Monday, July 13, 2015

NOTE: 3 NEW PICTURES! CLICK ON THE PICTURES TO THE RIGHT TO VIEW THE PICTURE ALBUM.

Hello everyone!

Sorry I didn't write last week, it was a busy week, it was also transfers, and they wanted me to play a special musical number that they told me about five days before I need to play, so I have lots of practice before me.

These last couple weeks have been quite interesting. I have had many unique events happened. Besides the MTC, this is the first time in my mission that I'm no longer in a trio. I was with Elder Riggs for three weeks as well as Elder Burr but now Elder Riggs is home after completing his mission. It is now up to Elder Burr and myself to take care of the valley of the sun.

So the work has been extremely successful lately, and our mission president has been really pushing us to change. It is come to the point where he wants us to report every single day, via text, about what we did that day. During the last few weeks our numbers did go down, but we are coming back now, and having several lessons and contacting many, many, many, many people. Unfortunately, we are still not having a ton of success.

To make things worse…my previous bishop got a Windows Surface Pro and made a point of telling me about it. I am so totally jealous.

A Couple weeks ago we logged over 10 hours of service during the week, which is an incredibly, insanely large amount. But, it was so enjoyable, it was nice to meet all those people to be able to serve them, the only damper was the 115° weather.

One of the spiritual highlights that happened recently, was the opportunity for my companion and I to go to what is known as The Randolph Center. This is a center in Tucson that is a shelter/care facility/training center for the mentally and physically handicapped. We were all assigned one person to take care of/entertain for the time that we were there.

It was church for the patients, but they called a primary because all of them were primary children who are under the age of accountability. It's quite interesting doctrine.

I was assigned with the patient called Maria, who herself his deaf. She simply went up to the stage, put her hands on the piano, and felt the vibrations for the majority of the time. I didn't really get to communicate with her too much in the traditional way.

I noticed what special spirits each and every one of them have. Some of them you almost can't tell through all of the equipment, handicaps, and inability to communicate, but you can always tell that they're there. You can always tell that they are a child of God and that they know who you are, however limited they may be physically.

Other than that, Elder Burr and I are having a wonderful time together. We're rocking the valley (we're rocking the valley because that's the only thing that deaf people can feel)

Some other interesting news: our zone was just combined with another zone causing the number of districts to rise from 2 to 4, one of those districts being incredibly large. Our zone meetings have just doubled in length and size and several of the companionships became hybrid language companionship's because the other zone was a Spanish zone so now we have several companionships that are one Elder English and the other Spanish. I don't know how that quite works out, but it's quite fun.

I look forward to hearing from you all and have a wonderful week!

Elder Sands

PICS: Craziest cactus I’ve seen yet and Elders Burr and Grenko squeezing into one of Elder Riggs pants he left behind