Email June 18 2012

To Mom:  LOVE the picture! It’s super awesome! Also good job on the missionary experience! I’m glad you liked my mormon.org profile! I changed it a little bit but.... YOU GUYS STILL HAVENT MADE ONE! It would be super super awesome to be able to have all of you on there! You, Dad, Michelle, Brian, Ellen, Becky, Joey, Grandma, Grandpa, all the aunts and uncles! I would LOVE that! So please do it! You never know who could end up reading your testimony and it either 1. strengthens their testimony. Or  2. Begins to make a testimony for someone.

To Dad: I heard you were sick and I’m glad you’re doing better! I heard about your missionary experience with the Hindu guy! That’s pretty cool! Planting seeds! That’s what members should be doing! I wish people here could figure that out. Missionaries are here to Harvest not Plant! I mean planting happens along the way but if people are helping their friends be prepared way before we get there it just makes things so much better and their conversions so much stronger. So we got transfer calls last night. I’m staying.... again! haha I will have been here for soooo long! I will be here until July 31! Supposedly it gets hottest here in August so I’ll be leaving before that thankfully but still. hahaha 7 1/2 months of my mission will be here in B. I’m not too upset though because I have a good companion and things are going pretty well for us. I have some goals for this transfer that will keep us pretty busy. Such as I want to finish tracting our entire area. We are about half way right now. And I also want to have visited EVERY active member and at least know where all the less actives live so that I won’t need the ward list at all. I’m already pretty close with that one. I only need to look up an address every once in a while. The only changes in my district are my roommate Elder U is leaving. His companion is now going to be training so once again we will have an MTC fresh missionary here in B. Also one of the N S elders is getting transferred. Which will mean that in my district I will have been here the longest. I’m pretty sure I’ve actually been here one of the longest in the zone. I’ve seen pretty much everyone come and now go haha. Our week wasn’t that successful again. We tracted a bit. No cool stories there. Tracting though is a bit funner with a companion that you can mess around with. We saw some less actives. We saw 2 investigators but couldn’t get a hold of any of the families we are teaching so hopefully this week... it’s just tough on weeks like this. but now I’m like 98% sure this will be my last 6 weeks here and so we are going to get lots of work done and work even harder so I don’t miss anything I could have done here. Supposedly Elder N and I are going to be moving apartments soon and I’m super excited because the apartments they are moving us to are way nicer than the one we are in! It’s actually gated and the people that live there almost all of them work at Fort Irwin so none of them are drug dealers or partiers! It will be soooo nice! It can’t come soon enough haha that is pretty much all for this week! Hopefully next week I will have lots to write about! I love you tons! Have an awesome week! I hope your Father’s Day was great!

Email June 11 2012

You should have just sent some of that rain off this way! We need it here in B! Sounds like you all had a great trip though. That’s too bad Michelle wouldn’t go on Tower of Terror! When I went to Disneyland last year we went on that around 17 times I think. It was super fun! I know I didn’t used to like it but when you get older it’s not so bad. I’m sorry to hear that dad is sick... get the home teachers over to give him a blessing! Tell him I hope he gets better soon and that I love him! And just to clarify. It’s mormon.org not lds.org. mormon.org is focused on nonmembers and lds.org is for members. My profile isn’t up yet because it wouldn’t let me use my picture that I wanted to so I’m going in to fix it right after I’m done emailing you.

So this week’s email is going to be kind of short because this week was pretty much shot. Tuesday I took Elder U down to V to get an MRI for his knee and by the time we got back the day was pretty much over. Wednesday I had exchanges with Elder B my zone leader and it was pretty good. We didn’t have any scheduled appointments but we just went and tried to visit less actives and just meet with people. Thursday Elder U, his companion, and I all went down to Ro for a training meeting. It was a really really great meeting! There are about 18 missionaries going home this transfer and the group that is going home has been a major leadership group. 5 of them are currently zone leaders, a couple of them were past zone leaders, and one is an AP. so they had each of the missionaries that has spent a lot of time in leadership give 30 minutes trainings on different topics and give advice on how to best fulfill your mission. It was really sad though because a lot of the missionaries going home are the ones that I’ve looked to a lot and been friends with and now they aren’t going to be here! But it really was an amazing meeting. They mostly covered being obedient, working hard, and about making your studies effective.

Friday-Sunday was also pretty slow. It was just a dead week. We did meet with the L family the one with the 4 kids we are teaching and it was a little crazy. The 14 year old son wasn’t paying much attention and distracting the 2 younger girls. We found out he has ADHD so that explained it. But the mom was a really big help in helping us teach them and the 16 year old daughter was really paying attention pretty well. Sadly they didn’t make it to church again. I’m not sure what happened but it was definitely a bummer. We didn’t get a chance to see J because he was out at Yosemite for the weekend so that was a bummer and we haven’t met with S and A at all this transfer. They were at church though this week so I at least got to see them!

We did have a really neat experience on Saturday. The other 2 elders had a baptism of a 13 year old boy and a 12 year old girl and they had a ton of non members there so after they got baptized and we were waiting for them to get dried off and dressed we turned on a video about Joseph Smiths first vision. After it finished I got up and talked about it and I wish I could tell you more of what I talked about but as soon as I sat down I had no idea what I had said at all. I know it wasn’t even me talking. I know I did say a little bit and then I bore my testimony of the church and Elder N bore his testimony also. Afterwards we had a few of the non members thank us for our testimonies and we went to a lunch at the family’s house where most people went and Elder N started talking to a family there from South Africa who moved up here and found out that they are on our side and that they are interested in hearing our message! We are going to go try and see them this week! I sat down and got to talk with them a little bit and they were really friendly and were asking a lot of questions about missions and we just had a really good talk. This next week is looking to be a better one. Hopefully not so empty so we can get our numbers back up to where they were the week before.

 I hope everything goes great for you all and that you continue to have a great summer! I miss you all like crazy! It’s insane that it’s coming up to a year in just a couple months! It doesn’t seem like it’s been that long at all. I love you all!

Email June 4 2012

I wish I could go with you guys! We are going to have to see if we can find something to look at Venus with.

This week was quite the amazing week!! Tuesday went by pretty slow not too much happened at all. We went out to an older couples house and gave them blessings because they were going to be going on a long trip so that was good.

Wednesday we went down to R for a greenie meeting. I was in a tri-panionship with Elder C and Elder R again. We went to Ensign Book and I bought 2 journals; one for just my daily writing. The other is one that I’m going to have other missionaries sign throughout my mission. And we went out to lunch then did some studies because we didn’t have too much time to go to any of our areas. It was a pretty fun day and I was happy to be with some of the friends I have out here.

Thursday was definitely the best day of the week and most miraculous. We had an appointment with our investigator who we set the date with for October 13 and he says he knows the Book of Mormon is true and we just had a great talk about the Book of Mormon. After that we had an appointment with the lady that came to church with her 2 daughters last week. We found out she actually has 5 kids living at home from the ages of 11 - 18. We sat down and taught all of them except the 18 year old because he was having a bad day because he found out he wouldn’t be able to graduate. But we had a really powerful lesson with the other 4 and set baptismal dates for July 14! The mom was such an amazing help in that one. She brought the spirit really well. After that we went out to the V’s who are a part member family that we did a family home evening lesson with last week and this time we officially started teaching 2 of their kids and also the dad said he would listen and take the lessons which is a great improvement over last week! We set a date with both of the kids for July 28. It was just such a great day! We got 7 new investigators and 6 more baptismal dates! That’s more than I’ve had in a week my entire mission.

Friday-Saturday not a ton happened. It was soo soo hot here. We tried tracting and had absolutely no success. Knocking on doors in 100 degree weather is just sooo much fun.

Sunday evening we had an appointment with a family that is friends with a family in the ward. When we went they just had the attitude of just share your message but we aren’t really interested. By the end of us talking about the restoration and the Book of Mormon they were so much different. The mom said she really wanted to know if this was true and she would read and she really wants to come to church. It was so fantastic and the Spirit was sooooo strong! We got another 5 investigators with that making 12 in the entire week! That is going to be a hard one to beat in a week. I’ve only got a year to beat it haha. It was just soo amazing. Sadly we only had D B at church... we don’t know where everyone else was so we will need to stress the importance of church.

So one last thing. the mission has now started a thing where we are to get on Mormon.org 2 times a week for an hour each and just start using that in our finding and in our teaching and we are encouraged to have people make accounts on mormon.org so I’m going to ask ALLL of you minus Lyndsi because she is a little young but.. Michelle, Mom, Dad, Brian, Ellen, Becky, Joey, Grandma, and Grandpa and anyone else. Make profiles and tell EVERYONE about it. Any nonmember you run into tell them to check out your profile and others it is such a great source. I’m already on there so you can look mine up and see it! I love you all tons and miss you like crazy! Hope you have a great time at Disney World!

To Mom:  It really amazes me how tuned to the Spirit you are. I wish I was that tuned into the spirit and I’m working on it. our lesson in Gospel Principles yesterday was about the Holy Ghost and I shared about how you always seem to know when I’m having a hard time or am sick or something and how great you are at listening to the Holy Ghost. I’m glad everything worked out so great for the baptisms! I have a feeling that I will only be in B for another 2 weeks and that my training will be interrupted again... I’m not sure though and I honestly wouldn’t mind leaving B... it’s getting hot and I feel like I’ve met EVERYBODY here and know who is interested and who isn’t but I’ll definitely be here until I’m supposed to leave. The only thing that would upset me is just that me and my companion get along so well and just have a good time and are getting a lot of work done. But yeah its good!