🍁 Bienvenue au Canada

September 20, 2021

Wow, this has probably been one of the craziest weeks of my life! So much has happened, but I'll do my best to describe what's been going on. 

It was pretty sad to say goodbye to the CFM, but the last few days there were truly wonderful! It's so amazing that Elder Allred will be able to take over with Elder Price in Merced and I was super grateful that I got to go to interviews with our whole zone before driving down to Fresno with the assistants, one of whom is my good friend Elder Hall! It was a dream come true to get to sit next to him in the Tacoma and talk about our experiences from the last year or so. He is truly an amazing missionary and disciple of Jesus Christ! 

It was a little bit stressful finishing packing and making sure that I had all of the necessary papers to get to Canada the next morning, but thanks to some help from our incredible mission secretary, Elder Hodges, everything ended up working out! There was one really huge tender mercy that stuck out to me from that night. As I said, I was sitting shotgun next to Elder Hall in the Tacoma, but once I was at the office Elder's apartment I realized that I had left my passport and vaccine card and basically every other important paper I had in the back seat of the truck. It was already late at night and to make things worse Elder Hall and Elder Crane were supposed to drive another 45 minutes south to Visalia and spend the night there for interviews the next morning, but miraculously they had decided to spend the night in Fresno so we were able to drive over and get all of my documents! 

I've heard a lot of horror stories about traveling recently, so I was honestly pretty nervous the day I flew out but thankfully everything worked out pretty smoothly. It was a little bit tight reaching my connecting flight from Dallas to Montreal but thanks to the kindness of a pilot who told me where to go everything ended up working out! We got to Montréal at about 5 pm their time and spent 3 hours in immigration but thankfully I was with a bunch of other missionaries so it wasn't bad at all.

So here is where things get pretty crazy. It turns out that my companion, Elder Eich, is also a reassigned missionary so we ended up meeting each other at immigration. We are being doubled into the province of New Brunswick with two other Elders who also flew in with us that day. Because of Covid, there haven't been missionaries anywhere in New Brunswick for nearly 8 months! Before the borders opened a few weeks ago our mission only had 90 missionaries but we are in the process of receiving enough missionaries to put us well over 200! They are really stretching to even find enough places for all of these new missionaries to live! 

For those of you who, like me, aren't super well versed in Canadian geography, New Brunswick is about a 15 hour drive from Montreal… it's literally in a different time zone! So the four of us Elders are going to completely white wash an entire province! But it gets even crazier. It turns out that we were going to have a mission conference on Saturday with Elder Cook and a bunch of other general authorities that Saturday that every missionary in the mission would attend in person, so we flew in on Thursday and helped with moving furniture and some of the crazy logistics involved with having so many new missionaries arriving on Friday and on Saturday we went to the Conference and it was such a cool experience! 

I have to admit that it was kind of tough leaving the CFM and being surrounded by so many missionaries that I don't know at all, but during the conference I felt a lot of comfort and also a feeling of excitement to get to work! It was exactly what I needed. I am running out of time but I also wanted to mention that I've had a lot of time to read the Book of Mormon while flying and it is just so powerful! I read the entire story of the Sons of Mosiah on the way to Montreal, and I know for a fact that God will comfort us and give us success if we are willing to trust him. Especially when it comes to missionary work! 

Sunday night I flew out to Nova Scotia and I will be here until Wednesday for a Zone Conference and then my companion and I will finally make a four hour drive to get to our area in Moncton. Missions truly are crazy! 

Love you all

Elder Jackson