Email Nov 20 2012

I’m really excited for Thanksgiving! We got invited to a few people’s homes. We are playing football with the stake in the morning and then there are a couple people who are having late Thanksgiving meals on like Saturday that invited us. We even had a Thanksgiving meal last night! ahhh it’s so good!

 

I can’t believe it’s already week 5 of the transfer! It’s going way fast. Today we are going up with some other missionaries to Lake Arrowhead to go visit around the village and look at all the shops and just have a relaxing pday. It’s been kind of funny because Elder H and I have been trying to work on our Spanish. I can now pray in Spanish. Not well. But it’s getting there! haha I’m going to keep practicing. It will be useful if I can learn Spanish.

There’s another Kevin Graf??? woah!

 

Well this week was pretty good! We had a couple really awesome experiences. One was when I was tracting with Elder N. We go up to our first door and Elder N knocks. Nothing. He knocks again. Nothing. He knocks one last time and waits and then goes to put a card on the door and all of a sudden somebody knocks from the other side. It took us by surprise but I thought it was funny so I knocked back in a little beat. Then he knocked again. After that we just waited for a minute and a younger guy opened the door and was like "hey you didn’t finish the beat." We all laughed and then started to share a little about our message. He told us he is a big believer in Jesus and asked if we had any reading material so without hesitation Elder N asked him if he had heard of the Book of Mormon. We then explained what it was and asked him to read Moroni’s promise and then got his info to come back. We bore our testimonies to him and Elder N stuck a pass along card in the Book of Mormon on 2 Nephi 33 and asked him to read it and he asked if we were thirsty, got us some water and while we drank the water he stood there and read the chapter. After he finished he said he really liked what he had read and wanted us to come back. It was sooooo neat and the Spirit was sooo strong. After that a little ways up the street there were a couple of kids trying to get a couple of balls out of a tree we asked if they wanted help. Turns out they had a basketball, a soccer ball and 3 footballs all stuck in this big ol tree. So Elder N got one football out and the basketball out and then Elders H and P showed up and Elder H got one of the other footballs out and was working on the soccer ball and I was trying to get the highest football. Finally we were going to just give up and go but we both gave them one more shot. I threw the basketball up and hit the football out! But that’s not all. The basketball came back down, bounced twice and swooshed into the basketball hoop! Haha that couldn’t be repeated if I tried the rest of my life!

 

Not too much else was really neat this week. We did get to go with our ward down to Redlands temple and set up the manger scene they have out and that was super fun. Sadly I forgot my camera but when we go back to the temple to help clean it in a couple weeks I’ll take some pictures. Well that was pretty much the highlights from our week! Love you tons!

Email Nov 13 2012

To Mom:  It’s sooo crazy that next week is Thanksgiving! I will officially spend both of my Thanksgivings being companions with Elder H! haha pretty crazy! I miss Zion’s a lot. I actually have a post card that Sister Plumb sent me that is a picture of Zion’s and I used it for my planner cover for this transfer! haha its great to look at every day!  So where is everyone going for Thanksgiving this year? Not really much to talk about this week just sending quick emails to everyone and getting back to work! Love you so much!

To Dad:  Well this week I’m not going to do a long email. Nothing really exciting happened anyways but because it was a holiday yesterday I didn’t get to email so I’m just sending short ones to everyone this week.

I guess a cool experience that we had this last week was when I was tracting with Elder M. We knocked on a door and this 20 year old black kid answers the door and just says "oh come on in!" so we went in and started talking to him and it turns out that he said he has seen missionaries on their bikes all over for the last 4 years but none of them have ever stopped to talk to him. He also told us that he wasn’t sure about religion because "there are so many churches but how are we supposed to know which one is right?" so we briefly summarized about how God loves us and has restored his church to the earth and Elders D and M are going to go back and teach him tomorrow and if he is still interested they are handing him over to us! It was really neat though and his is just a super nice awesome kid. Definitely looking for something. Anyways that’s about it for this week! Love you tons!

Email Nov 5 2012

To Mom:  It always seems like they spring those meetings on you at the last second! That’s happened to me more than enough out here haha That sounds like a lot of fun to have Leesa over. I remember her from mannny years ago haha. Not really a ton happened this week. We had a meeting ALL day Thursday that we as zone leaders now have to train our zone on tomorrow. It should go pretty well though! Things have definitely been going a lot better! We are getting more work done (not as much as I’d like sometimes but enough) and I love our zone members and being in the San B zone. This next week is hopefully going to be really good! I’m glad to hear that Becky and Joey are doing okay. We had a lot of people talk about the Hurricane over here and it was a good conversation starter to say "oh yeah I have a sister over there!" All in all our week wasn’t terrible but there is definitely lots of room for improvement! I love you tons and hope your meetings go great!

To Dad:  Well this week was really great actually! We got 2 new investigators. One was a kid named D. He is friends with that member I was talking about last week annndd it went okay. He wasn’t as super solid as I thought he was. He doesn’t believe that there is just one true church. We are going to work with him still though for at least another couple weeks. We also taught this girl in our wards roommate! It was on Halloween and we didn’t have a ton of time so we did a lesson on faith and did what we call the faith rocket where you light a tea bag on fire on their hand and right before it gets to their hand it floats off and doesn’t burn them. It’s pretty neat. We asked her and her roommate what they could do to strengthen their faith and A (the investigator) said go to church. So we invited her to church and she said she would come the next week because she had to work. Then K (The member) said she could do better at reading the scriptures and A was like "I’ll read them with you!" It surprised us all! She also said she would pray! It was pretty neat because we weren’t sure how solid she was going to be but it’s looking good! Also W is progressing very well! We moved her baptism date back to the 24th and she came to church again and likes to meet with us and just eats up what we teach! It’s super neat to see! Other than that there wasn’t a whole lot this week.. We did absolutely nothing on Halloween night. It was really lame. We went tracting a couple times with other Elders but not much happened. So a couple really good things and then just kinda a busy week with Zone leader stuff... but oh well! I love you tons and hope you have a great week!

Email Oct 29 2012

Well basically in a singles ward that is DEAD work wise and being a zone leader we don’t get very much new stuff going on so our week was pretty much average... We did get to teach 3 people unexpectedly which was awesome! We just went to a member’s house to share a message and whoa... They had a friend their so we shared lessons with them! They were all hesitant to learn more but we at least taught them! Also our investigator W came to church yesterday with her boyfriend who I found out is a returned missionary! Sweet! So she will hopefully get baptized in a couple weeks! We also had a pretty cool thing at church! so we had been trying to get this member to help his friend want to take the lessons and his friend kept saying no so we were pretty much just giving up on him... well yesterday the member came up to us and said he asked his friend again and he finally agreed!! The thing is that his friend has only missed church 1 time since I’ve been here and goes to FHE and Institute he is sooo just ready to get baptized! So wish us luck with him and pray for us!

Also some cool news! Elder N my favorite comp is now training... and he is in our zone!! He lives right across the street from us so I get to see him all the time! It’s super awesome! A couple more just really cool/funny experiences.

1. I went tracting with Elder N and we had TONS of weird things happen. We got a LEGIT door slammed on us and afterwards the old lady yelled swear words at us out the window and complained about how she had to get up when she didn’t want to and how we were bugging people. We just laughed and it made her more mad. Oh well. We got offered some beer. That’s always funny. Some guy said he had one question for us so we said go ahead and he asked "Do you really believe that you will become Gods of your own world based on how you lived here and how many children you have?" We said, "Well that’s some deep doctrine and we don’t believe it matters how many children we have." So he said "Just answer the question.. do you really believe you will be gods of your own world?" and Elder N just was like "yep!" and we tried to tell him where it says it in the Bible such as Psalms 82:6 and Romans 8: 16-17 but he just waved us off and told us if we told people that we might offend them. It was weird. So also Elder N got scared by some dogs and then we saw a chicken just wandering around someone’s front yard! haha It was soooo weird! All this happened in about an hour haha pretty awesome.

2. I went tracting with Elder M and we go to knock on the first door and this kid comes out before we even get to the door and we do our little summary of what we are there for and asked if we could take 15-20 minutes to share a message and he said sure! So we sat down right there and taught an amazing restoration lesson which was cool because we have never really taught before but it flowed way well and hopefully Elder M and A will be able to teach the whole family. But it was just cool because it was the FIRST door we went to. Usually it’s the last but we had a good time and the kid was kind of younger and really relaxed and had a lot of really good input. So there is a chance there!

Well that’s really about all! Things are going really well! Hopefully the work picks up more and more! I love you tons and miss you lots!