Week 3 McAllen, Texas

I talked with Elder Goodbaudy today and he said no email. He spent his time this morning emailing his Grandma and Grandpa and his Aunt. The highlights of the week for him were playing basketball this morning and serving the people of McAllen, Texas. He and his companion and the Sister Missionaries serving in the ward enjoyed lunch with President Torres and his wife today.
Elder Goodbaudy is looking forward to a baptism hopefully on Wednesday.
I enjoyed a spiritual discussion with Elder Goodbaudy about our Savior. I appreciate his insights. It was a fabulous way to spend my lunch!
I can't believe how quickly the time has gone, just over 6 months and Elder Goodbaudy will be heading home!

Week 2 McAllen, Texas

Mom,

All is good. We had a cold front the past few days which has been nice. It has been in the low 60's. 

 The ward (McAllen 1st Ward) is good. A lot of people are gone for spring break so that makes it a little small at church but other than that, it's all good. 

Glad you are all staying busy there. 

That's all from me.

Love,

Elder Goodbaudy 

Week 1 McAllen, Texas

Mom,

Well. The week was good. I'm now in McAllen. My companion is Elder Davis and he is pretty cool. He is on his 3rd transfer so it's enjoyable.

Speaking Spanish is nice, I missed it a lot. 

We are teaching this guy who is a 5 star chef. So he sometimes makes us really good food. 

That's about it. 

Have a great week.

Love,

Elder Goodbaudy 

Week 24 Corpus Christi, Texas - One last time

Mom,

Happy Transfers! I'm going down to McAllen to cover our mission presidents ward. It is English which is kind of weird but I'm excited. 

Other than that, not much is new. I'm just chilling. Corpus has been really fun and I'm sad to go but I'm needed elsewhere.

Have a great week.

Love,

Elder Goodbaudy 

Week 23 Corpus Christi, Texas

Mom,

Not really much in news for this week. Things have been going as usual. We get transfer calls next week so the next time we talk we will know where I go.

Hope you have a great week.

Love,

Elder Goodbaudy 

(We received an email from Jaden's mission President asking that when we speak to our missionaries each week we ask if their apartment and car are clean. I ask Jaden each week and he assures me all is clean.)

Week 22 Corpus Christi, Texas

ELDER GOODBAUDY PHONE HOME!!
(On February 15, 2019 the Church announced that Missionaries are allowed to call home each week, and are encouraged to keep that connection with their families weekly. Jaden calls each week and it is beyond wonderful to hear from him. He does still write a few sentences so I  will continue to post his emails.)

Mom,

Nothing much is new since we can call home now. So that's pretty cool. The call home was pretty cool. That's a blessing. 

Highlights for the week:

Huff went to Ecuador on Wednesday morning. So Tuesday night we had to drive down to McAllen. Then the next morning we drove back up to Corpus Christi. 

That means I have a new companion. His name is Elder Desjardins, he's from Canada so that's pretty cool.

That's pretty much the big news for the week.

Love you and talk to you next week.

Elder Goodbaudy 

Week 21 Corpus Christi, Texas

Mom,

This week was good. Not much happened.

That sucks to hear that the snow ruined your shopping trip, and Aunt Brenda's visit to an extent. I guess it's good that you guys can shop again in the summer.

Sounds like the new job should be pretty fun, to see what you end up doing on a daily basis.

Yeah we attend ward council, I have attended ward council in every ward I have been in. I enjoy the meetings, I have really come to enjoy seeing all the behind the scenes work of the church and how everything comes together.

We didn't have any crazy snow but we did have a cold front that came in and dropped the temperature to 37 degrees, so we got to break out our sweaters.

We had a super good zone conference on Thursday. They replaced the Tiwi's in our cars. (Tiwi is basically a little box that yells at you if you drive too fast) So they got us new ones because the ones that we had been using were pretty old. Now they are all futuristic looking and hi-tech. The zone conference itself was super good too. President Torres said something really insightful. He talked a lot about failing and learning from our mistakes and he talked about how God knows that the purpose of mortality is to learn and to grow, sometimes through failure and then getting back up from that failure. He then said that sometimes we as humans don't understand mortality because we are so caught up in having to be perfect that we don't allow ourselves to fail so that we can learn.

 Braden comes home in 5 months?!?!?! That's crazy, I sometimes keep forgetting that I am almost down to 6 months left. It's crazy how fast time flies.

Anyway, that is pretty much it. Super short interesting thought, in testimony meeting yesterday (testimony meeting was this week because we had stake conference last week) someone said that they had been thinking about the phrase bearing your testimony, and he talked about he thought he heard someone say they were burying their testimony. So he then asked a rhetorical question: 

Are we bearing our testimony or are we burying our testimony?

 So there is some food for thought for the week

Anyway, that is it for this week.

Have a great week!

Love,

Elder Goodbaudy

Week 20 Corpus Christi, Texas

Mom, 

The week was good. I'm glad all has been going as usual at home. No crazy teaching appointments this week, we had a lot of meetings and stuff like that so not a whole lot of time to go out and see the people. 

Don't have any scriptural insights this week, sorry. I've still been studying the New Testament with the institute manual, it's always good. 

This was a long, yet short week at the same time. It was kind of weird. The beginning of the week was pretty normal. Elder Huff signed his Visa paperwork on Wednesday, so he is now on the clock and could leave for Ecuador at any time. On Tuesday we found out that we would be having a mission leadership conference in McAllen. Normally it doesn't really mean anything but since they were inviting the district leaders to go it meant I got to go down to McAllen for Thursday and Friday with all the leaders in the mission. So Thursday morning we left for McAllen at 6 in the morning so we could be there at 9:30 when it started. I really enjoyed the conference, I got to see a lot of missionaries there that I know so it was pretty cool. It was a little weird though, because there were a lot of missionaries that I didn't know because they are all so new. 

Anyway, the conference was really good. President Torres talked a lot about being better ministers as leaders, so that we can better help those that we serve. It was awesome and I learned a lot. All I have to say is that President Torres is amazing. He is such an inspired guy.

Friday evening we got back to Corpus and just finished off the day. 

We didn't have fast and testimony meeting this week because we had stake conference. Saturday was pretty cool though because it was the adult session of stake conference. We had an area seventy speak, it was Elder Willis. Saturday session was good Elder Willis spoke about making it back to our heavenly home. Then Sunday morning we had the general session that was super good. Elder Willis gave another super good talk about enduring to the end. Honestly this week was really good. 

That was pretty much it for me. We will see when Huff ends up leaving and what happens with that. Until then though, here we are. 

Anyway, hope you guys have a great week. 

Love, 
Elder Goodbaudy