Virginia WOW...

I love this place.

It was sad saying goodbye to my district. I love them all and from what I know they are all doing great and that's been good to hear!!

I got to Virginia last Tuesday and I threw up 3 times in airports... I was not having a good travel day but that's okay because when I got to Virginia we went to the mission home and these amazing senior missionaries made us a homemade meal. I was scared I was going to throw up but I ate and literally immediately felt so much better-it was the besttt.

The next day all the greenies (new missionaries) went to the church and had orientation and then after that we went to the gym and sat in random chairs. They went in alphabetical order of announcing companions. Before that I had gone up to a couple missionaries and talked to them and what's funny is we got assigned to be a trio-it was so cool!!

I'm in Hopewell Virginia, it is a small town and our ward, I mean Branch, I mean "group" has 7 active members! This was definitely a shock! I had a little phase of being sad for such few people wanting to be at church. But I decided to change that to motivation to share the gospel and act more as a representative of Christ. We are focusing on inactive members because the missionaries that were here before my trainers learned that when they get a lot of new people to come to church, they think it's bad because there are such few members so we decided we are going to work as hard as we can to reactivate the inactive members. So far this week we have done pretty well I think, we will see how it goes this next Sunday with people coming to church. 

My comps....terrible, I can't handle them! Just kidding they are some of the best people I've ever met! I had been praying for a comp that was fluent in Español. One of my comps is from El Salvador and that was an answer to my prayers. Then I also got a bonus comp that is also way good at spanish and it's helped a lot. They are both spiritually strong and its awesome.

I’ll share one of our many lessons that we had. We are teaching a members son-his name is Cristobal and he had said he wasn't ready for baptism so we are continuing to teach them. He is looking more ready so we might be asking him soon to be baptized again and I think he will want to soon so that's awesome. I got to teach him about the blessings that come from obedience and explained that I have the gift of tongues because of my obedience and service to the lord-and I obviously did all of that in Spanish and realized after even more how blessed I am to have the gift of tongues. The spirit in that lesson was sooooo strong.

Alright this is too long I know you are all bored if you even make it this far so I'll just add pictures.

Love you all!

-Elder Owens

-Elder Quinteros in his Halloween costume.

-Knocking doors.

-Random abandoned building where Elder Ruger got poison ivy a couple weeks ago and has now decided to finally go to the doctor tomorrow .

-Making phone calls to inactive members and making appointments.

-First picture with my comps.

-The beautiful Richmond Virginia temple.