Elder Carston Mark Calder

On Tuesday we had exchanges with the Zone Leaders. Elder Johnson went over to the French branch while Elder McMullin came over to our area. Elder McMullin is a big man, maybe half an inch shorter than I am but super strong and with huge hands and feet. He's got a deep, booming voice and his shoe size is 17. He can fully fit the shoes of the other Elders inside his own (we tested it). He's from the forbidden frozen land of North Dakota. I think we made quite an impression as we were tracting around. I'm sure people were wondering that whole day what on earth the "Mormons" feed their children to make them grow like that. Elder McMullin is pretty cool, he had some good ideas on how to move the work forward in our area and different strategies and methods we could try. He's really good at street contacting and I feel like I learned a good bit from him. He's also a French-speaking missionary, which is interesting. It might be surprising to some but there is act...

Last week we were visited by Elder John Pingree Jr. of the Seventy. He and his wife did a "virtual tour" of the mission, meaning that there was one day where he met with half of the missionaries in the mission in person one day, while the rest of the missionaries watched over zoom. Then the next day it was reversed, with the missionaries who listened over zoom day 1 meeting with him in person. Instead of giving a devotional, both days Elder Pingree basically held a 3-hour discussion about various topics. The missionaries in my zone listened over zoom the first day, and due to the horrible audio quality we could barely understand anything that was said. We couldn't exactly leave or stop watching or anything, so we spent a mostly fruitless three hours crowded together around my phone, staring at a laggy screen and trying to parse out some English from the tortured audio coming out of our old speaker.  It wasn't my favorite experience, but the in-person meeting the next ...

  I was able to weed out my Elder Johnson from the crowd. I'd like to say that I felt the tug of Destiny tethering us together or that he had a special sparkle in his eye and we were just drawn to eachother from across the transfer chapel parking lot, but the truth is a little anticlimactic. I was just talking to Elder Cook and Elder Johnson came up with his companion to greet him since he was their temporary district leader for a week last transfer. Sadly there was no lineup. Maybe next transfer, when I get paired up to an Elder Smith or something.  Elder David E. Johnson is a native of Wooster, Ohio. He's the oldest of nine siblings, he enjoys programming and reading books, and he worked in IT before his mission. His family raised goats and chickens, and grew their own vegetables. He is very quiet and mild-mannered but also very obedient to mission rules. I'm sure he'll find a way to whip me into shape. (He's got his work cut out for him). Last week was transfer w...

  It's been a while since my last email. The month of September has been a little challenging, but it's the end of the transfer tomorrow and the beginning of the next. My companion Elder Christensen is leaving Friday for home, and I'll be staying where I am now. I'm getting a new companion named Elder Johnson (first name currently unknown). I've never met him and don't know anyone who has, but I'm sure we'll get along famously. I'm still the junior companion even though I'll be leading the area, so its nice to see how confident the Lord is in my competence as a missionary. It's kind of funny because I still have no real idea who my companion is going to be. This is the second time in a row that this has happened. Last transfer I was told I was going to be with an Elder Christensen and I had to ask "which one?" Because there's at least three or four of them in this mission. Now the same thing is happening with Elder Johnson. Ther...