What an incredible week. We got to go up north and see the wonderful city of Holbrook. But then the most important of all places was SNOWFLAKE. I love that town. Elder Matsunaga got to see the temple there for the first time and we had some BITS pizza and had breakfast with the Flakes. It was awesome.
On the way back down we made a little detour to explore a part of the mission we'd never been to. We've always heard of this Roosevelt Lake but had never seen it. So we drove off the highway for a few minutes through a neat town called Tonto Basin that the Payson Sisters cover and then got to drive along the lake. It was gorgeous. Who knew there would be such a huge body of water in Arizona? We thought we would make an adventure of it and take Highway 88 through the Superstition mountains past Canyon Lake and through Apache Junction, but they had the road closed because of some flooding. So we had to drive halfway back to Payson, but it was still way fun.
The singles ward is goin crazy right now. We're really excited about everything that is happening. Carolina is amazing. She's getting baptized this Saturday. Her family kicked her out of the house because of it, and it didn't phase her at all. She's probably the most prepared person I've worked with on the mission. We had a good experience with Doug this week, and he's supposed to be baptized this Saturday as well but he's been in California over the weekend, so we're still trying to get things figured out. Josh is working toward sthe 20th right now and he's excited for it. And Collin is opening up to us and commited for April 10th. So there's a lot of really neat things happening.
Probably the most exciting part of the week was getting a new ward-mission-leader called in the Mountain Shadows ward. We've been without one for three weeks now. Brother Doane got called on Sunday and he rocks. He already has a whole binder set-up and came up with a Ward-Mission Plan and talked about what he wants to happen. What we're really excited about is his goal to get recent converts to the temple within 90 days of their baptism. That's something that we've been struggling with big time here. It's tough to see a temple so close not be utilized. We beg and plead for the converts to have home teachers and visiting teachers assigned so that we can ask them to take them to the temple because we're not allowed to. But it just hasnt been happening and we're slowly starting to see them fall away because of it. Brother Doane is determined to change that. So we're happy with the way things are looking in the family ward as well.
I love being a missionary. We are having a lot of fun and seeing a ton of miracles.
Hope everyone else is having a great week.
Love yall
-Elder Coffman