Monday, July 25, 2011

A Busy Week in Billings

Hello Everyone,

Greeting from sunny Billings, Montana! What a week it's been. First off the 10 hour transfer van ride from Kalispell, to Helena, to Butte, to Bozeman, and finally arriving in Billings Tuesday around 6. It's a pretty neat thing to be around so many missionaries. There are two zones in Billings which mean a lot of missionaries around. It was a surreal feeling pulling up to the mission home on Tuesday. I have only been here for about 24 hours before and havn't been back since a year and a half ago. It sure does feel good to be back though. Wed. I was able to go to the greeny breakfast that they have for all the missionaries in the Billings area and the new missionaries. It was a lot of fun to see Elder Hineman and Elder Whitlock again! I also had the privilege of being able to go to the testimony meeting Wednesday night for the missionaries that were leaving. It was a very spiritual and sad experience. Elders Catron,Weight, and Sargent are all Elders I've been around quite a bit and have been my leaders and example in a lot of ways. This group was just a great group and really tough to say goodbye to. So those were two big highlights of being in Billings and in the mission home. Another big advantage has to be being around President more. It's just great to work with him and also it's great to be working around lunch time and have him stick his head in and ask if we've eaten yet. The answer almost always has been nope so he invites us over for some left overs and we get to eat lunch and talk with him! It's also great to be in the office with the Karlinseys and Ives who are the two office couples.

So my new companion is Elder Garcia from St. George. He's been out a transfer longer than me. We live with a really nice older couple in their basement. It's a great place to live. We've been in the office a lot this week preparing for leadership meeting this week but we were still able to get out and teach a good amount. Elder Garcia wants to find more of a balance this transfer than they did last transfer. We make sure we are always out of the office by 4ish so that we can get some good work done in the evening. Like I said this week we were in the office a lot more than usual getting ready for our leadership meetings this week. Tues we travel up to Helena for the west half of the mission and Wed. we are here in Billings for the east half. We will drive up to Helena and back all in the same day. We have a really great presentation we have been working on. It's focusing on fine tuning our online work to make it better.

We cover the Blue Creek and Central Wards. They both go to different buildings so it's a little different to go to half of Central and then drive over to Blue Creek for their meetings. So far I'm enjoying being in these wards. Already seem like there are a lot of neat people here.

Some of my other responsibilities as an online assistant include monitoring the online activity, collecting online numbers, making presentations at leadership and zone conferences which means I'll be traveling a bit to four different combined zone conferences. We also help out with any other training for new online missionaries and the leadership of the mission. I'm learning a lot but I feel like I'm picking up on everything pretty quick.

I got the BYU shirt from Gma G. Thank you for sending that to me! As far as mail and what address to send it to send it to the mission home addresss 1848 Rimrock Rd. Billings,MT 59102 . It's just the easiest one to send stuff to me at. I get it quicker too because I'm here at the mission home in the mornings.

Well I better get going. I hope that helps everyone see some of the things going on with my new responsibilities. If there are any more questions please ask. My brain is kind of fried right now so we are going to go shop and play some basketball. I hope everyone has a good week. Talk to you all later.

-Elder Davis

P.S. Also one last cool story we street contacted a sweet black guy playing bball at a park the other day. We asked him if we could play PIG with him and he said sure. We played and talked to him. He had played high school ball in Minnesota and college ball at a small college in MT. I had the lead on him PI to nothing. I was hitting some deep shots and doing pretty good. But then he came back and beat me. The only chance I had to beat a black guy at bball and I blew it! hahaha!