25 Apr 2016

Kind of a weird week But I’ll start off with the big news so you don’t have to bother reading the whole thing. I'M GETTING TRANSFERRED!!!!!! It’s a bummer in some ways but I’m super excited!!! So I will be moving down to Pocatello central 2, and be the district leader companion to Elder Dawson! I've been told by like three people that he's a "work horse" so I’m excited for what’s to come!!!!

Monday- Pretty slow Monday. I was super tired so I didn’t really even participate in the p-day activity I just chilled and talked to people. After P-day we saw Melba! I've mentioned her before but she's this super crazy lady in her late 80's and she was telling me I had to call president and let him know I couldn't move because there was this little old lady that had broken her hip and was almost converted to the gospel. We spent most of our evening just doing a puzzle with her. Then we got a call from Bishop Petersen and he said he needed us for a blessing for his little daughter. So we went over there and his little daughter Emma had a double ear infection. It is not easy to give a blessing to a baby in pain, they don’t sit still. But we gave him a hand then he walks around the corner and goes yea we were at Reed's dairy so we picked you up a tub of ice cream. We are pretty sure that was like 60% of the reason he called us over, because he's able to give his daughter a blessing himself, but I love the guy and I’m going to miss correlating at his house.

Tuesday- District meeting, we've been keeping the focus lately on teaching the lessons so we split into two groups and took turns teaching each other. It's weird because when your teaching missionaries we want to bring spiritual enlightenment so we get a lot more in depth, but when you’re teaching investigators explaining all this stuff has to be a lot simpler. Today the ZLs had a couple of double scheduled lessons and we didn’t have anything scheduled for the night so we went on exchanges, and doubled up on their area. I went with Elder Bushman, and we from there went on splits with members, so I met Cheryl really nice lady that basically works to hard, and she talked for most of the time then I basically shared a scripture and headed to the next appointment. With Jarrett he recently got out of prison and he is awesome, like obviously mistakes were made but he's been taking the lessons and is already being a member missionary, he's sending B.o.M to his family and friends. He won’t be able to be baptized until he’s off parole but he’s so solid.

Wednesday- A slower day but it was good, we took Martha (a less active) to the V.C and watched the restoration video, and we also had Jason's interview! That’s about all I remember from today.

Thursday- Planning day, so the morning was basically planning, but the afternoon got better. We had a lesson with the Hebdons and we finally finished L1 and we've had several lessons with them, they talk a lot and we get along so the lessons take a while, but I really feel like they are progressing well! Then we went and saw the Staleys and reviewed L3 with them. So last week Meadow finally warmed up to us and she talked none stop, then this week we brought over a new face just a guy preparing to go on a mission and she was super shy again. Then we were going to meet with Dave but he sent us a message and said, I think I’ll hold off on seeing you guys until next week I want to read the book of Mormon so we have something to talk about. I have no clue if he meant the whole thing or just like some chapters but at least he's showing interest.

Friday- Back to work at the soup kitchen we always meet a few crazy people there this time his name was Wayne and he was super nice but he kept giving us hugs and stuff saying how awesome we were for serving missions, and I’m pretty sure he isn’t LDS but hey potential. Then we helped Green and Christensen (they were on exchanges) gives a blessing to this crazy lady. She had a heart of gold but she was a little out there. We went and saw Dominic and he was being a bum to us because he was grounded but, his mom ended up texting his dad while we were there and he now has permission to be baptized! Then on our way to dinner we met a schizophrenic guy and he was super nice but just a little weird, there were a lot of crazy people today.

Saturday- Jason's baptism! nuff said! but it was a really good service his soon to be family in law did a really good job with the program. During a video/testimony intermission we gave while they changed the AP's called us about transfers... worst timing in the world. then we had a lunch in over at their house, but left a bit early to start moving. Not for transfers just the third time I’ve moved apartments in the same area, so I haven't even bothered unpacking because I’m going to be gone to Pocatello soon.

Sunday- Busy day we tried to make it to all our wards so I could say good byes to people but the 26th ward cancelled church because they had a power outage. So we didn’t make it to the 26 and 28th ward. But Bishop Petersen did call me up on the stand to give a farewell testimony; I guess is what I would call it. But it was a crazy busy day in the 11th ward, Jason got confirmed and they had a missionary home coming. We finished up the day by visiting Melba so I had to break the news that I was for sure leaving. Just been a crazy week

Anyways I hope you all are doing well!!!

18 Apr 2016

I've been super tired this week and am not sure why. Oh and transfer calls are coming up this Saturday and it sounds like I will be transferred for the first time! The thing I find weird is that after this week I will have moved three times to different apartments but I haven't been transferred once.

Monday- Was pretty legit nothing special as far as shopping goes, but for p-day activity we combined with the Ammon zone and played soccer, kickball and smashed soda cans with a bat (pretty good stress relief). After Zone activity we and the zone leaders exchanged for the evening. I'm not entirely sure why... but it was a pretty good Monday. Elder Bushman and I went around in my area and we caught the Hebdons and caught up with them and shared a lesson on the seed of faith. Then we stopped by Dave's and his door was open and T.V was on but he didn’t answer, so we went back to the apartment to grab our directory.... and both of our companions had the apartment keys. So we started going back out to look for something to do when Dave passed by in his little convertible and turned towards his house. So we just kind of followed him and chatted for a bit. He's a super solid guy. Literally every time I talk to him I feel the spirit, He's so prepared. After our chat we headed over to the V.C to get a baptism interview done for the west stake elders. And that about wrapped up the night.

Tuesday- District meeting morning and we got our topics last night so luckily it was all about teaching lesson one and it was kind of like a giant role play. So we all taught each other. It was weird though because we were teaching other missionaries so we all ended up going way deeper into detail and thoughts than we normally would with someone just learning the gospel. We talked about why the first vision is important (like why is it important that Heavenly Father, and Christ showed themselves to Joseph), about how the Great apostasy isn't a sea of pasta, but actually a sign that we are in the last days, and other details that would not normally be discussed in the first discussion. Not much else occurred today we had to break the news to Jason that we aren't allowed to do water’s edge confirmations; we worked the baptismal program and other boring stuff.

Wednesday- This morning was pretty cool so we got the chance to go to several seminary classes and share messages, mostly pertaining to member missionary work and being an example of Christ, but it was a pretty cool opportunity and I think a few kids actually took it to heart! Hopefully they're better than I was at their age (a whole year and a half ago) and actually act on the things missionaries ask them to do. Then we had a lesson with a couple of less active ladies who are quitting smoking and trying to get temple worthy. Then we went over to a pot luck and saw Patricia there. Her life is still a bit of a mess but she's improving and that’s awesome.

Thursday- weekly planning for the first half of the day, and then we had interviews!!!! Interviews were awesome, it’s always cool to get council from President and from what he said it sounds like am going to get transferred. He never thinks about it until like 5 days before transfers but he said there was going to be a lot of changes. So transfers should be fun! I don’t want to leave this area but at the same time I feel like I need a change. I've been here half a year! All I can say is six months took way longer to pass by when I was working at Wal-Mart.

Friday- The only thing I really remember is working at the soup kitchen and that’s about it, but we did end up with a referral out of it. Plus we got to do service so win-win.

Saturday- I finished the Book of Mormon!!!! Ok well that was deceiving so I finished the Book of Mormon in the book of Mormon, so not the whole Book of Mormon. I think that’s still confusing so as simply as I can put it I have Ether and Moroni left to study. Most of the afternoon consisted of working on talks and helping with the sister’s baptism. Later we saw Noah and we are hoping to go fishing with him next Monday. Then we saw the Heaths and helped them move a few things in their house and caught up with them.

Sunday- The talks went really well I feel. Elder Browning talked about forgiveness and I spoke on repentance. It’s always tough to tell if the talk actually went well because the ward is always kind. But I feel like we did a really good job and I know my talk a least helped one lady. She was visiting from another ward and said she had to teach on repentance next week and didn’t know what to say. But now she does. Then we split with the Zone leaders. All four of their churches start at 1 o’clock and we have no wards that hour so we split with them and they had 4 investigators attending the ward. I went to with Elder Green! After we had a baptismal interview for one of their investigators, super funny guy. Really country. He drives truck and is super solid in the gospel. Then for the rest of the day we basically just met with Bishop Petersen.

All and all it was a decent week could have been better could have been worse. Hope all of you are doing well!

11 Apr 2016

This week flew by

Monday- Nothing special while we shopped or anything, But P-day activity was legit, so over in Eagle Rock where all the rich folk in I.F. live. There is this old wealthy farmer guy and he has this building behind his house. He calls it his play house and it has a swimming pool (which we didn’t use) a basketball court, 2 ping pong tables, Foosball, air hockey, corn hole, and a bunch of other miscellaneous things to do. So we had a corn hole tournament, (just in case some people call it a different thing corn hole is the bean bag toss game) and I quit after the first game I won. Elder Lawlor carried our team. He sank like three in the hole right in a row. Then some of us moved on to ping pong. I got a little heated during it and smashed the ball. It shot over and hit sister Fielding right in the throat and left a welt and now she won’t let me forget about that. After P-day we went over and saw Dominic and just reviewed some lessons. It was a pretty good day!

Tuesday- In the morning we went and helped out Jason with his house again and talked about his baptism program. We spent a couple of hours there mudding the dry wall. We also moved some beds around for him. We worked on the program for a while then stopped by Dominic again to review some more stuff and show him his program.

Wednesday- I don’t remember everything that was going on but we saw Martha, a less active who is trying to quit smoking. We didn’t meet for that long; just talked about getting her to see bishop Then on our way back home we RAN INTO PATRICIA AND MIKE! So if you remember, Patricia had a baptism date that fell through then she moved and fell off the radar. Mike is her friend; he's crazy. I love the guy but he's like half insane. When I saw these two walking, I like flipped out and flew over to the other side of the street. I kind of freaked them out but they were super happy to see us. So we parked our bikes and went for a walk with them before dinner. They are doing awesome! Patricia is working on getting everything back together. She definitely still has a testimony of the church. She just needs to overcome some stuff. Then Mike, ever since I’ve known him he's just been really into science and aliens, for the first time said he is warming up to the idea of God! He says every time he talks with us he just feels better about himself.  Just goes to show, "by love shall all men know that we are his disciples." These two are the first two people I taught. On my very first day in the field we went to Mike's house and had a lesson with Patricia on faith. I was super awkward and had no clue what to do. Just a lot of history with those two.

Thursday- Zone Training!!!! Love zone training. Mostly because I’ve really come to love learning. I wish I was this engaged when I was in high school. We went and helped Jason again. Now that the mud was dry we got to sand down everything. He didn’t like how the power sander did it so we did it all by hand. Now by no means are we professional carpenters. We are pretty lucky he is like 60% blind so he can’t really tell if we do a bad job. As we were leaving his wife-to-be showed up and found donuts in his freezer. He's diabetic and his mom keeps sending him donuts because she works at the bakery, so he gets all the extras. So his wife-to-be won’t let him eat donuts so he passes them on to us. We got about 2 dozen normal donuts because of that but tomorrow gets better.

Friday- Today was pretty neat. We helped out at a soup kitchen. That was tons of fun. All the people that came through were really kind and friendly. We might end up doing it again. But after the soup kitchen we were out and about when we got a call from Jason and he had some donuts for us to pick up. So we stopped by his house and he had 6 dozen donuts...... so we carried them all home. We ended up giving away two dozen on the way home.

Saturday- Today there was just too much food. So one of the donuts we got is this monster donut like 6 donuts in one at least and I decided I would try to eat it as fast as I could. It still took like 5 mins. Then we went to breakfast with a senior couple from the V.C and I ate there. Then we did some service and they made us lunch then we planned and got picked up for dinner. I’m amazed I didn’t throw up. Today was another big service day, we helped an elderly lady with her lawn and moved a wood pile and stuff. It was a lot of fun and her grand kids were there to help out so they kept us entertained. Then after dinner we were going to make a visit when this lady across the street yells, "Are you missionaries? Can you help us move this stuff out?" So we did some random service and they just had us move everything they couldn’t carry which is pretty typical, but we were more than happy to help and we might get a new investigator out of it.

Love all of you

4 Apr 2016

Crazy service week, like I’ve never done this much service in one week before, or probably in a month but it was a lot of fun!!! It’s a long e-mail but the weekend was the best, even if the things I typed don’t make sense. I think they do. I always feel like it doesn’t come out the way I want it to when I type.

Monday- P-day was pretty cool; I still had no money so I was living off my stock pile of oatmeal and nature valley bars. I didn’t have any milk though luckily one of the Elders had an extra gallon so I had some. After the activity we went and saw Dominic, one of our investigators with a date, and taught him about the commandments. He kept asking if he was going to be tested on this. We told him he might,so he had a plan to come up with a plan to make flashcards and stuff  He's 12 so it’s funny to see him get excited about this. We asked if he was saying his prayers and he said every night he prays that Heavenly Father will come to him so he can call us over and we can shake his hand. I don’t know how to break it to him that that most likely won’t happen.

Tuesday- The service begins. So from 10 to noon we helped a couple in a neighboring stake move things out of their house (they're moving) but there nephew who is in our YSA area was supposed to show up and he didn’t. But we meet him later on in the week! They called us over just for the biggest things; you know washer, the fridge and freezer, giant dressers, those things. I guess that’s the curse of being young. Luckily enough we got a pizza for helping out, so the Lord provides for you when you go forth without coin or purse. That’s a fact! I still suggest not wasting all your money though. After that service project we went to Jason's and helped him do some dry walling in the house has renovating. That went from like 1-3. Then we started our normal proselyting and taught a less active who’s basically an active member now. They just like to see us. One of our normal lessons for today Brother Kisley (a recent convert) isn’t going on anymore; He got deployed to Turkey, soooooo yea kind of hard to teach him now.

Wednesday- This morning was District meeting which was really good. Sadly one of the sisters was sick and so it was just us and the zone leaders. Afterwards we went and saw a less active lady. She's in a group home because she is mentally handicapped but she's really nice but it’s hard to teach her. It feels like everything I say just goes over her head or in one ear and out the other. It was an ok lesson. Every meeting with her is a little awkward but we are going to keep doing our best to help her. I’m sure the Spirit will do more work than what I actually say. After we went over to Dominic's and helped them throw away a ton of stuff that got flooded in their basement. We left for dinner, changed then came back to pick him up for a church tour. And that about wrapped up the day. Oh I almost forgot one of the biggest things, Jason called up President Nelson and they talked, then we talked to P Nelson and he gave us the go to baptize Jason. All the Legal stuff is cleared up!

Thursday-More service. We went back to the couple in Eagle Rock to help them install carpet and we got to meet Noah, the nephew. He's a carpet installer so he knew what he was doing. We were just some extra hands, heavy lifting and stuff. If you are young and offer to move heavy things don’t expect people to hold back! Anyway, Noah is a super chill guy. He's got this monster beard, and looks a bit like a mountain man but he's got a heart of gold. He's really into fishing and camping; outdoor stuff. Then he's also really in to League (a video game, that I was really into) so we had a lot in common. We didn’t get around to talking about the gospel this time it was mostly just work and get to know you, but we knew we were going to see him a few more times because there’s a lot of carpet to install. We figured for the first day it was best just to build a strong friendship. We got pizza for lunch again! So I’m still not starving! Afterwards we went to see Cole and Loren, Cole is a prospective Elder and Loren is a non-member. She has taken the lessons in the past to "understand" Cole better, and she's taking the lessons again so we are pretty sure this time it’s for her to know if the church is true or not. We spent a lot of time just talking. Then when we started the lesson, we only got through the first two principles. It was a really good lesson. A lot of testifying of God’s love and how families are blessed through the gospel and how families can bless us. We went and met Jesus (sounds like Hey-Zeus) at institute and it was an odd lesson. It was about how God loves all his children, and the curse of blackness doesn't make the Book of Mormon racist. He talked about how skin of blackness is an idiom. He compared it to a verse in the O.T where Jeremiah say "I AM BLACK" meaning he is depressed, not he is literally black. Then he compared several other verses to it. But it was a good day.

Friday- More service, back over to Eagle Rock to help with the carpet again. More heavy lifting and moving things out and what not. We did talk more about the gospel this time. We didn’t teach a lesson per se but we found out where he is with religion. We also ended up giving him a blessing. He has this weird forearm thing that carpet installers get. It’s like a big lump on his arm. It was cool that he was willing to have a blessing. Then we all ate pizza for lunch. This family is crazy about pizza but I’m hungry so I’m not complaining. Afterwards we helped Jason again. Turns out he had tons of extra sheets of drywall so we had to move it out of his basement into his garage. I would guess we moved over 1300 pounds of drywall. The rest of the day wasn't too eventful.

Saturday- Conference Started!!!!!! I've been told by several people that the Conferences on your mission will be the best of your life and they weren't wrong. I don’t know if this conference was just better than the past or if it’s just because I didn’t listen before. (probably the second one) I’m not even going to try and write down the things that I learned at conference. I don’t have time or the desire to write down that much again. So the whole day was just at church. Priesthood session was really cool. I loved President Uchtdorf's talk. During it one of the big things that stuck out to me was charity is the defining characteristic of Christ which I knew. But then has said therefore pride must be the defining characteristic of the devil. I've always know pride was not a good thing but it put into perspective on how I can look at each action I do. Is it prideful and for myself or is it selfless and charitable, or which of those does the activity lead too.

Sunday- Another great day of Conference, I don’t have my notebook on me so I have no idea what sessions which talks were given in or who gave them for most of the talks at least. But one of my favorite things that I heard, not necessarily the most helpful for me to know and apply in my mission but it brought a lot of peace. Someone was talking about the "fairness" of life or more so the "unfairness" and he said "if life was fair there would be no resurrection" and it’s true if life was fair Christ wouldn't have performed the atonement, and we would all be doomed to live in our miserable sinful states and get our just reward. But because of Christ, life is unfair in the fact that, for all the misdeeds and sins we commit we can receive remission and have more joy in returning to our Father in heaven than we rightfully deserve to have. Life isn't fair and I’m glad it’s not, so the next time you’re weighed down in depression, thinking it’s not fair that this circumstance has happened to you, I invite you to remember the eternal perspective, and opportunity we have to receive a joy that isn't fair for us to even have the opportunity to receive. This life isn't supposed to be easy, but if we endure it well, all things that seem unfair will be fixed and I suppose that more than likely we won’t feel worthy to that joy that we will receive. I hope that, that made sense.

This week has been amazing and I hope you all enjoy the week to come!

Love you all

Elder Hoffman