These People Are Good And This Is Where I Need To Be: I'm back on a bike

We are spoiled here in the California Irvine Mission to have lots of cars so now that Salt Lake has decided to take a lot of them away it causes problems. We didn't get ours taken away for dumb things or accidents, we just hit 50,000 miles (the point at which the church sells the cars again) on it because we have to drive around so much so we had to park it and now we are car-less. It has been a big pain in the butt for us and our zone. We have a huge zone and now we only have 3 cars to try and transport 16 elders around and on our side we have to bike everywhere we go. We live in Irvine at the very edge of our area and to get to the main part is a long ride up and down rolling hills and then to do Japanese work we also have to bike to Irvine and especially UCI, which, when we will have to do it, will probably take up the majority of our day. It sucks because it has really limited the amount of work we can do for both English stuff and Japanese stuff. All things considered we still had a decent week. When we talked with Brianna about baptism she was really excited still and was ready to do it even though immersion was the only way but as soon as we told her about the possibility of proxy she got super opposed and said she didn't want to be baptized anymore which makes our job a lot more stressful but hopefully when we meet with her again we can get her back on track. The rest of our week was spent mainly biking and stuff. We have a less-active who has been progressing a lot and now wants to be able to attend the temple so that he can do baptisms for the dead for his father and grandfather, which is awesome. We were able to get some good news though, one of the youth in the ward named Jack has been bringing his friend, Brock, to church for the last three weeks so we have been talking to Jack about the possibility of teaching Brock and yesterday Jack told us that when he approached Brock about taking the lessons Brock said he would like to do it, which is awesome. Member missionary work is real and is a huge strength! The other investigator related miracle is that there is a 10 year old girl named Ryland whose mother is less-active and her father isn't a member so she was never baptized. Ryland has been attending activity days for a while and recently came to church and told her mother that she wants to start going to church. Our hope is that with some help from the primary president, who is super awesome, we can begin teaching Ryland as well and see if that can be a way to get her mom back to church and maybe even teach her father.

A big focus in our zone has been on looking for the good in everything and finding the small miracles that we have each day so that the Lord can trust us with the bigger miracles that we really want. We have a "tree" on our wall and each night we call our district and we all talk about the miracles that we saw and we write them on sticky notes and put them on the tree as "leaves" Its pretty amazing to see how after doing this for two weeks we have tons of miracles, some bigger, some smaller, some more serious, some more silly (we are still just 19 and 20 year old kids) but they are all things that have helped us see how much the Lord is blessing us. I would encourage all of you to do the same sort of thing, each night think about what happened in the day that can be considered a miracle in some way and find some way to record it, you can make a miracle tree like us, or just write it down in a journal or on a note in your phone and then remember to thank our Heavenly Father for these. I know that through continued faith and gratitude the Lord is more and more willing to bless us with the things we stand in need of. I know we are all children of God and that He loves us very much. Even though biking sucks I know its for a reason and that we will be able to help somebody in some way because of it and I know that these people are good and I need to be with them.
Love

Elder Cheever

Us and Yuuske and Minoru (Japanese students)