Tan Man

*Just a little bit of information-a man from Shad's ward (Brother Cook) that he is serving in, emailed us and told us thank you for raising such a wonderful young man and sharing him with them in the San Jose mission.  He also told us that he's a hard worker and healthy and has a great sense of humor.  Apparently, they let the missionaries take oranges off their tree.  They also feed them and try to help the missionaries the best they can.  He mentioned that it's a new way of doing missionary work and they are trying to get use to the new way and help the missionaries.  It was great to get this email and we were pleased to hear that Shad is doing well.

Dear Family,

It's pretty crazy that I've been out over 2 months.  It feels longer than that-time flies by so slowly-haha.  Ya Brother Cook is a really cool guy.  He has an orange and lemon tree so he has so much that we take some and eat it.  He taught us how to make lemonade with the lemons and it's really good!  That stinks that the weather there is so yucky, because the weather here has been nice, but really hot.  I got a hair cut by a Tongan Elder and I had a bad tan line from my hair.  It was ridiculous.  It's really sunny here so I am really tan with a super farmer's tan.   :)  On Saturday we did 10 hours of straight service and then the next day was fast Sunday and so I was super hungry and super tired and sore.  It wasn't that great of a day and I was kinda grumpy.  :/  Hopefully, my body can recover.  It sounds like June will be pretty crazy, but good.  Something really cool happened on Thursday.  We went to go teach a less active member of the ward, but we didn't feel like the lesson we were going to teach her was right, so we prayed on what to teach her and got a prompting to look over our notes from General Conference.  We picked out Elder Uchtdorf's talk about God's hope and light.  We went with the bishop to her house and gave her the lesson(talk).  The whole time we were there, the Spirit was so strong and after we were done, she said she really needed that since she is going through a hard time.  It was such  a cool awesome lesson we had with her.  I loved it!  On Saturday, we got to go up to the temple and do a session and Brother Paulson took us up, but we missed the session we were planning on going to, so we  went to the visitors center and watched a movie about the saints settling the bay area in California.  It was pretty cool.  The Oakland temple is really beautiful and you can barely see the Golden Gate Bridge from there.  It was pretty cool.  Anyway, hope all is going well.  Love Ya!

Elder Whaley

Shad and Elders at the Oakland Temple

Elder Vance, Brother Paulson, and Elder Whaley
at the Oakland temple.