Happy Halloween Elder Varvel!

I knew the Holidays would be hard without Sawyer. So it begins....Halloween was so boring without him! He had a boring time too. The missionaries had to be in by 6:00 that night. So him and Elder Walker just played some games that night. We did send him a fun Halloween package though :)! 

Happy Halloween Elder Varvel

Memories from Abilene, TX

We received Sawyer's SD card with all of his pictures and videos from the first area of his mission. He loved his time in Abilene. He met some wonderful people, and made some great memories. He said that leaving was really hard, and it felt like leaving home all over again. We're grateful for all the people there that took such great care of him.

Elder Harris, Elder Dalley, Elder Chapman, Elder May, Elder Simonson, Elder Martin, Elder Varvel, Elder Evans, Sister Davidson, Sister Kramer, Sister Archibald.

Sawyer's first companions were the zone leaders, Elder Martin & Elder Chapman.

A tour of his first apartment. Be prepared to get dizzy :)!

One of the first things that Sawyer experienced in Abilene was a storm! He said that when it rains, there is nothing quite like it. The rain comes down so hard, that within minutes the streets turn into rivers. They drove through the streets with water up to the door of their car.

An Abilene rain storm!

On one of their P-days, the missionaries got to go to Prime Time. It's like Fat Cats or Blastoff. They bowled, played games, and he won at laser tag!

Prime Time

 The Bundy family loved the missionaries, and always took good care of them! Sawyer loved them, and will miss them greatly. 

Dinner at the Bundy's!

Hanging out at the Bundy's house.

The Bundys had an old military truck. 

The Bundy's dog was making the donkeys mad. I cracked up at this video just listening to how entertained the missionaries were.

Elder Varvel is working on his domestic skills! Cookies!

Here is Sawyer's cool insta-freeze magic trick :)!

Elder May, Elder Hancock, Sister Archibald, Elder Chapman, Elder Pasquale, Sister Kramer, Elder Thorpe, Elder Martin, Elder Dalley, Elder Varvel

This is a video of what they do when they are bored during planning meetings.

Sawyer and Brother Murrow. He was their ward clerk.

This is a video of the missionaries trying ghost peppers. A ghost pepper is the world's hottest chili pepper, and is 400 times hotter than Tabasco sauce. Most of the missionaries started going numb, but Sawyer must have got a lot of seeds, because he got pale and broke out in a sweat. Good times in the mission field!

Sawyer saying goodbye to the Bundys.

Jessie and Chelsea

The Cannons- He was their ward mission leader.

Sawyer with the Hedin Family.

The Elders with Lovenia. She is a recent convert who loved the missionaries.  She owns Chicken Express and would let the missionaries eat for free. Sawyer said her husband makes the best food ever, and she makes the best dessert!

 One of Sawyer's hardest goodbyes was with Chado and Bobooshka! :(

Sawyer and Bobooshka 

Chado, Babooshka, and Sawyer

Sawyer really grew to love Chado, and he will miss him a lot. I hope we can all go to Texas someday and meet all these people.

Elder Varvel & Elder Pasquale 

Elder Varvel & Elder Hancock

Elder Watson and Elder Varvel. I miss his goofy faces!

Elder Varvel, Elder Chapman, Sister Kramer, and Sister Archibald.

Saying goodbye to Elder King. 

Elder King and Elder Varvel.

Elder Moffitt and Elder Varvel 

Elder May and Elder Dalley both came out to Texas with Sawyer.

He says this is his last moments with his parents :)! He learned a lot from these guys, and I'm sure he'll miss them a ton.

Sawyer loved his time in Abilene. He will miss it a lot, but he is excited to start a new phase of his mission is Muleshoe , TX. I hope he can meet just as many great people there, and have just as many wonderful experiences. 

Turn Around! Turn Around!

When Sawyer was getting ready to leave on his mission, he got some advice from President Fuller. One of the things he told him was that he didn't need to let his family know everything...especially the bad stuff that would make us worry. That's probably why he 'forgot' to mention a little driving incident that happened in Abilene. Dani let it slip while she was visiting, so I asked him about it. Here it is in his own words:

Elder Chapman got cut off and ended up driving the wrong way on the freeway and it was super funny! We didn't even realize it until we saw headlights in the distance coming at us super fast. I started shouting TURN AROUND, TURN AROUND!

They are nuts! How do you not know you are driving the wrong way on the freeway! I'm glad he thought it was funny though :)!

On a less stressful note, Sawyer loved General Conference! This is what he said about it:

We had investigators come to conference this past week! Oh my gosh, it was so perfect! We told them to pray and come to conference with a question, and that their questions would be answered. They were answered perfectly! It was so awesome to see the prophets and apostles touch lives. I tried that approach too, just to see if it would work, and the same thing happened to me! Those men are called of God absolutely without a doubt!

Happy 100 Days!

Sawyer reached his 100 days of missionary service! We sent him a fun package to celebrate! We wrote a list of the 100 things we love and miss about him. Some of them were pretty funny :)! Our package was all orange stuff, and we said 'Orange you glad you made it 100 days!'

Here's the first half of our 100 things we love and miss about him.

Here's the finished product!

Orange you glad you made it 100 days?

Happy 100 days Elder Varvel!

MTC Flashback!

A while after Elder Varvel had been in the mission field, he sent me his SD card with the rest of his pictures and videos from the MTC. He loved his time there! He had a great companion, a great district, and great teachers. 

This is Elder Varvel's district with Hermana Gibbons. She was his first teacher in the MTC, and they had her the whole time they were there.

This is Hermano Torres. He was their second teacher. He had to leave half way through their time at the MTC. He left to teach at the MTC in Mexico.

The district with Hermano Torres.

This is the district with Hermano Clarke. He replaced Hermano Torres once he left. 

Elder Varvel with Hermano Albaugh. He wasn't their actual teacher, but Sawyer said he might as well have been, because he helped them out with everything.

He claims he's doing a wall backflip, but we know better than that :)!

Sawyer found Curtis in the MTC! 

This is Sawyer's district with the sisters in his zone, the night they left.

Singing the night they left.

There are goblins in the MTC bathrooms!

Abilene, Texas

Elder Varvel is in the mission field! His first area is Abilene. That is on the Eastern side of his mission, so it's pretty and green. His whole mission is in the Bible belt of the US, but Abilene is the Bible belt buckle. There are more different churches in this city than in any other city in the world! Sawyer said, "Everyone is very nice! The people here really do have southern hospitality!"

His new companions are Elder Martin and Elder Chapman. He said they are great! They are the Abilene zone leaders. He says  there are a few things that come from being with the zone leaders:

1. You get excellent training.

2. You stay really busy.

3. He's currently in an English area. His companions have meetings a lot, and when they do he goes with the Spanish Elders, so he still gets to practice his Spanish.

He attends the Spanish Branch along with the ward he is assigned to.  He said, "The members here are awesome! Everyone knows the missionaries and everyone is super involved with the church! And they make FANTASTIC food! The Spanish Branch is a small, tight knit group, and I just love them! They have a pot luck after church every Sunday.....be jealous, because THEY CAN COOK!"

He seems to be having a great time! I'm happy to know that he's being trained well, fed well, and taken care of :)! I sent him a letter with a gazillion questions. I'll have more info when I get his response back from that one.

Thank You!

Elder Varvel received his package of 43 letters (plus lots more from people who sent them on their own) right before he left the MTC. It took us a while to hear from him once he got to Texas. We finally got a letter, and he expressed how fun it was to get that package! His whole district was in awe when he dumped 43 letters out of the envelope! He wrote us a message to give to everyone who wrote:

Hey everybody! Thank you SO much to all of you who sent me letters! I haven't been able to answer them all because of my schedule, and there weren't addresses on a lot of them. But keep writing to me and I will be sure to write back as soon as I can! I really appreciated hearing from everyone! Whether it was because you all miss and love me, or because my Mom had dessert, either way it still felt really good :)! You all are in my thoughts and my prayers! I miss and love y'all and will see you in LESS than 2 years! Wooo! The church is so true!

Thanks again everyone! Elder Varvel's current address is:

Elder Sawyer Varvel

Texas Lubbock Mission

6310 114th St.

Lubbock, TX

79424-6024

Leavin' on a Jet Plane!

Elder Varvel has finished his 6 weeks at the MTC, and is now in Texas! 

We sent him a 'Leavin' on a Jet Plane' celebration package. It had stuff to have a toast with his companion for making it through the MTC together. There were poppers for all of his District to celebrate with. And of course stuff to entertain him on the plane ride to Texas; a snack, fun stuff to color, and a bunch of word games that I made for him on the computer. I took information and facts from his mission prep, and his time in the MTC and made cross word puzzles, word searches, and other fun games with it. Some of them are pretty funny, and I can't wait to see if he figures them out!

'Leavin' on a Jet Plane' package

The best part was that he got to call home!!! He called from the Salt Lake airport and we got to talk to him for about 30 minutes before he had to board his plane. It's amazing how fast that time goes by. We had about a gazillion more questions for him, and things to tell him when his time ran out. It was so good to hear his voice! He sounded happy, and excited to be starting the next phase of his mission. He said there were 28 missionaries taking his plane to Texas. That would be such a fun flight to be on! We still don't know what area he'll be serving in, who his new companion is, his address, or any of that information. We aren't even sure when he'll have access to a computer again, or be able to write. We hope to hear from him within the next week and get all our questions answered. We're pretty excited for him to start sharing the Gospel and using all the things he learned in the MTC. 

Good luck Elder Varvel! You're going to do a great job!

Wet Wipes vs. Toilet Paper

We got an e-mail from Sawyer, and I seriously about died! I laughed so hard I cried! Caution- this is one of those stories where Sawyer shares way too much information. Consider yourself warned!

Here it is in his own words:

Hola! So, I have my first funny story about my mission and this one will be worth putting on my blog because I still laugh when I think about it. So ever since we got here, Elder Richards (aka: Captain America) has been trying to convince us that wet wipes are better than toilet paper. We never believed him and just made fun of him for using them. But the toilet paper at the MTC sucks really bad and after being here for 5 1/2 weeks it has started to feel like I am wiping with bark. So we are in the computer lab working on some language study and I am just so uncomfortable because the bark has made me chafe really bad. Elder Richards points at the wet wipes in the room and tells me to go use one because it will make me feel so much better and I will feel so clean. So me, being an idiot, decides to do it. Well...it turns out that those wipes were disinfectant wipes for surfaces! So as I  begin it feels really good and I am starting to believe Elder Richards. But then a couple seconds later it felt like someone was shooting a flame thrower at my behind! I don't think I have ever screamed as high as I screamed then. It burned for like an hour afterwards!!! But then to make it up to me Elder Richards let me use one of his baby wipes and it was sensational! The next day I went to the bookstore and bought my own box of huggies and I will never go back to normal toilet paper. 

And this is what happens when you live with 7 other guys for 6 weeks!

Dessert/Letter Writing Open House

We got an e-mail from Elder Varvel that made us kind of sad. He sounded a little discouraged. He has been getting e-mails, but the letters slowed down for a couple weeks. He wrote:

I haven't got many letters the past two weeks, so I'm starting to feel like I've been forgotten. You should tell everyone to write me because you never realize how important it is to a missionary to get a letter until you are actually the one waiting for the mail.

So we did what he said....we told people they should write to him! We even gave them some incentive. We held a dessert open house. People could come over on a Sunday evening, have some dessert, and write Sawyer a letter. We had all the note cards and stationary they needed set out on the table. We had a goal of sending him 20 letters. Our friends and family are so AWESOME, and we more than doubled our goal! We sent off 43 letters in a big envelope the next day! And that was just from the people that came over that night. Several people that couldn't make it, or that live far away also sent him letters. I was giddy with gratitude and excitement! I wanted my missionary happy, and to know that he hadn't been forgotten. That was definitely accomplished! 

The dessert bar!

We also took pictures of our friends that came over to write. They posed with our stand-in Elder Varvel. We sent all the pictures to him in his package of letters.

The Waters family

Sam!

The Russons crack me up! They were trying to be as serious as possible. It almost worked...and then there's Chase :)!

Katie, Chyanna, Emily, and Melissa

The McCalls pictures were so funny! Someone moved and was blurry in the 3 we took before this. This one was perfect, Owen rolling off the ottoman and all! 

Schnick!

The Hendrix family

Jason

Payton, Brad, and Marlee 

The Draper family

Christie Mae 

The Hughes Family 

Emersyn, Kassie, and Bailey. Bailey was a champion dessert maker!

Drew Dawg!

The Spence girls. They wrote their letter to Sawyer all in Spanish. I can't wait to see if he could understand it! 

Cute Savannah! 

Shannon and Madi!

This made us realize that we can be doing a lot more to support missionaries. I am now making it a goal to write to a missionary from our ward, or one of Sawyer's friends each Sunday. Thank you friends and family for your support! I can't wait to hear what he thought of his letter filled package. I'm sure he was overwhelmed :)! Stay tuned...