I did not expect this situation a year and a half ago, leaving the MTC in the -1 degree weather. In the January of 2023, Elder P and I both left for the airport, luggage in tow. I said my goodbye via firm handshake and boarded my plane first. Elder P then took a flight up to Seattle. Fast forward to the August of 2024, Elder P gets reassigned to San Diego. One short flight later, and we're back together! La Mesa is not ready for this unstoppable duo.
I don't think I've laughed so much on my mission. Elder P has a great desire to do God's work, I'm so grateful to be companions with him. Transfers were Wednesday morning, after which we headed back to the apartment to do some planning. This next transfer is going to be super exciting. We even got to go to New Missionary Orientation again.
Our friend, J, is entering the covenant path this next Saturday, so we've been working with him to prepare the service. Picking songs, people to pray, etc. It's gonna be a hectic week planning that out. I'm praying that everything turns out well, it's always stressful doing these. It'll be worth it, though, because he's super excited to start his new life as a disciple of Christ.
On Saturday morning, we get a message in the Zone 6 group chat. They said that the new zone action item for this transfer is called 'Saturday Sprint', where we were encouraged to invite as many people as we could to church. Each time we invite someone, we were to send a church emoji into the group chat. Immediately seeing the potential to spam everyone in the zone, we quickly set a goal to invite 100 people to church that Saturday. We started at around 10am and were out inviting people all the way until 9pm. It took a while, but the spam in the group chat was well worth it.
To invite people to church, we talked to people in the mall, texted our friends, and even rolled down our windows at stoplights to invite the people next to us to church. Needless to say, we had way too much fun inviting people closer to Jesus Christ. We ended up achieving our goal of 100 invites. To celebrate, we did the griddy in the parking lot on the way back to our car. Video is in the photo album.
One last interesting happening: while doing visits in the late afternoon yesterday, we ran into some coyotes. There's actually quite a few coyotes here in the suburbs of San Diego. Elder P and I were walking down the road to visit a few of the members in the area, and on the way we saw a dark figure step onto the road from someone's property and slink off to the other side. Having seen coyotes quite a few times from our car in the parking lots, I knew what they looked like, but had never seen one out of the car and so close. We stood there and watched the coyote disappear into the shrubbery on the other side only to watch another coyote appear to follow its brother.
At that point, we decided it would be best to play it safe and drive to our next visits up in that forest-y area. San Diego coyotes are used to humans and have no fear. I had no intention of fighting off a coyote last night.
Whelp, that's all, folks! I hope you have a great day!
-- Elder Coxson
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