For those who don't know (probably most of you), Vidor, Texas is a forest. Basically. Look it up on a map or something, you'll see. Anyway, all of these trees had some kind of council and decided that it would be hilarious to rain pollen all over the place and, in effect, punch me in the face. Last Thursday I had absolutely awful allergies, probably the worst I've ever had from pollen. I was sick and could not do very much. To make matters worse, I was on an exchange! Luckily, not very much was supposed to happen on that day, but I was still really annoyed at my uselessness. Oh well, I still did my best.
Since Thursday I have been on a slow recovery. I still wasn't able to be outside for very long on Friday or Saturday. That's where the miracle came in. Thanks to General Conference, I wasn't expected to be as active as usual. I was able to rest AND be spiritually edified. Every time I go outside I can feel the pollen slowly making my nose congested. It's wonderful. But on a positive note, I feel much better today and I still had a great weekend. Did you watch General Conference? If not, you need to go watch it! It was great! I especially liked President Nelson's talk Sunday morning. I have been working on being a nicer person and saying uplifting things, so it was an added boost of motivation.
We were able to watch the first session on Saturday with some members in our ward (they invited a bunch of us over, picture below). The rest of Saturday was watched at the Ross's. We then watched the Sunday morning session with our friend Rosemary. It was great because she's already really good friends with the Ross's. She loved the talks and when we were talking later she was super grateful we invited her to watch with us. For the Sunday afternoon session we watched at the church with a recent convert named Mitchell. After the session we started talking with him about patriarchal blessings. He is super interested and excited to talk more about it with Bishop.
That's really all I have to share. Like I said, I was sick more most of last week, so nothing super crazy happened. Well, last night we had a fantastic 1½ hour lesson with Micah where he asked all kinds of genuine questions. He admitted that his only problem with things we believe is prophets. He has a really hard time believing that man is trustworthy or righteous enough to be that close to God. We have a plan though, he will see. With the amount of genuine interest and desire we see in him, he will come to know the truth. He just needs to take his sincerity to prayer and start asking God. We look forward to meeting with him again.
Now that's all I have. Go watch General Conference if you haven't!!
-Elder Peterson
We also had Mission Leadership Council. That picture below is us on our way home. I look annoyed because I was trying to drive in Texas traffic (there are some absolutely awful drivers down here) and they wanted pictures.
