This New Area's Pretty Nice!

Dear family and friends!

This week has been fantastic! My new area is great! I'm going to love it for sure. I've met tons of new people already and have been working hard with Elder Ojala (Oh-Yaw-Luh, it's Finnish.) He's from Southern Alberta, Canada. He's been here in Mesa for a transfer now and he served another transfer and a half in Canada waiting for his visa.  He's my 8th companion and probably my last as well. He's also my second foreign companion! He's a pretty great guy who has enough pity on me to laugh at my jokes from time to time. I don't know if I've mentioned this, but I've been working on writing a 202 joke book on my mission and completed it about a month ago.  I've told a lot of jokes in the last week.

There are some super cool members and investigators we are working with or have visited. On Thursday night we went over to the Hutchinson’s. Bro. Hutchinson is not an ordained Elder but has been coming to church with his wife recently and on occasion their non-member sons come with them. It's awesome! When we went over to their house Elder Ojala mentioned he'd never seen a scorpion before.  Bro. Hutchison jumped on that and asked if we wanted to go scorpion hunting. He hauls water for a living and has tons of enormous water tanks in his back yard that they like to hide under. A lot of them are empty, so he can lift them. We only found one tiny, little baby, but we figured it was too cold for now, plus a storm was coming in so they were all seeking some higher ground. We definitely will be going by toward the end of the month when it really starts getting hot. This week wasn't bad weather wise. I don't think it ever broke 90 or so. It even rained Saturday! That was pretty cool and unexpected.

One night our dinner cancelled, so Elder Ojala decided to introduce me to a super awesome family, the Cox's, and have them feed us. At first it was kind of weird because it's a mom and two 18-year old twin daughters with no males in the home, so we ate outside.  After we had been there awhile I thought, "Oh man! These people are awesome!" Haha! I also found out that we have a couple of investigators that they've found for us that we teach in their home. One of them is a kid named Josh whose 18. It's not very apparent whether he has been learning much or been feeling the spirit, but Caitlin, one of the daughters, came up to us at church on Sunday and showed us a text from him. He really loves meeting with missionaries and said if it hadn't been for prom being last night he would have come to church.  He was just too tired and worn out. He's a socially awkward guy, so it seems hard to teach him, but I think he is a person that learns the most when it's more of a lecture setting, because when you ask him questions, he suddenly gets uncomfortable and it seems like he isn't interested. From what he says in his texts and to the girls personally though, he really likes it. At the end of our lesson on Friday he even came up to me and said he had a friend in school that said the 'F' word a lot.  He said that he always thinks to himself that guy needs some happiness and peace and that he would benefit from meeting with us. He's an interesting kid, but I'm going to love teaching him.  He'll be baptized for sure!

This area is by far the richest I have ever served in.  I thought my last area was rich.  It was probably lower-middle class and a few middle class people, this one though is almost entirely upper-middle or upper class. We have tons of millionaires that live here. It makes the work a little more challenging, but the youth are I think where we are going to target. They all have friends that they can invite to activities, which means we get to go to tons of fun activities. This week one mutual ward is getting those giant inflatable balls that you can get inside of and run around and smack into each other with.  Some of the youth said they were going to be inviting some non-member friends. It looks like our Wednesday night is going to be fun! The majority of our serious investigators are youth and children, so I think it's definitely the best place to look.

The zone I'm in is a pretty cool one too. They do some neat things that I have never seen zones do. Every Friday we get together at the stake center and have a zone lunch where everyone brings a lunch and we eat together. It's awesome! I've never done anything like that.  I love socializing with other missionaries and we don't usually get many opportunities for that, but with this we have a lot more zone unity and opportunity to make friends. We have zone sports every P-day morning.  I've done that in previous zones, but not every zone. So that's pretty fun. Then we also have a Facebook feed that we all post our new investigators into so we constantly know where we are with our goals and we also get motivation to go out and keep working to find people to teach! My zone leaders are Elders Carlsen and Karlinsey.  Elder Karlinsey was my MTC District leader and I've never served with him, so this is nice. He'll probably be transferred at the end of the transfer, but oh well! I've now served around every Elder in my MTC District that is still out, because Elder Gilbert is also my roommate.

There's so much happening here that I can't even write about all of it. The members are great and love the missionaries. They help us out a ton. The meals they serve are generally on the healthy side, and if they aren't healthy, they're delicious. Like last night, wasn't healthy but it was delicious. They had amazing meatball sliders with some great potato salad and homemade lemonade. I had like 5 sliders.

It was glorious! However, they were super greasy because they were soaked in butter, so I had pretty bad diarrhea this morning. It was pretty worth it though. Those things were incredibly delicious! Well, I hope you all have a great week! I love you all! I'll talk to you on Sunday family. I can't believe Mother's Day is already here!

Love,

Elder Mullins

Final District Pic

Elder Goeckeritz

We pranked the hermanas pretty bad

See the above picture

Elder Shirley dressed like an Arabian

A massive train table a member built

Elder Ojala dwarfs the thing!