A Meeting and a Conference...

This week was a great week

We had our Stake Mission Coordination Meeting. The Stake President told us to have the Ward Mission Leaders assign exchanges because this church is a church of assignment not volunteer. When he talked about it, it made sense. He is one of the most missionary-minded stake presidents that I know.

We also had Zone Conference. That was great. We learned a lot about repentance, and how to "Teach Repentance and Baptize Converts", which has been a major theme in the missions around the world since we had a Worldwide Training about six months ago.

I gave my departing testimony, even though I have several weeks left, since it was my last Zone Conference. I was able to spend it with an elder who came out with me, a couple of my former companions, and all of my best friends in the mission. It was great!

We've been doing a lot of active member lessons and seeking for referrals. We're doing a lot of finding, and talking to people on the streets.

The bishop took us to see a less active member. On the way, we talked about priesthood keys, the priesthood birthright, etc. Bishop is super cool.

Week Preceding July 11

We had transfers!!!! Both my companion and I are staying This is going to be my last area where I get to stay for three transfers or more. I was super shocked about that.

I'm excited to stay for another transfer. We were able to teach quite a few lessons. Most of them were from tracting. We tracted in a neighborhood with much success. It was cool. We also tracted in another area...but we didn't have as much success there.

We were able to have nine less actives at church. That was super cool.

I haven't been the best at taking pictures for the past couple of weeks, but here are some good ones taken six or less weeks ago :D

Me with one of my previous companions.

Me with my current companion.

The End of June...and Into July!

We weren't able to see the investigators this week as usual, for good reasons, of course. One had doctor's appointments throughout the week. One had a death in his extended family, so we felt like it would be good to have them mourn their family and then talk to them again this week. Then, the last one that we've been visiting recently we felt like we have been a little too pushy on him, and so we also are giving him time to think things through.

Anyway, we received quite a few referrals from a cool senior couple in our branch, and we are helping them share the Restored gospel with their friends. We also met another lady who we are beginning to teach.

We talked with a less active about the Sacrament and he came to church. So that's good.

Nevertheless, we did quite a bit this week. We went to a nearby town and talked to a part-member family that had a recent death in the family. While we were there, they told us that after we leave they discuss about what we talk to them about.. It's pretty awesome. I really like them. Anyway, we received another referral by one of the awesome families in the branch. They live in another nearby town and they love to share the gospel. We've received four referrals from them so far. It was sweet.

I went on an exchange with the Zone Leaders. I went with one of the Zone Leaders to another town, while my companion and the other Zone Leader stayed in our current area. The Zone Leader that I was with and I realized that we don't have a lot of time left in the mission. We came out at the same time. We talked about our mission experiences. It was cool. He is one of the coolest missionaries in the mission.

The Month of May!

After our Mother's Day phone call, I searched around the apartment and around the car for my camera. I found it in the car. So, I have it now. I took a bunch of pictures, including one of my "pants burning".

Speaking of pants-burning, one of my former companions got transferred...I was super sad to hear that. He's going to miss the burning. He saw my shirt burning at my year mark, so it kinda adds to the reason why I wanted him to come. "But behold, [he is] gone, and my sorrows cannot bring [his] return." (Mormon 6:20)

So, before our Mother's Day phone call, we went to our branch president's home for dinner. His mother came to dinner with us, and we were able to have a member-present lesson on mothers for Mother's Day. It was really cool.

Our mission president is super cool. I talked with him about how I could improve in missionary work, and I talked with him about how I could open my mouth better when street contacting, because I've always struggled with that. It was cool. Our mission president's wife asked every missionary she interviewed to share about repentance. I shared something that I have been studying more on about a certain aspect of repentance because I gave a talk on that aspect, which is: storms. I talked about the storms in the Book of Mormon, and she told me to look up something in the Doctrine and Covenants Institute Student Manual . So I'm gonna do that. Super excited to do so.

I've been rereading the Old Testament, studying it more fully with the new set of scriptures you guys sent me for Easter. Right now I am in the Book of Judges. It's a good book so far.

Now for the pictures!  My parents wish I would send them more frequently!

Our last district meeting in my old area. Afterwards, we played basketball. Ties against no-ties.

A ward member and me in my last area...

...and her "demon dog", Sophie!

Saying "goodbye" to a family in my last area.

The storm shelter near our current living quarters....It pitch black in there.

I burned a pair of pants. It is a missionary "tradition" to burn some pants when you reach your eighteen month mark.

Our church's pews.

This is in Tahlequah. The movie, "Where the Red Fern Grows" was filmed here. The actor who portrayed the main character is LDS. I went here for exchanges. It was super cool, and spiritual. We taught a teenage girl about the Restoration.

We had "Braums" at the church while waiting for a ride to our next appointment.

Our weekly planning meetings have been highly effective. My companion and I have set some really good goals that we are both striving to keep.

We played Red Light, Green Light with some children in the area and connected it with covenant making and keeping. Spiritual and fun!

We also found an less active member who wants to come back. He wants to feed us dinner. It was awesome.

We went to an 7-hour long duration of meetings for stake conference. Instead of being a long day, it was absolutely cool. We met a Seventy who knew a lot about the scriptures. Enough said.

Our area is amazing. We got transfer calls toward the end of the month and I did not get transferred, but my companion did. I got one of his trainers for my new companion. I am super excited I'm staying in this area. The members are the best people you can ever meet.. They're true, they're hard-working, and some of them have to travel 50 miles to get to church. One member sees more people than we do throughout the week. Our mission leader always comes to church despite health problems. Our branch president is willing to feed us whenever we don't have a dinner as long as we give him a half-day's notice. The first counselor takes us out every Tuesday. Our area is full of the most faithful members I have seen. Whenever I see how far each of them are from the church, I marvel at how they can do it. I would be content if I stayed here the rest of my mission. Probably not going to happen, but it could.

We said "goodbye" to everyone for my "transferring" companion, which wasn't too hard. We already saw 95% of the people that he wanted to say goodbye to before Thursday, so it's super easy.

Here are a few scriptures I shared with my companion who transferred:
1 Corinthians 16:22-24, 2 Corinthians 13:14, and 3 John 14. The last one is my favorite.

On transfer day, I helped other missionaries clean a ward house while we were waiting for the next group to get here. We finished around noon. After transfers, we were able to have dinner over at the president's house the first evening my new companion was here, so he could meet his family. We then got a call from the second counselor in the branch presidency, asking as to speak in sacrament meeting. We prepared our talks, had a few solid lessons on Friday and Saturday, then spoke on Sunday. It went well. Afterwards, we had a wonderful time at the linger-longer eating Mexican food. A ton of people gave us food to take home. We had two cartons of eggs, enchiladas, and one and a half bag of tortilla chips back at the cabin. It was a lot.

I Got Transferred...A Cabin, a Lake, a Storm, No Power!

Here is the installment from the last part of April...

My new area is the greenest place I have been thus far. We are actually opening up an area that has been a dual area for a number of years. My new area has a small branch of less than 30 active members. I had an uber long drive down to the new area, I left my old apartment at 6:30 in the morning, and finally got to my new area around 4-5 in the afternoon. Long day on the road, but on the bright side I did get Sour Patch kids, Twizzlers, and some other candy....All gone in a day or two....well, maybe 4 days. Don't have diabetes, yet, so I'm good :j

My companion and I have a cabin. We live pretty much where our branch president lives. He owns a trailer park, and he built a cabin just for us to stay. It's awesome. It's pretty fun to be in a cabin...you see a ton of bugs, we have to climb a ladder to get into bed. We sleep over the bathroom and the kitchen. Our oven and stove doesn't work at the moment...our branch president is working on it. He's a really cool dude. The fridge was empty, as was expected seeing that we opened up a new area. My companion and I went on a shopping spree to grab lunch food for all meals. We have a furnace, but we don't have an air-conditioner quite yet.

The church is also very exciting. The LDS meetinghouse used to be a Baptist Church...then the Baptist Church became a mortuary, or a morgue. Then it became the LDS meetinghouse. The chapel pews have crosses on the sides. The baptismal font is also in the front of the chapel. It looks really cool. The church is one of a kind. The people really love us, though. Our branch president is happy to feed us if they are not busy....so his family has fed us each night since I came here. His family is super cool. The food is delicious, too! We then share a spiritual thought, which is great because the branch president's mother is not a member of the church. She loves the church and has been to many church history sites including the Hill Cumorah and the Sacred Grove

Church was super exciting. A whole lot different than church usually is. We have a reverence hymn at the beginning, then an opening hymn, and we continue on the meeting. The sound speakers for the stand are actually only at the stand. So when you speak, it sounds loud to you, but to the people in the back, it's difficult to hear.

We are doing a ton of finding in this new area because we have basically no investigators. My new companion is from Utah. He has been out for six months.

Our area has a huge lake in the middle of it. We are in the middle of two towns (about 10 miles to each) leaving us with a ton of miles used because those are the two closest cities, and we have people we teach in other towns that are about 20-50 miles from us. It's actually really fun. We get to cross the lake every day. We have no choice, too. It pretty much surrounds us. We have a ton of less active members that we see, but not close enough to keep ourselves busy. We did meet some cool members one Sunday at a linger-longer (It's theme was Italian food...mmmm. It was quite delicious). They were from Orem, Utah.

I misplaced my camera after videoing the village where we live, so no pictures for a little bit. I know the camera is somewhere in our apartment or our car, though, so it's okay, it's not hopeless.

We had a tremendous thunderstorm hit close to us. It caused a tiny tornado 5 miles north of us, but no fatalities from it, so we're good. We were out of power the day after from 8:00. I was showering at the time, (The thunderstorm kept us awake because of the large amounts of rain that hit on our roof. It was the loud, so we didn't wake up to our alarms in the morning.) So, I half showered in the dark. We were without power until after 10:00 in the evening. We're linked to the power station up north, so the thunderstorm damaged something. Some of our food went bad, but it's okay. We got sick of the salami, and there wasn't much other food in the fridge. We actually had to get a ton of food on Friday ("pay-day" for us) because of the spoiling of the food. My companion took pictures of us in the night with no power, and trying to light up the cabin with two flashlights, because my camera was lost in the darkness of that night. It was super awesome, but I wasn't able to read anything for the evening, which I love to do.

We were able to meet up with an investigator with our branch mission leader. He was able to relate to our investigator in many ways, because they were of the same age group, they had experienced similar trials, and they both loved to garden. It was a really cool visit with him.

We also visited with a family and taught them two lessons. Both lessons were wonderful. We were able to teach some of the kids that were involved in a baseball team, and they provided some amazing insight. The second visit, we were able to answer some of the dad's questions about the church. He asked questions about polygamy and if the Book of Mormon was changed, etc. Some of his questions may have arisen from him reading stuff about the church on the internet. Nevertheless, he did not want to contend with us, they were honest questions, not the other kind of questions used for arguing. We were able to answer all his questions as I have experienced similar questions to his. It was a really spiritual visit.

We tried to find some good OTMing places (places where you could see a lot of people) nearby, but no luck, thus far. We were able to find a service opportunity where we helped clean up the town. It was good.

Sundays are absolutely amazing, with great church services. We were able to help a member on the computer (well, my companion helped him. It was a one-person job). I was looking through an old LDS hymnal that the member had...It was super cool. It had songs that weren't in the one we have today, the songs were named differently after the first couple words, such as, "Count Your Blessings", it was titled "When Upon Life's Billows", and "If You Could Hie to Kolob" had a completely different tune than the one we have. It was sweet.

After we helped him, we had a lesson with the assistant branch mission leader and his daughter. We then had dinner with the branch president and his family. We had delicious grilled hamburgers and hot dogs. We watched the John Tanner story with them. Finally, we went to help the Branch President finish working on our stove...well, he hasn't finished it quite yet. The flames are still too high.

General Conference Thoughts...and Other Things!

My parents are still trying to get "caught up" on my missionary blog. Here is the installment for the first part of April.

General Conference was amazing!!!! I loved every minute of it. I had just gotten another study journal as a gift, so I started writing notes on General Conference. It was so cool. My questions that I brought got answered, and my answers got questioned, etc.

I loved President Dieter F. Uchtdorf's talk in the morning session of Sunday, and President Henry B. Eyring's talk at the VERY beginning of conference. :D

Hehehe...so we were going to go to the church to watch the Saturday afternoon session, and entered the church around 2:55 (1:55 for you guys). Well, the video to set up General Conference wasn't set up. My companion and I started to flip. We said a prayer, and called a couple people a couple of times. Didn't work, so we decided to just barge in on a family to watch Conference with them...if they were home. So we traveled there and knocked on their door around 3:07 or so, and they beckoned us in. We enjoyed Conference with them :D. It was cool.

Someone quoted the last part of Part III of Handel's Messiah in the Conference...Last session, somebody who wasn't an apostle. It was so cool! :D

I did two baptismal interviews. The sister missionaries are amazing. We were trying to get our investigators to a baptismal date, but we weren't able to visit with one, and another hadn't been keeping commitments. We got a new potential from going to his house. He started to read the Book of Mormon. Other than that, we tried to reactivate less actives, get one member to quit smoking, and set up exchanges with elders in another town. It was really fun :j.

Awesome Weeks!

The past few weeks have been awesome. I can't really use any other adjectives. We saw the Lord's hand many times, of which I will give a few examples :j.

1) My companion and I, after all we could have done, went to a local store to OTM people. While we were in the camera aisle, a woman OTMed us, wanting to know who we are, what we were doing, etc. We answered her questions, and told her snippets of what our church believes, etc. She wants to meet with us to learn more.

2) My companion and I encountered a young kid, who passed by us while we were attempting to make a visit to a less active. My companion had an impression we should talk to him, so he led the discussion we had with him. The kid lied a lot, but that's what you get when you OTM someone in the dark of the night. He talked about being Satanic (we could totally tell he was lying about most of this subject, so don't worry, we're safe), that discussion moved to him being Atheistic...and eventually he said he believed in a God. It was a good discussion.

3) While we were doing service at a food pantry, I started talking to this guy who was seeking assistance from the pantry. I talked with him, and a couple of people around him, and we discussed many things, including our church. A few days later at church, my companion nudged me, and asked who a certain guy was. I couldn't see him clearly, so I shrugged my shoulders. After sacrament meeting, a ward member came up to us, and asked us to talk to a guy in the foyer. We went to the foyer and I recognized this guy from the pantry. We talked with him and taught him a lesson. We answered some of his questions, and gave him a Book of Mormon and we're going to continue to meet with him...I am totally excited!

I loved this past week a lot. I'm excited. We're going to have an awesome week, this coming week, too. The best thing about this week, was that I really was not looking forward to anything. Every day, when I woke up, I didn't feel like doing missionary work at all. I was just not looking forward to the same old thing. Well, as I pressed forward through it...I received a ton of help for all of it, I saw a lot of cool stuff...It was wonderful.

Branch is Now a Ward!

I am no longer serving in a branch. As of January 3, the branch is now a ward. It was an amazing switch, and the bishop is experiencing a lot more responsibilities than he had when he was a branch president :j. It is awesome.

Missouri and Arkansas have HUGE firework shows on New Year's Eve...because there are next to no fireworks banned...so we had some crazy fireworks.

We have also had some crazy flooding. I won't go too much in detail, because it REALLY floods down here. I drove for a week straight week because my companion lost his wallet for a time. That was fun having to do 1000 point turns on dirt roads because the area before us was submerged by three feet or so.

We were able to get a less active member to church recently...and he wants to keep coming to church. That makes me so excited.

Transfers...I am in a Trio!

Transfers are every six weeks. My trainer and one of my former companions will be going home during the next transfer. Transfer calls take place the Saturday before transfers. Occasionally, there will be emergency transfers out of the blue.

One of my new companions is from Southern Arizona. We like to joke that he's from Northern Mexico. He's been out for about two months. He's pretty cool.

My other new companion has been out for about nine months. He came out a transfer after I did. He's really cool, too. He's from California.

We drive a Jeep Compass. My fifth different vehicle in the mission (the five being: Chevy Colorado, Nissan Frontier, Chevy Cruze, My bike, Jeep Compass). Pretty cool.

Our new area is awesome. We've had a lot of success in reactivating some of the members, and we've been tracting a lot to get new investigators. We referred a Young Single Adult from one of our great members to the YSA elders. We've had some really spiritual lessons, and we've especially had success with the less actives in our ward.

Catching Up - News from September 8

Well, I'm getting transferred.  I already learned that one of us was being transferred while the other trained. My companion is training and I'm transferring out. I'm going to a dual area in Missouri, it is in the same zone as my first area...totally excited for that. I'm definitely going to miss this area. It's been a very wonderful place.

I found out that a family in our stake at home are moving to Arkansas, and they are going to be in our mission president's ward. It's awesome!

Well, what happened this week:

• We tried to contact Less Actives that we've already contacted...but we weren't able to set up appointments with them. Their schedules are crazy.
• We did, however, set up appointments with our few investigators.
• We notified an individual about the Addiction Recovery Program...she's in the process of quitting...very sad that I won't be able to see her or another one of our investigators baptized.  Oh, well. I already have a testimony of transfers, so I know that I'm supposed to leave.
• This Sunday, I told the young men and the leaders that I was leaving.
• We taught Gospel Principles for my last Sunday. It was amazing, and I was able to leave our investigators with my departing testimony. It was a really cool experience.

This next week will be spent packing, saying goodbye, picture-taking, etc. I'll send the pictures to y'all!