Adventures with Canadian Medical Care

Dear all,

This has been a week. Elder Tarati left on Friday for his new home in Valleyfield (just north of Montreal), and Elder Burton and I are now living on our own. We're doing pretty much the same things we've been doing for the past few weeks, working in the Riverside ward and doing some Chinese work in the Dow's Lake ward on the side. It's been a busy week, but it's better to be busy than bored. Things are going well.

We had our zone conference yesterday. A lot of it was about district council meetings. I took a lot of notes. Organizing district councils feels a lot like doing tech again. I do a lot of preparation, and then just kind of watch the whole thing come together. I enjoy it a lot. It all feels really familiar to me even though nothing about it is the same. 

While at zone conference yesterday, Sister Phillips told me to go to a clinic to see someone about this little bump that grew a few months ago. So, today, we went to a clinic to see someone about it. After a while of waiting, I spent about 10 minutes with a doctor who told me that it was probably just a wart, but it might be a super mild skin cancer, and that she would schedule and appointment for a biopsy just in case. Then she froze it with liquid nitrogen just for fun. So, that was my first experience with the famous Canadian medical system. It lived up to all my expectations, in that I didn't have to pay for anything, but I think that was more because of church insurance than actual Canadian politics, but whatever. It was free, and now my arm is frozen.

So, I almost forgot that the Prophet came to our mission this week. He gave a devotional in Montreal that was broadcast to a bunch of different buildings in the area. I didn't get to go to Montreal, but I did get to watch it here. It was pretty cool to know that he was really here in the mission and really speaking to all these people that I was serving. The thing that really touched about the whole devotional was when he talked about obedience. He said that to be obedient, you really just have to focus on loving God, your neighbors, and yourself. It's super easy to get really stressed out about obedience as a missionary because there a lot of really little things we have to follow. It was a good reminder that our focus really should not be on what we are doing, but why we are doing it. It doesn't matter if you wake up at 6:30 if you don't love God, or others, or yourself. The focus shouldn't always on the tiny nit-picky things. 

Hope you all have a good week.

Love you all

Elder Hadden