ELDER LANDGREN: SHOVELING FOR CONVERTS

Honestly this week, when it comes to just straight up missionary work, it has been really hard. We haven’t had a lot of time to just go out and proselyte and we don’t have a very good teaching pool right now because all of our investigators seem to disappear to Brazil during this time of the year. We still have a couple of families we are working with that should be baptized. They just need to come to church.

So this week started off pretty good we were tracting having no luck so I said okay let’s do one more house then let’s go home. So we knocked on it and it was a Portuguese guy who let us in. He is really good at guitar and loves music, so I played him a couple of Christmas songs and If You Could High to Kolob on the guitar. He really enjoyed it. We are hopefully teaching him tomorrow, should be good. Man my guitar is super, super rusty. Mom thank you so much for that guitar CD, those are the coolest songs in the world and I promise I will learn every single one of them when I get home. Man I miss guitar. It was one of the reasons I didn’t want to serve a mission when I was younger because I was scared I was going to lose my talent. But now I have learned a completely new love for music and hymns and have even learned a couple of things about music that I don’t think I would have learned if I had stayed home. So it is a good blessing but I still miss just sitting down and jamming on my good, old guitar.

We had a zone conference that was really good and very spiritual. I think the best one President Clayton has given. It helped us learn how to better work with our members.

Then on Wednesday can’t remember what happened so ya, oh well.

Thursday we had a huge snow storm, we got like 8 inches of snow!!!  I was so happy because you know what that means? Shoveling!!!!!!  Honestly the happiest and best days of my mission have come from shoveling houses. Well it started to snow super hard so we grabbed a couple of shovels and got to work. I think we shoveled about 200 walk ways and after we shoveled a walk we would leave a “He is the Gift Card” on their door so they could see the true meaning of Christmas.  Oh man it was a blast. People would come out and ask what we were doing and we would tell them who we were and why we do this and every single person was so happy and they all were super excited about the “He is the Gift”. We had a ton of people ask for the card too while we were shoveling. All in all throughout the day people would offer us money for shoveling and we would tell them no so then they would offer us more money. By the end of the day we would have made over 300 dollars had we accepted all the money. Man I know what I’m going to do for a job when I get home. Also some lady chased me down and shoved 20 bucks into my pocket so she bought us a good lunch:).  Funny thing about that too was we also shoveled the walk way of our favorite restaurant here and after we were done shoveling he came outside and said, “my mission friends come on in, lunch is on me, thanks for shoveling my walk.” It was just a day full of miracles I’m just counting the days until the next winter storm!  I have learned how meaningful it is for people when you just do a simple act of kindness I hope when I get home I can always remember that when it snows I need to go out and shovel because that is the Christ like thing to do and plus for some reason people just throw money at you hahaha

On Friday the bishop called me and asked me to give a 15 minute talk in Portuguese on Sunday.  It went very well. It is amazing to me that I have enough vocabulary to speak for a solid 15 minutes.  It is so cool. All the Portuguese members told me that my Portuguese has gotten so much better and I didn’t say anything blasphemes this time while I was talking. It’s funny I’m the only Portuguese missionary that has ever given a talk and I have given like three.  They must really like when I say weird goofy things in Portuguese over the pulpit .

Well I love you all so much we are now even closer to Christmas. I just want it to be here. I love you all so much. Well I got nothing left. All my investigators are in Brazil and other countries being baptized so we really need to plan a trip so we can see them haha

Love your son Elder Parker Dayton Landgren

That weird Portuguese, Canadian, Spanish, slack-lining, guitar playing, runner.

Love you all

Adeus