Hello all! Welcome back to this week's episode of skip through all the writing of the email and just view Jacob's weird pictures! Lowkey if that's what you've been doing, respect because I understand my emails can be a little long and weird. I'm glad to entertain all of you in any way possible so no shame if you want to scroll to the bottom and get right to the good stuff. Ju befte mire.
Okay, let's start of with some little quick updates. This week was a good one but I've definitely had better. This was the last full week of the transfer, and I kinda realized that I'd been falling into some less helpful routines and that bothered me a bunch haha. BUT, I've set some new goals now and so far, all is going great with those. I'm very optimistic that I'll be able to turn a new corner and have a great next transfer. Speaking of which, I'm not really sure you could even call this transfer a transfer, because only a few people moved at all. We still have our power district so we are hyped about that. It just means that next transfer, when the new missionaries get here, is going to be absolutely massive. That will definitely be fun to see. Odds are, I'll be staying in Gjirokastër though to lead the area, and from what President has been telling us, it is fairly likely that I'll be training... Definitely don't feel ready for that but I've got another transfer to learn all I can I suppose! Updates to come on that.
Being the district leader so far has also been so awesome. It's been giving me so much more opportunity to connect with the missionaries in the district and I love that. Everyone down here is hype and I'm so grateful. I'm learning a ton from it too which I'd say is also a bonus.
Story time! After district counsel on Thursday, we were looking at possible spots for baptism near Gjirokastër for our friends that are *hopefully* getting baptized next weekend! The level on the rivers has changed a lot since the last baptism so we kinda had to start from scratch. Anyways, we looked for a while and didn't have much luck, so we decided to head out. We get back to the car, only to realize that I had dropped the key somewhere while we were walking along the river. We start looking for it, and 10 minutes later after having no luck, we decided to say a prayer for guidance and help. We started the search again, and this guy wanders over and, in classic Albanian fashion, is super friendly and asks us how we are and what we're doing. We told him we were great but we'd lost our keys and so we were looking for them. This guy, being the legend he is, puts down all his fishing stuff and starts helping us look. The search continued, and it began to get dark and I began to feel quite frustrated with myself. After wandering back and forth over all of the area we walked several times, we ended up back up by the car with this guy and just started talking to him. He's an awesome guy and he ended up telling us he was Christian. We talked for a while more, and then resumed our search. After just a second of looking, we asked our man if we could say a prayer together for help from God to find these keys before it got dark. Without much hesitation at all, this guy starts offering a great prayer for us. Less than 5 minutes after that prayer, our homeboy comes running over to us with a grin on his face holding up our keys. :) It was quite the miracle for us and a good reminder that God works in mysterious ways. The keys were found in a place we had searched several times at that point. If I hadn't had been so careless and lost the keys, we wouldn't have met this guy. He asked for our facebooks so hopefully we can meet again one day. I was very humbled and grateful after this experience because it was a prime example of how the Lord turns our weakness into strength. Our mistakes and shortcomings may be exactly what the Lord needs to get his work moving.
That was definitely the most exciting moment of the week, but we also had a bomb P-Day near Vlorë with our whole district and Lushnjë at the beach! We partied and had a picnic sort of thing which was super fun. There was lots of spikeball and Frisbee and this other dank game (with a strange name that I cannot remember) that Elder Esquivel taught us. I got quite sunburned which means it was a good time. We also built a sand castle/mountain thing which was dank! Love the missionaries here.
Peace out fam! Good luck wherever you're at and keep me posted on how you're doing! I miss you all!
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