Happy Thanksgiving!

Dear family and friends,

First off, I just wanted to wish you all a happy Canadian Thanksgiving! I'm looking forward to eating turkey tonight with a family in the ward. It's been a great week in Ottawa! It's starting to get quite chilly... I've already started making some purchases for the Winter season. While I'm excited now, I'm sure I will soon be wondering why I was ever excited ha. The leaves are amazing in Canada this time of year. They turn extremely bright red. I'll try to remember to take some pictures to send.

This week we went on splits with the zone leaders. I stayed in Fallowfield and Elder Talbot came in for the day. We had a lot of knocking that day so I learned a lot from him. We also taught a less active guy in the ward who always talks trash on America. On Thursday we taught Zoe who is the daughter of a former investigator. We found out that she had been telling some of her friends that she had been reading the Book of Mormon, and "liked" mormon.org on Facebook. Hopefully she's able to keep reading and feeling the spirit.

While we were doing our weekly planning on Friday, Elder Rasmussen and I decided that we were going to commit our 9 year old investigator, Isaac, to baptism. His parents are members and were less active when he was 8 so we've been teaching him. He accepted the date and will be baptized on the 20th of October. There are a lot of areas in Ottawa with investigators being baptized that day so it will be a good day for the zone. Friday night we had a dinner appointment at the home of James Reece who is preparing to go on a mission. He lives with his non-member uncle who is a funny character, and we were excited that he was ok with us coming over. James also invited his friend Marco who we've been teaching. It was a great dinner, and we shared a message about helping others. I think that everyone who was there enjoyed feeling the spirit in the room.

Saturday was conference, and with it the awesome announcement of the new missionary age! I assume a lot of people are reconsidering future plans. I was feeling disappointed that we didn't have any investigators with us at the Saturday morning session when Russell M. Nelson spoke directly to investigators, frequently repeating: "Ask the missionaries, they can help you". I felt like we had missed a huge opportunity, but after the session ended we got a text from Queen, our investigator from Naimibia, and she had been watching at one of the members' home! It's so great when members extend a helping hand without being asked. Queen loved the conference sessions (she watched both on Saturday). Afterwards, as the members were giving her a ride home, they asked her if she had any questions about anything, to which she replied: "I think I'll ask the missionaries". Haha she's awesome. We're planning on committing her to baptism soon.

The rest of the sessions, of course were amazing. Just one short line that stuck out to me from President Uchtdorf's talk in priesthood session:

"Constantly increase in righteousness!"

I think we can all apply this in our lives. Improvement is a process that is accelerated with consistency.

This morning we had zone study and interviews with President and Sister Cannon, so P-day got pushed back to tomorrow, but today we're doing e-mails since we won't have access to the computers tomorrow, so it's all just confusing haha.

I hope everything back home is going well!

Sincerely,

Elder Oxborrow