so

grateful for the knowledge that we have received about our Heavenly

Father's plan for our eternal happiness and salvation and the great co

fort I receive from that knowledge and know that Sister Hyde and all

else who will receive the message can receive that comfort as well!

Another highlight of the week is that the Groves returned from Utah

and have talked about baptism with their grandfather, who told them

that he will be able to make it down here whenever as long as they

give him a week's notice (which, since we will be setting the date on

Wednesday when we see them next, he will have much more than a week's

notice!). Both of the Grove children are SUPER excited to be able to

be baptized in the next few weeks! I just hope I will be in the area

to witness it (transfer calls come go out this week and I have no idea

what will happen to me (since I've been here before for almost 4

months)). Though time will tell! Regardless, I'm very excited for both

them and Jaelyn as well!

Now for the story of the 54 hour tire swap: so a week or so ago during

zone conference, the mission vehicle coordinator, Elder Thompson, told

me that they are planning on selling the WP2 car in October when the

new batch of cars gets in and in order to prepare the car for sale, I

needed to take the car in to get new tires (usually a two or three

hour thing at most) so on Saturday at about 8:30 AM, we decided to do

just that and took our car to the shop to get said tires replaced.

Long story short, due to miscommunication, lack of communication, and

general frustration for all involved, we literally just got our car

back about an hour and a half ago. All I will say about the whole mess

is that serving in the largest English area in the mission without a

car does not result in a fun or very productive time... Thank goodness

for the amazing members in this Ward and our roommates being willing

to taxi us around for a few days, otherwise life wouldn't have been

fun at all! And that, my dear friends, is the Ballad of Our Car!

I love you all! Have a fantastic week! More updates on the Groves,

Jaelyn, and the Hydes along with whatever other adventures I embark

on, next week!

Sincerely,

Elder Sam Williams

Washington DC North Mission

11700 Falls Road

Potomac, MD, 20854       (I really need to get an auto-fill for that footer...)