23 May 2016

Crazy week as usual. So it started off really bad...

Monday- I was sick, I woke up at 2am and was violently ill until 5am, and the rest of the day I just wanted to sleep. By the end of p-day I was able to go around without feeling terrible.

Tuesday- Elder Dawson got sick..... We lost most of the afternoon but I was able to split in the evening and make a few visits

Wednesday- so this made up for the last two days of sickness. We didn’t see each other for about half the day because we had so many splits set up. We did weekly planning in the morning because we had zone conference the next day so we had to plan early; we also ended up picking up a 3rd elder for the day. Because of the upcoming mission split Elder Dart (one of our ZL's got moved) so when he left we watched Elder Horne.

Thursday- Zone Conference with Wilfred W Anderson of the seventy. It was Awesome a lot of cool and helpful things were said more than I'm going to bother typing, but it was even better than I expected.

Friday- we went on exchanges and I went over to central 1 with elder Boatright. He's a super awesome guy probably one of the best at and one of the few that’s actually good at door approaches. Sadly we didn’t really get a chance to teach together but we had a lot of contacts and got things set up.

Saturday- the day came!We had FIVE baptisms today! The service was a little crazy/ One of them almost didn’t make it, but everything ended up going well. Sadly I don’t have any pictures. The kids were very opposed to having any pictures taken.

Sunday- We had all five confirmations in one ward and then Elder Dawson also gave a baby blessing. It was about a half hour of blessings I think the speakers didn’t mind though.

Have a good week, sorry I didn’t type more this week. Love you all!!!!

16 May 2016

What’s up everyone? This week just seemed super long. So something I left out last week was that we gave talks on Sunday (Mother’s Day) and we were asked to speak on....*drumroll*.... missionary work... We both tried to find ways to incorporate Motherhood and missionary work together, while still giving advice on how to be an effective member missionary. Apparently the ward really liked it but it was one of the more unusual talks I've given.

Monday- I don’t remember really anything about this last Monday. Luckily I have a planner.  We saw a couple of potential investigators and things went surprisingly well. We figured they would just shut us down because they didn’t show much interest.  They still didn’t show much interest but showed more than we expected!

Tuesday- We spent the morning at Idaho Youth Ranch volunteering and at the end Elder Dawson found some LaBron basketball shoes. They were basically new and worth like $150 but he got them for 10 bucks. Then we went to the mission office to have interviews with President. I already had mine before transfers but Elder Dawson didn’t so I ended up having a second interview that lasted about 5 minutes. After we played some b-ball and taught shortly with this kid named Brain. We found him walking down the street one day and just talked and now he's taking the lessons. Most of our investigators here come from referrals so a street contact working out is super weird for me.

Wednesday- We weekly planned today because we have zone training tomorrow. Then later we had this church tour/activity and it didn’t turn out like we wanted. A few kids cancelled, but Ashley Moncur, the best 12 year old missionary I've ever met, brought a friend and we got a new investigator. We also went to Bamboo Garden as a district and had a shrimp eating contest... not the best idea, Walking around all day didn’t feel the best after that.

Thursday- Zone training was sweet! Elder Dart and Elder Horne are some awesome zone leaders; the focus was how to get members involved in the Lords work. We ended up going on a split which both lessons turned out really well.

Friday- Long morning we did tons of record keeping/catch up. Then we had a couple baptismal interviews later that evening.

Now I'm running out of time... sooo I hope you all had an awesome week and I hope this next one is just as good!

Love you guys!

9 May 2016

Crazy week and am not sure I’ll remember most of the details.

Monday- P-day was awesome we played ultimate Frisbee. After p-day we had dinner with a part member family and it went pretty well. Then we went and saw Kaden, I'm not sure if I mentioned him last week but we met him at the White’s house. He was just there chilling and we asked him if he wanted to get baptized and has like Yea!!! So we went and saw him today and his mom’s boyfriend is a less active member trying to re-activate and his sister was baptized but went less active and they all invited us back and are looking forward to seeing us!

Tuesday- Spent the morning ripping out a fence for a service project. It was pretty fun. We made more visits than I'm going to list but we found a new investigator. She has a little daughter and has a bit of a past and she wants to be affiliated with a better crowd so she's looking towards the church. Then we had a lesson with Kaden and his family and we got along great. It took a while to get focused, but we did get to the lesson eventually. He is an awesome kid though. One of the most golden investigators we have.

Wednesday- we had district meeting and Elder Dawson asked us each to train on PMG effective study. Then instead of training we just did a big think tank sort of deal. A lot of good things were brought up. A big one being, "do our investigators know how to effectively study?" We invite a lot of people to read the B.O.M but not many of them know how to study scriptures. Then nothing really picked up until the evening and we saw Kaden again to finish the restoration and I got my eye brows waxed. Their daughter was in the middle of doing it when we came over so Elder Dawson volunteered me and did a bad job. He barely even got anything off and I think they’re uneven now.

Thursday- weird day with weekly planning. It took up our entire morning. Then we went and did some contacting and then went on splits for the rest of the night. That’s about all I remember.

Friday- we had exchanges and I went to central 1 with Elder Vogt. We spent the morning volunteering at the Idaho youth ranch thrift shop. There was probably a dozen Elders there. It was pretty fun. We set a date with a guy named Diego. He's a super cool guy. He's into church and heavy metal. Kind of a weird mix but has really genuine. We had an awesome lesson with him. That’s about all I recall from the exchange. That and walking like 15 miles that day.

The weekend was awesome but am a little tired of typing, sooo am gonna end here.

Hope you all have an awesome week!!!!

2 May 2016

It’s been a crazy week and as much as I miss the people of I.F. being in Pocatello has been better than I dreamed!

Monday- P-day and kind of an odd one with transfers coming I didn’t bother shopping for food and then I didn’t get to really do anything for the activity because I was swamped by journals that people wanted signed. I don’t know if that’s big in every mission but here we all have transfer journal and people go all out (well the sisters) like they border the paper with frames and cut out all these pictures, then there’s me drawing stick people and yea. After P-day was mostly just some good byes and final visits, most of the night was over at Dave’s and it’s a bummer to leave him has an awesome guy and I really wanted to work with him more. Then at like 8:30 a couple of members we are close with took us to Reeds dairy for some good bye ice cream. Well I shouldn’t say a couple, it was supposed to be both the Stafford's but Kelsey was super sick due to being big with child, so she couldn’t tag along.

Tuesday- A very short and strange district meeting, followed a final lunch trip to Moranita's (super good Mexican restaurant) Then from like 2 o’clock to 9 we just had visits with like everyone we know, it surprised me that some of the people were as upset as they were, like I didn’t realize they felt that close to me, but it helped me know that at least we were doing something right.

Wednesday- Transfers!!!!! The morning took forever, it was mostly just sitting around the transfer sight writing more journals, then the transfer "train" came and dumped off a bunch of people I haven’t see in forever! And it was a crazy union for about 10 mins. Then we were off, getting to Pocatello was crazy! My new comp is a boss, I see my MTC comp once a week and the whole zone is just awesome. We live with members basically on the side of a mountain, and Elder Dawson loves to exercise so we have these sweet morning runs! But when we got back to the apartment we did a quick planning session got me caught up on some stuff and went to work, I don’t remember names that well but it was a sweet day

I’m running out of time so I’m just going to sum up some stuff, we had a game show style lesson with a family and the loser had to eat this nasty dessert they made. Elder Dawson was giving questions so it was me against them and we tied so everyone got nasty cupcakes. I technically lost but Elder Dawson just kept making up things to break the tie.

We had this sweet fasting miracle on Sunday, we have a couple girls on date and we dropped in to see them and they had a couple friends over, and we talked to all of them a bit, and on Sunday it was looking iffy if the White girls would even get to church, then they showed up with the friends they had over the other day! So we have a couple new investigators and they had an awesome time at church.

The new transfer is awesome and I love Pocatello. Life is good!!!

Hope you all have an awesome week!

 That's our puppy. I took a bunch of pictures but its tongue was out in every single one...

 Saying good bye to my favorite ZL (Elder Green)

 Saying good bye to Dominic. He's usually a lot happier and I was lucky to get the picture.

Got a present from Eliza.  It was a teddy bear.