My Fellow Americans

Hello everyone! This is Elder Reynolds once again.

The first thing I’d like to say to you all is that Canadian patriotism is really cute. The Canadian flags everywhere, the red maple leaf on every American restaurant, the “O Canada” song taped at the back of every hymn book, it’s really adorable. I like Canada, I do, but growing up in the USA, and spending so much time in Texas of all places, I find the patriotic effort really admirable. It’s just not quite the same. Still a great country though.

The work is still happening up here in Willoughby. It’s still very difficult to find people that will even talk to us, but those we do find are often very kind, and we have some appointments set up this week.

To those of you who were not aware: for the last few years, the Canada Vancouver Mission has had a strict rule stating that missionaries could only have dinner with members if there was somebody of a different faith at the dinner. About 2 weeks ago, that rule was revoked, and our calendars have been filling up really quickly with people wanting to feed us. When I first got here, I had hoped to maybe lose some weight, but it seems that goal has become impossible. But I’m not complaining.

I had my first exchange on Friday. An exchange is where you spend a day (usually 24 hours) with a different companion. You either go to their area or they come to yours. For my exchange, I went to Brookswood, our neighboring area, with Elder Heiner. Elder Heiner looks like a blond Alan Tudyk; the resemblance is a little freaky. It was a really good learning experience, as I got to see how he talked to people and studied. He has a really long life story, but I’ll just say that the fact that he’s on a mission is a miracle.

We had a big service project on Saturday. Thanksgiving is celebrated pretty early in Canada, so we were helping out with a massive, province-wide Thanksgiving food drive, which was really successful.

Things are going great though. We just have to keep up the faith. One of my favorite quotes from our zone meeting last week was “You have to get out of your comfort zone before you can be in the miracle zone.”

-Elder Reynolds

PS. If you ever happen to come across a movie called “Small Miracles” on the Hallmark channel, I just want you to know that we tracted the houses they used for filming and got to talk with most of the film crew.