Zone Activity was Golf at a Mansion

This email if fairly long, so if you don't like these sorta emails, you should probably just delete it.

I think I have mention it before but Redlands is very affluent, to my knowledge there is two mansions that are owned by organizations, that host events, we do service at both. Kimberly Crest and Burrage mansion, are super nice, we did golf at the burrage mansion, they have more land, and on it is a three chipping and putting greens. They were thanking us for all the service we do there. We also played wiffle ball which was loads of fun.

On the topic of service we also did homeless count for the county, where we woke up SUPER (read annoyingly) early and went and got assigned an area and we went walked around for an hour and a half and counted two homeless people. But at least they had tasty donuts when we got back.

We had multiple awesome lessons with L this week, like 5, and she has learned all she needs to get baptized. We are just going to review and read the Book of Mormon from here till the 10th. She is so excited to learn more about the church as well as meet new people. We had stake conference and so she was able to meet the stake president and she was so happy. However when we were going over temples and family history she was concerned that we baptized dead bodies. Thankfully she had a very confused/concerned look on her face so we asked her what was up.

The flu continues to run rampant, we have stayed away so far.

We had dinner with the Griers, and dinner started out with, Brother G grumbling about having to deal with his wife and daughter, and Sister G yelled WELCOME BACK TO DINNER AT THE G's! They are awesome.

I have a new favorite line from a hymn, in 106 "God Speed the Right" it says "if we fail we fail with glory" and I thought that that was hilarious.

But another thing I learned at district meeting besides that was we (the royal one) need to bear (or bare) as it turns out, our testimony as often as we can.

With a couple we are teaching, the dude is super knowledgeable, so we were teaching about the plan of salvation and he says, "I know a little bit about the Millenium, can you tell me more?" and we were like, "how in the world did you hear about that?" so we hit the basics and scooted on along. But it was good to talk about the Plan of Salvation because it definitely gives us a road map and a sense of purpose here in this life.

Also he said he wanted to be baptized in moving water, which would be sweet, but we will see whether that happens.

Friday we felt like real missionaries because we managed to schedule 5 lessons in one day, which meant we were biking all over town all day. Only two fell through so we were pretty blessed. Also all of the lessons we did have were super cool, one we talked about what in the world is a prophet and what in the world is an apostasty. The guy had lots of personal beliefs, but not too much backed up by scripture, so it was interesting talking with him. Another lesson was with a less active, we brought his home teacher, and it turns out that they grew up in the same area with the same corwnd just at different times, so 30 minutes of the lesson was them saying, you remember so and so? and the other would be like NO WAY.  it was like watching a tennis match.

We also had a lesson that tested our ability to leave the plans, becasue we oringinally thought we were teaching the Plan of Salvation to some guys in there late 20's but none of them were there so we ended up teaching it to their kids which was a bit different and we had to simplify on the fly and it turned out pretty well.

We also had kumquats which are extremely weird.

I will finish with a miracle, were outside a house looking at our area book to see where to go next and I was fiddling with my ctr ring and it dropped and bounced straight into some ivy ground cover sorta stuff, and so we looked for ten minutes and were able to find it. In the dark. 

Thats a week in Redlands, have a great day!

-Elder Bearman

the sunsets here are spectacular

L remains excited for her baptism, no joke

things here grow like crazy

Lots of pretty nature, enjoy!