July 28th, 2025 - 100th Email - Go out with a bang

 Hey

This do be being my last email

Thats pretty wild actually

So real fast lets do a quick recap of what we did this week

Monday evening we hit up a couple contacts and then ended up talking to a basher for over an hour because he lives with a friend of ours and as you can imagine that went nowhere and then the night was over so that sucked

Tuesday we met a guy named hector sitting on the side of the road while walking he was pretty cool but then ghosted us almost immediately lol

That evening we met with a recent convert family who had an uncle who isnt a member staying with them so hes chillin there and we had an epic lesson about the plan of salvation so that was pretty great

So wednesday was where things started to fall apart because we get in our car and the ac just doesnt work like at all so we're driving around for a bit hoping it cools down but it never did so we go to the church and check the hood and it turns out we were out of coolant, 8000 miles overdue for an oil change, and out of brake fluid.

(Thanks to the missionaries that rode in this thing before us)

Granted we probably couldve dealt with the oil change sooner

But hey

So we have a few lessons to hit up and then we went over to a pepboys to get the oil change and they say we have to schedule an appointment so we do it for the next day at 8 am (because we have a zone council meeting later that morning) and we just go to autozone to by coolant and brake fluid and after a little bit of finagling we figured out how to put it all in ourselves (ploeger worked on cars before)

But bruh

The ac still didnt work even after putting in the coolant

We went like a solid 4 hours without ac in that thing and its like 100 outside so we go to a lesson with a part member fam and we know one of them is a mechanic so we're like hey come check our car the ac isnt working and he goes to check it and the ac is back up and running

Classic cars...

Also going on at the same time was elder jones in our apartment was lowkey going through it not really sure what was happening and its probably personal to him but wednesday bro ended up taking the day just to hang out with the mission nurse and his companion elder walker had a service missionary whos trying to become a full time missionary (he like basically is already, its like a weird situation) and his name is elder smith so they hung out that day and elder ploeger is their district leader so he and the zone leaders too are tryna figure out what the heck is going on and also our obispo was tryna get a hold of us to do a service for a family that was moving at the same time we had a lesson scheduled so that was lowkey like

A really stressful day

So the next day we went to the oil change and our zone council meeting and then elder walker and i drove to the mission office in san bernardino (like a 20 minute drive not too bad) to see if elder jones was ok and president oligschlaeger went and got my departing interview out of the way meaning i was his first ever departing interview

So then president talked to walker and jones and on the ride back jones said unfortunately he was going to go home early and we didnt really know when because thursday was a holiday in utah (pioneer day) so it wouldnt be same day and we were lowkey all sad but it was probably for the best

Thursday was also my last exchange ever i went with elder baldwin so ploeger could go with elder hall to do a baptismal interview in their area and it was a chill exchange spent the entire day tryna plan a soccer night with the youth and we actually got like 4 people to show up which isnt like crazy but it was cool

Then friday morning we moved a washing machine to a family in the ward (well, the daughter is a recent convert the rest of the fam arent members) with the help of a member who had a nice truck and the neighbors of this family had a MASSIVE dog like im talking biggest dog ive ever seen in my life easy 4 feet tall that thing was a horse that was no dog idk what kind of dog it was they musta just released it in the last earth update ima just call it "big" for rn

And then we went to jack in the box and had to help the member we were with order cuz he dont speak english too good but i got a vanilla shake and i was pretty happy

So we get home like noonish and we learn elder jones was leaving at 2:30 and president was gonna pick him up. Luckily that was our deep cleaning time and so president didnt walk in on a completely trashed apartment because it was freshly cleaned (i swear we aint that messy but it was funny how it worked out that way)

So the rest of that day and ever since we've been a trio with elder walker covering three wards and three different languages (spanish, english, and samoan)

Saturday was lowkey really funny so we do a lot of work in elder walkers area and we got permission from the aps to go to the temple because our members were getting sealed (W) and they had a lot of nonmember family that was going to go to wait for them outside the temple and we were gonna talk to them and we pull up and theres absolutely nobody there lol so we wait a second hoping the family pulls up and a bunch of members from the ward pull up and a former missionary was there too because the couple that got sealed were her recent converts (she helped them get baptized) and i served around her, she finished back in january or something

So that was cool

But yeah we ended up just waiting out for like ten minutes until the couple came out and not gonna lie they werent thrilled their family didnt pull up either but they came to the afterparty at the church lol

There was food and lots of dancing

We had the one and only presidente luna do the DJing for the party and we had to bring all his equipment in our truck to the church but before we could go to the party we had to go to another party celebrating the birthday of one of our friends and then after the party we had to help presidente luna bring his stuff back to his house and then our friend had us go back over and say a prayer with them after we did that and so that evening was really tiring and we were exhausted lol

Sunday was exhausting too so basically since we cover 3 wards we attended 3 sacrament meetings but i didnt go to the samoan ward cuz they meet in a diff building at the same time as the spanish but we had a funny thing work out our spanish ward does sacrament second, so ploeger and walker drove to the samoan ward while i was in class hanging out with other elders in a different english ward so i could be with our friends there and walker and ploeger came back to attend the spanish sacrament meeting and i was asked by our obispo to give a final testimony and then us missionaries (including the sisters in our ward) did a cute little musical number and of course i played the piano for the song This is the Christ (from the new hymn book) and it was a lot of fun

The rest of the day was just visiting lots of people nothing too crazy

Then today was my last pday, we played ultimate frisbee and had pizza and signed journals and then we gonna do my last 3 hours of missionary work tonight after pday is over. Its crazy im already done with my mission, but even though i mostly just talk about the crazy goofy stuff that goes on i just wanted to say a quick testimony that I know this church is true, and by seeing it change the lives of everyone I teach I came to realize for myself just how much I had because I'm a part of this church. Jesus Christ paid the price for our sins and we just need to turn to Him always and he'll make us feel joy even in the most difficult of circumstances. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

I fly home on wednesday, my flights at like 6 am and i have a connection through salt lake and i get home to Florida about 4 pm. Tuesday im hanging out with all the missionaries leaving with me, we're gonna do a temple session and a big dinner so it should be a fun way to finish off.

Ok picture time lol

-ploeger fixin the car

-a member took this of our musical number

Love you guys! Regrettably this means this concludes my weekly emails, end of an era fr