Elder Carston Mark Calder

Not a lot has happened since my last email but I thought I'd send some photos.  Brother Sturgiss (our ward mission leader) let us take pictures of his epic tricked-out car, the Sturgmobile, before I left. I am honored to have been allowed to sit upon it's hallowed drivers seat.  At the Scottsdale YSA there was this cool poster with the entire Book of Mormon text on it. You can't really tell from the picture but imagine it in your mind, ots pretty cool huh? Wow...🌈😁 A sign left by the sisters who left in our apartment before. I appreciate it, it's definitely something I could use a reminder on as well.  Zone photo at our activity today. It's turns out that Arcadia Ward, our family ward, actually has a lot of my Uncle Clark and Aunt Christine's family living in it. I had no idea but they all came up to me and basically knew who I was, which was a bit surreal. What a cool coincidence though! I look forward to getting to know all of them better. Elder Baldwin and ...

Don't have a lot of time since I'm getting transferred tomorrow and I need to pack. I'm going to the Scottsdale YSA which should be interesting. I'm glad I got to meet so many kind people in Glendale, I'm definitely going to have to come back and visit some day.  There were some interesting things that happened this last week. Most significant was probably that the Mission was visited by Elder Ulisses Soares of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. We gathered together as an entire mission (usually not allowed by mission rules) and I got to see a lot of my friends, which was very nice. We also heard some good talks by Elder Soares and a few other General Authorities (our Area Seventy Elder Lithgoe, the North America Southwest Area President P. Shmutz, and Sister Runia of the Young Women's General Presidency). All the talks were very good, Elder Soares talked about developing the spiritual resilience to stay active in the church after your mission is over. Here is a...

This week I did something a little different for my personal study. We had interviews with our Mission President a couple of weeks ago and he invited me to study Moroni 7, on faith, hope and charity. I decided to buckle down and spent the entire week working my way through the chapter. I learned some interesting things as I tried to figure out what Mormon was saying. I realized what it meant to "lay hold upon every good thing" and what exactly it means to be a child of Christ. I was also struck by how merciful our Father has been in providing us with the scriptures and also with heavenly messengers to teach us about Jesus Christ, thus allowing us to learn about him and develop faith in Him, which we need in order to be saved.  One thing that confused me but that I was able to somewhat get a handle on was the difference between faith and hope, and also the relationship between them. Moroni 7:40 says that we need hope in order to "attain unto faith," and verse 42 says...

We had a very remarkable experience with our friend Melissa this last weekend. At the beginning of my time in this area, Elder Jarrett and I felt prompted to look through our expiring records (people who there has been no contact with for at least two years, who are automatically deleted by the system in order to conserve memory). We saw Melissa's record and decided to text her, not really sure why or if anything would come from it.  She ended up responding and we set up a visit. We came to learn that her husband Julius is a member (though he hadn't been to church consistently in a long time) and that she'd been learning with the missionaries on and off for over seven years. She was ready to get baptized three years ago but couldn't be because she wasn't following some of the commandments. She felt offended at being denied and had stopped learning, and missionaries hadn't really been able to get in contact with them until we came along. It turns out that the iss...