Elder Macfarlane's Wonderful Washington Adventures: The Gallon Challenge/ RIP Kingston

September 14, 2020

Hey friends and family!

I'm having a blast serving the Lord here in Washington and hope everyone's doing good and staying safe!

I didn't get a chance to write my weekly email last week, so this weeks might be a little longer ;) haha

Soooo last week was transfers and it was a little sad. Me and my comp (Elder Wilson) are both staying in our area which is awesome, but one of the elders we live with left us. Elder Waddoups was really cool. On his last day in the area, we went to The Grub Hut, which is apparently this super good burger place. My relatives that live in Washington (the Morleys) said you NEED to go there at some point. The burgers were amazing. Elder Waddoups had never gone before, so that's why we went. We also went to Sluys Bakery that day. It's this pretty small bakery in downtown poulsbo, but the pastries are wayyyy good. I had two viking cups, which are basically just cinnamon rolls with a crap ton of cream cheese. They were super messy but super good. That was Elder Waddoups final requests before heading out

that day was 10/10 haha

After Elder Waddoups left, we got a new guy in the apartment named Elder Bailey. It was definitely an adjustment at first because Elder Waddoups and Elder Bailey have like opposite personalities. He's super cool though and it's been fun having a little bit of change. I usually don't like change. All three of the guys I live with are all from Utah now which is pretty funny. Elder Bailey got me into running a little bit and now we run twice a week in the mornings. I still don't love running but it helps me stay in shape and it feels good to get outside. We ran three miles the first day and it was a STRUGGLE. It reminded me of my soccer days with coach Dustman haha. We stay inside alot throughout the day, so it's nice to do something outside.

Elder Wilson and I did some service and the Millers last week. They are this super awesome old couple and we helped mow there lawn. They were so funny! Brother Miller started talking to me about politics and I just kinda sat back and listened. He was speaking facts, but I'm pretty sure missionaries aren't suppose to get into that too much haha. We couldn't stay there for very long, so they gave us sandwiches to go, which was also really nice. Me and Elder Wilson haven't been doing a whole ton of service this week because we've actually had people to teach!

We've been teaching Kaylie and Lou a lot recently and they are both doing well. They both have a lot of questions and my companion and I try are best to answer all of them. Its fun to finally be able to connect and teach nonmembers. I think thats one thing that has been hard is being inside a lot and not having personal interactions.

One thing that happened last week was the fire alarm in our apartment went off! At like 8 in the morning!! The maintenance people were apparently just testing to make sure they worked, but it caught us all off guard haha. It would go off like every 30 seconds! It went on for a solid half hour until we decided to just go over to the church (cause we were all in the middle of personal study). Its hard to understand the scriptures sometimes... but its WAY harder to understand them when you have an alarm going off 24/7

The weather has been a little different this past week. There apparently have been a lot of fires in Oregon and parts of Washington, so there has been a lot of smoke in the air. It's not super bad or anything, but I kinda miss the blue sky a little. Our health person has told us not to do heavy amounts of exercise outside, just to be safe. I'm sure it's not super healthy to breath in a bunch of that smoke.

Me, Elder Wilson, and Elder Bailey started the Gallon Challenge this week. It's a challenge we made up where we all drink a gallon of water and if we don't we have to do 100 pushups by the end of the day. I'm almost positive I can't do that many pushups, so I'm just gonna stick with drinking the water haha. We all use 1 gallon milk jugs and it's pretty funny. I don't know how long we'll keep it up we have a tally and everything. I definitely don't drink enough throughout the day, so that why I agreed to do it :)

BIG NEWS: Me and my companion were serving in the kingston ward, but we had the boundaries changed yesterday! The four of us were all expecting that Kingston would get some more people... and that's about it. Welllllll that didn't happen. They straight up got rid of the kingston ward entirely!! We were all shocked. The neighboring wards basically just split up the Kingston ward in half. President Metts called us up afterwards and told us what was gonna happen with me and Elder Wilson. I was worried that we were gonna be emergency transferred to a different area, but luckily that didn't happen. We are just combining with the Elders we are living with. BUT we aren't technically a quad cause we have two cars haha. We are now serving in the poulsbo second ward. It was kinda sad cause we lost a lot of cool members to the other ward. We also lost both the people we were teaching! (Kaylie and Lou) We didn't lose them, we just have to give them to the other Elders