September 18, 2017

Last week when I last emailed I was in the beginning of getting into a rut. Everyone always says to humble yourself and that pride is sickness as a missionary and all this stuff about making everything about everyone else. I felt that I was doing that, and I was. However I was putting myself down by just always talking down to myself to the point where I even believed all the garbage I was saying was true. About Friday Elder Crowley could tell I wasn't normal and to be quite frank I just wasn't happy. I was convinced that not only am I a bad person but not worthy of any ones love. Then when we were talking he pointed out to me that you can still love yourself and be humble. You do it by looking at yourself through other peoples eyes. Then I pretty much instantly got out of that garbage and was like "Damn, I'm a great person". So that was the moral story of the week for me. Elder Crowley is definitely going to be on my list of top three companions. He's a crap ton of fun and we work pretty well together.

Besides finding a bunch this week we did get to do some cool stuff. We took some selfies in front of the Free Mason lodge because it's way cool. Its actually a pretty boring building but we just want to be the legendary missionaries that get to say we became free masons on our mission. It's stupid, but its a funny thing for some reason. I cut Elder Crowley's hair. It looks good, I re-wrote the front page of my white handbook to be funny. Also a member in our ward got her mission call. She got called to the most fricking crazy mission ever, it's not even on the list of missions. It's the central eurasia mission. It covers basically everything under Russia. She's going to speak russian AND she's called to specifically serve in Kazakhstan. So that's way cool. Our recent convert Gary also went to the temple so that was pretty legendary of him.

Elder Erik Orchard