Elder Landon Shoemaker: Arrival to Independence

Area: Independence, Missouri
Companion: Elder Tu'akalau

Hey Family and Friends!

Sounds like the Stake Presidency is going to be amazing!! Bishop Walker is going to be a great Stake President! This first week has been a little stressful but ultimately so great. We have a bunch of stuff from Preach My Gospel to memorize so that will take me awhile. I'm in the 12 week missionary training program and Elder Tu'akalau is my companion and trainer. He's so awesome! He is from New Zealand and has a really sweet accent.

I'm in the Independence Missouri South area in the 4th ward. Everyone says I'm really lucky to start out here because of how nice the people are in this area. I met a lot of the ward members yesterday and everyone is so nice! There are a lot of Poly's here and it seems like everyone here has a tie to Utah so that interesting.

Right now we don't have any progressing investigators so we have been working with the members in finding new ones. We have mostly been going around trying to find the less actives and working on reactivation. We run into a lot of people who are members of the Church of Christ here so that's kind of a struggle. We have only had a couple doors slammed in our faces but it hasn't been too bad yet. We have a car but we have it for 1 week then we give it to the other elders for the next week and we just switch back and forth.

The flight out here was great. Everything went really smoothly. We stayed in the Mission Home the first night and then went out to our areas. The humidity isn't that bad right now. Everyone said I missed the bad heat by about a week so I'm no too disappointed. The weather right now is a lot like Utah actually.

Thanks for having everything here and ready for me Mom! Everything is working great. Did you get my package of tie's? Yeah I kept some of my skinny ties for P-Day ha.ha. I just couldn't send them all home, it was too hard to separate.

I'm excited for the William Holmes Walker book! It sounds great! Oh and Mom, thanks for all the little notes in my clothing. They brightened up my day whenever I found one. :)

My apartment address is 12403 East 40th Street, Crysler Gardens Apt., Apt. E. Ind., MO, 24050. You can mail letters to my apartment and packages to the mission office. It is in my area so it isn't to hard to stop by and grab the mail when we need to.

Love everyone!!

Elder Shoemaker

ps: Oh mom, Will you send me my ray ban's sunglasses? The ones that fold :) Thanks!