Letters from Gene : Some good things this week!

Hello people of Other parts of the world,

This week in Elder Pilling's life: Elder Drury rides down some steep stairs, I ride an E bike and everyone gets a phone.

Tuesday was zone conference and I want to share a quote from it that we can ALL benefit from.

Here's a good one by Elder Oaks, "The intensity of how we want to share the gospel is an indicator to our own conversion." Elder Palmer, one of the APs shared that. I wish I said that in my farewell talk since it was all about conversion. And along with this is something I've set as a goal, which is to be scared everyday of the mission because of the people I need to open my mouth to. I've seen that with the desire to share the gospel with as many people as possible you become more converted to the gospel and the Lord. So definitely something I'm sure we could all work on:)

Along with the zone conference was how to use our phones effectively. So everybody in the mission got a phone, one member on the companionship has the sim card. We have 5gigs of data a month for the 2 of us. We mainly use them for #Lighttheworld which is so awesome and everyone loves it. We also take pics with them. They are still working out the bugs so we don't have Area book or even LDS tools. But I can see that they are already helping the work. President Nakken is most worried about how our phones will affect our ability to seek revelation due to distraction. So I've set some good guidelines to stay focused. Y'alls would never follow them in the real world because that'd be weird. Like one of them is telling my comp whatever it is I'm going to use my phone for even before I open it. Keeps me from doing useless stuff.

During zone conference I realized I need to rely even more on the Lord than I already am. And I also realized that in order for Him to trust me I need to be even more obedient. So this week has been great. I've really been obedient and it's been great and I have been receiving that personal revelation on how to hasten this work.

By now y'alls are prolly super bored. So here's a story. You know how in my last email I said that mail is super exciting even if it's just a blank piece of paper? Well that actually happened. A little anti-climactic though. I got this letter Saturday, which is when I was on district leader exchanges. So I get a text from my companion who tells me I got mail!!! Ayyayayaya so all day I'm super excited for this mail. When the day ends and I get the mail I see that it's from my favourite sister:) pool yay, I open it and it's a nice blank piece of paper which was an exact square, not rectangle. So yes exciting but then less exciting but still exciting. Just goofy stuff.

My letter from Clair... a blank piece of paper.

See here's the thing with emails, if I want to tell a story it takes like 9 hours to write and it ends up not even making sense. Plus when you are following the rules you don't really have any crazy stories... Just cool experiences.

So here's a cool experience, Elder Ujhely and I were walking from a less active's house to another when JP the mailman yells across the street, "Hey guys. Thank you so much for all that you do. It's really cool." We wave and say thanks and then an hour or so later we see JP the mailman again and this time he pulls over and wants to talk. He asks, "What do you have for me to read?" Now he said it a little jokingly but since we are missionaries we always have a Book of Mormon with us, so that's what he got:) We talked a little bit and he said he'd contact us later! That was a super cool experience. We hope we will see him again. We know which route he was on so we'll keep our eye out for JP the mailman:)

This week went by really quick. We have been doing a lot of contacting, trying to find new people to teach and during this contacting we met an old potential investigator previous missionaries found a while ago. So we got in contact and set up an appointment which was cool. Hopefully he pulls through, seems like he's interested. We also got a referral from the Hermana missionaries for a guy they found but he prefers Spanish. We met him the other day but he was on his way to Mexico. So this week we hope to catch up with him as well.

Last Sunday after my talk, a nice fella in the audience comes and talks to me and tells me he served in the Calgary mission and got home 2 years ago. He was visiting his in-laws who is a member of the bishopric. He went biking with Mark Bishop! Kinda cool connection. We actually had a lesson with him and his father-in-law. Good lesson about Christ and how we can share his light through #lighttheworld. After the lesson I find out he has an E bike so I road it. I forget what it's called, it's one of the Specialized ones. It had guides and gx1. It was really weird to ride. Like fast but not fast. Like the harder you push the less power assist you get. Idk it was weird.

Here's the story of the week. Elder Drury, who lives in the same complex but different apartment, comes over and grabs Elder Ujhely's bike and says, "Yo I should ride down the stairs" (which btw are narrow and steep). Like house size stairs. So he hops on and shreds down the stairs. Hits the bottom and just about flips over the bars. Pretty entertaining but not the smartest.

Oh and another bike story, I crashed...sort of. So on our bikes we have U locks around our headset and in between the top and bottom tube of the bike. And I went to turn my bars but the U lock got stuck around the fork so I couldn't steer and I road right into the curb and scraped my shoe hard core (all buffed out now) and hit my hand on the ground. So yah

Scraped shoe from bike crash.

Here are 2 dinner stories. The one is when we went out to Wood Ranch for dinner:) I got pulled pork with MAC and cheese and mashed potatoes and slaw. It was a lot of food lol but super good. It was with the Hanshaw family. He played for the 49ers once upon a time. The second was with the Hymas family, who we eat with often. And at the end of each meal we play a game. And they have a game where you flip a card and you have 6 seconds to draw and read what's on the card!!! Super intense but really fun. It's interesting to see what people draw in 6 seconds hahaha. It's called Terrible Art or something.

Yo p-day today is zone activity and we are going to Brother Neffs house. And yes he's the creator of Neff clothing so it's gonna be sweet. I've heard his house is super nice:).

Send me mail!
600 spring Rd. Apt #114

Moorpark Ca 93021

Some pictures for yalls.