Week 43 in Mesquite, TX

So this past week was pretty good. If you remember from last week I got that phone call from a former investigator named L. We met with her at a members house this week and it happened to be on the same day as another exchange with the zone leaders. So one of the zone leaders and I had the privilege to teach her. We went over the restoration and she remembers a lot but is is all jumbled up in her head. So we skipped around a lot to explain other things. She is a really awesome person. 

We taught her at a members home. L showed up like 15 min early and got to talk to them. they got along really nicely. It was a great lesson. The only problem is that she didn't come to church. She said that she would but then she didnt.

that is great Mikaela did so great. Hopefully she will break 20. I know she can do it.  Was it the same course as last year?  or have they changed it up again? it sounds like the team is getting good again. Are they going to contend for state again?

Taylor said that you will be taking them to the reservoir today. have fun. hope that the weather is nice. The past couple of days here have been a bit cold. We had a day in the low 70s. It felt super nice. I am being blessed with great weather on my mission.

Wow Emily is almost done isn't she? It has really been a year and a half has it? so Wayne and Shari will go to see her. I bet that island is pretty cool. 

You have only been to the temple 2 times this past year. I have been about 5 times already. You really need to step up your game. 

I will be looking for my package this week. I cant believe it has almost been a year. I need to celebrate. I know just how to celebrate the occasion. I will burn a shirt. At 6 months it is a tie (which i didnt do yet) at one year it is a shirt. and at a year and a half it is pants and at 2 years it is a suit.

yep those ones (pants) I am burning. Elder H had my same size and he grew out of them. so he left them for me and i have like 6 pairs of pants. 

 

My bag is about the same as it was when i last talked to you. i have had to sew a couple of parts. and i have been carrying a lot less stuff. Before i had my Spanish scriptures and two Spanish Book of Mormons in my bag. Now i only carry two Book of Mormons to hand out and a tiny bible. It takes a lot of weight off my shoulder.   

 

I haven't used that waterproofing you gave me at all. I still have the full bottle. My shoes are doing pretty fine. Cant wait to open my package on Wednesday. 

 

Another cool story was we were just riding our bikes around last Friday and there was this yard sale. We stopped and had a look around and asked the guy if he had any ties for sale and he told us to hold on one sec and he would bring them out. He brought out a 3 foot laundry basket full of ties. There were hundreds of ties there and I was able to get a couple of them to add to my collection.

oh BTW did you get my card i sent? it was another one i found in the apartment.

 

well i hope that you all had a great week. love you.

 

 

Missionaries leave behind interesting things!

 

Week 42 in Mesquite, TX

This week has been a lot like the last one, not much going on. It is like a roller coaster. One week you are full of appointments and the next you are bored out of your minds knocking and contacting.

I went on an exchange with the district leader Elder D this last Friday. It was fun being with him. He was once companions with Elder H. We spent almost the entire time talking about and making fun of elder H. No offense to him, but it is really easy to do.

I also got a random phone call from a girl on Friday. She said that she lived in East Texas and had been taking the lessons there. She had to move back to her parents house in Mesquite. She had found our phone number somehow and called me and asked for me by name. Cool huh. We will start teaching her on Tuesday. It is so cool that something like this happens. The Lord always blesses you after your hard work.

I LOVE THE PICTURES!!!!!!!!!! THANK YOU SOOOOOOOOOO MUCH.

So Dad told you to write short did he. He wrote me a pretty long email. Oh well. 

I can't wait to see all of the changes you have done to the house. I love you and thanks for the pictures once again.

 

Here is a picture of my new protein. It cost $20 as compared to $40 dollars and it has 29 servings as compared to 8. 

Also I heard that you had some problems with receiving my garbage chair 3 picture so here it is.

Can you look up for me object lessons that I can use in my missionary lessons. I want to use some new ones. If you could help me that would be great. thank you

 

Well sorry I don't have any more funny stories for y'all this week. I hope that you have a great week. love ya

 

 

 

Week 41 in Mesquite, Texas

So hi everyone!
How has your week been? I can sum up the week in two words, we tracted. Pretty exciting. Oh and BTW we baptized. Just a little important fact. His name is J O and he had been investigating for 5 years. It was really Neat. One of the first sister missionaries that first taught him came and was able to see him be baptized. He was really excited. The spirit was really strong there. This is what it makes it all worth it.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA coach Barnes. Did you ask him if he was wearing his headlight or did he forget it? You should really get on him about it.

It is too bad about Wayne's mom. It must be really tough for him. I hope all goes well.

I need to write Grandma it has been a while. I have just been a bit busy and stressed.

How big are your pumpkins? The members here have been cooking veggies from their garden. It reminds me a lot of home. We have been offering to help with the gardening. It is sad, I miss gardening. 

Derek just emailed me. He sounds super exited to go. I hope that he does well.  

 

Oh and BTW Page  says hi. She is in my zone now.  

And one more question, can you bombard me with pictures of you guys next week. Like old pictures that you have on the computer. I have a small mp3 and I have all the pictures that you have ever sent me on it and I love looking through it. Thank you.

 

Love y'all lots.
Have a great week.

Week 40 in Mesquite, Texas

This week has been a bit hard. We have basically taught all of our new members the new member lessons. So we are going back into finding mode. More knocking doors. Knocking doors is a bit interesting with Elder M, because even though he can speak English his accent is sometimes very hard to understand for some people. He wants to teach in Spanish but our work is pure English and I can tell it bothers him sometimes. It is also a lot different than Spanish work because you can go a whole day without a single lesson and in Spanish work someone will let you in. He also doesn't speak much when we did have lessons so I have had to step up and take the lead in teaching which is kind of hard sometimes. I still stutter a lot during the lesson, but this transfer will help me improve my teaching.  I get to speak a lot of Spanish to my companion so I will learn to speak better.

Elder M has been in the mission for 7 months. He lived in Jersey all through high school and know English OK. It is hard sometimes for others to understand him. He really wants to be doing Spanish work and he is kind of bummed right now. This might sound funny but I don't know what is faster to do with him, walk everywhere or bike. It frustrates me sometimes but I need to be more patient with him.

J is still set for the 30th. He is so excited for it. Elder H is comeing back for the baptism.

I am glad that Mikaela is getting some practice with her car before mine. and i am glad to hear that she can drive forward. Now all I need to worry about is her getting fender benders in the parking lots backing out, but it won't do as much damage to my car.

So they assigned me to teach the Gospel Doctrine class next week. It is lesson 32. The last lesson I had to do was last week in elders quorum and they told me at 7 the night before just right before transfers. I stumbled so much through the lesson and I spaced out for like 2 min. If it weren't for the elders quorum president I would have ended like 20 min early. I was so embarrassed.

We have begun a hunt to track down all the less actives and unknowns in our ward. It will be a lot of work but hopefully something will come out of it. Other than that not much exciting things have happened other than my companion almost burning the apartment to the ground. He was making some popcorn in a pot and he put oil in the pot. When the popcorn was done he left the pot on and after a while it caught on fire. I ran over and turned the stove off and put a lid on the pot and then Elder M took the pot and was going to pour it in the sink and pour water in it but i stopped him in time. The lid was too big for the pot and it took a couple of seconds before the fire burned out. The worst part was that the apartment was filled with smoke. We had to let it air out for like an hour. It was a good thing it was a planning day. 

Well that was my funny story for the week. Hope your week was great and have a great week.

 

New companion

Transfers

 

 

Week 39 in Mesquite, Texas

So transfer calls happened last saturday and I have sad news, Elder H is leaving me. I will be getting Elder M. He is from Peru. I have served around him in Carrollton. I am exited.

So last saturday we had a baptism, S K. The room was pack full of people. She wanted to be baptized before elder H left and we did it right in time. It was a great experience to see and the spirit was really strong there. This month I will have at least 1 more baptism. His name is J and his date is on the 30th.

 

You will love this one, we have more garbage chairs in our apartment. I forgot to take pictures but I will next time. One is an office chair and one is a small leather chair.

 

This last week not much has happened. We have been working hard on our new map and on our ward directory to get everything planned. I have a few more things that I need to do and then we will start teaching everyone.

I hope everyone had a great week.

love ya.

Baptism

Another dumpster chair.

Week 38 in Mesquite Texas

If there was a hashtag for the week it would be #dumbdecision115.

So this week we had a baptismal interview for a investigator named S. She had been comming to church for a couple of months. Some of her friends are members and they invited her and she has been coming ever since. So last Wednesday we had a lesson with her and it was over lessons 4 and 5 of Preach My Gospel and at the end she asked when can I get baptized?  We told her whenever you want. She asked Elder H when is he going to leave because she wants to get baptized before he leaves. We told her we dont know when he is leaving we get calls the Saturday the 16th and she said that she wants to get baptized on Saturday the 16th. So we needed to have her interviewed on Friday. So we had the interview and SHE PASSED! So my next baptism will be this Saturday. Yay

Also we had a zone meeting on Wednesday and they want us working with the ward members more and spend less time knocking doors. So we are going to start focusing more on that. So that night we had a meeting with the bishop and he wants us going through the ward list and cleaning it out and meeting every member. So we wanted to map out every member on a map and so we made a map. We already had a small map on the wall but we wanted it to be bigger so we went to office max and made the map bigger. Then we cut it in half and made the map even bigger. It is now 36 square feet. Then we got it laminated and put it on our wall and all of the missionaries are jealous of our map. #dumbdecision115 (it ended up costing $115)

 

Tell Mikaela to keep trying hard and she will learn. I am just jealous of how skinny she is. I have gotten kind of chubby here. I weighed myself and I weigh 167! A lot more than I weighed before. I have been working and out and taking protein.  I have more muscle.

Elijah was a cool prophet. I like the story of him with the priests. Did you tell the story of Elisha and the Shebears?

The library here is kind of busy and they wont give more time I will see what I can do, but I need to go.

 Oh, by the way lamination is Expensive. #dumbdecision115

Well I hope that you all had a great week.

#dumbdecision$115

 

Week 37 in Mesquite, TX

Sorry it has taken me so long to write today. It has been a bit busy. We went to a museum in Dallas called the Pro Museum. It was really cool. They had Fossils there and other interactive things. We went with other missionaries who got tickets for free from a member. There was an exibit there where we could do a 100 foot dash with some athletes and some animals. I raced Jarell Barker and lost. sad. I was just piont 10 seconds from him. Then we went to Hard Rock Cafe and ate there and took some pictures with the guitars there. And now we are e-mailing at SMU. It has been a pretty busy day.

Not much has happened this week. No more crazy costumes and animals. The weather has been really nice. We set the record for the second coldest day in July. The sad news is that it is supposed to start getting hotter this week. They say that we will reach 100 by the end of the week.

We  have been knocking alot of doors this week and a lot of our appointments have dropped. Hopefully this week will be busier.

Hope that you guys had a great week.

Dumpster Chairs

Flash!!!

Trip to museum