March 25, 2013

Well it's been another great week here in Petoskey! We worked hard and accomplished a lot of things. the weather here is still cold and it snows everyother day. haha. but soon it'll be spring. it's gonna be weird when spring hits and i don't pull out an areater! haha.

This week was a good balanced week. We taught Gina some of the commandments and she loved them. she agrees with all of them and has prayed about all of them.  the only downer is that we taught her on saturday and she had relapsed that day! she'll get there though! one in a week is a lot better than where she was. i think she gets confident with herself so she stops following the program. so we are going to tell her that she needs to be exactly obedient for the whole week so she can be rid of smoking. we had a couple pretty blunt lessons with people. there are a couple of our investigators that are at a stand still, so we told them if they didn't start keeping commitments that we weren't going to be able to drop by anymore. it worked though, cuz for the most part they kept there commitments. we had a really cool lesson with an investigator named Ron. he answered the door and saw it was us and told us he was having a terrible week and just ranted to us for like forty minutes and we just listened. then after he was done we were able to share a lot with him about scripture study and the blessings of the gospel. his whole countenance changed. you could tell that he was feeling the spirit and he even told us that when we come by he is so lifted up and feels that spirit. it was amazing to see the spirit work on him. the church is true! otherwise a bunch of teenage boys and girls but especially the boys (the missionaries) would have destroyed it a long time ago. haha. do you people remember my sense of humor? haha. well the lord seems to be making my personality work thus far. haha. We also had a cool experience in a card shop (i hate going there) one of the less actives in our branch owns it and it's a card shop and the cards are creepy and weird. but anyways, we go there to help her out. while we were sorting cards for her this guy came in and asked who we were and we taught him and the less active bore her testimony on some things, and it was just a really good experience. the guy really appreciated us talking to him. We also had our half mission training on thursday. we had to wake up at 5 to get to it by nine though, cuz it was half the state away! haha. but we made it there and back safe. We talked a lot about using visuals while teaching and how to follow the spirit when door knocking and not just have some wrote thing that we say every single time. it was really good. it came in handy especially on saturday when we were teaching kevin, the guy that had a lot of plan of salvation questions. we went to his house and went through the plan of salvation with him and he just wasn't getting it and i remembered that i had paper in my scriptures in case i wanted to use a visual for a lesson so i drew him the diagram of the plan of salvation and he got it and it clicked a lot more for him. he has sooo many questions. haha. so we are going to teach him the gospel of christ next lesson. we haven't even taught him the restoration yet. we've told him the general stuff and explained about joseph smith, but he has so many questions about other stuff that we don't feel like it's quite time to go through the restoration in depth with him. I hope all is going well out there! i'm jealous of the spring time weather, but i'm sure when summer hits here i'll be begging for winter to be back. haha. well, you stay classy san diego!

March 18, 2013

another great week in michigan! this week was miracle after miracle. We found six new people to teach and taught a ton of lessons! it was great to see everything go through and see it all work out. We found out where kory went. haha. he ended up going to gaylord (a couple hours south of me) to visit his grandpa for a couple weeks. so we weren't able to teach him again this week, but at least we know where he disappeared to. haha. so we found out sunday that gina got antied by all of her family on sunday so we got to go clear some things up. we went over to herapartment and she was like " my family says you guys worship joseph smith and all this stuff." so i looked at her and asked, " when you came to church, who is the only person we worshipped?" and then she was like 'jesus. . . " and then she was like," i know it's true, i've prayed about the book of mormon and i just know it's true. i hate that everyone trys to tell me otherwise." so it was pretty easy to clear up her concerns, because she already knows it's true and that her family was wrong.  it's funny how much satan trys to bring down the church, but just can't. people think that the commandments are just restrictions on us, but if only they knew how free they really make us. We had a cool lesson on preisthood authority with a couple that are in their fiftys. they were really confused and we cleared a lot of stuff up and i showed them my line of authority and showed them how we can trace our authority back to christ and they were pretty amazed that we could do that. a lot of people out here confuse the light of christ with the priesthood. we've had to teach the difference quite a few times. I went to traverse city on a trade off with elder manning. it was a pretty short trade off because our schedules were way busy. but the zone leaders have to go on at least one trade off per transfer with the district leaders so it had to be done. but it is fun to go work in other areas and see how the work is going there. Like i said, this week we have been extremely blessed. i'm looking forward to another great week! sorry i don't really know what to say this week. haha. so it's kinda short today. You Stay classy!!

Petoskey, Michigan

March 11, 2013

What up my people!? haha. it's been a great week in Michigan! first i'd like you all to know that i ate the second hottest pepper in the world on wednesday.

 This is the Bhut Jalokia Pepper.  It is 400 Times Hotter than Tobasco Sauce.

it was the hottest until just a little while ago. you'll be getting a video of that pretty soon. haha. 

Day of Eating the Pepper with a Doctor standing by

So we did trade offs on wednesday and i stayed here with Elder Mosely while Elder Wright went to the Sault. We didn't really have a lot of visible success this week. it was kind of a weird week, not a lot of people answered their doors and not a lot of our lessons went through. but it was still a really good week. like i said, Elder Wright and I are really similar so we didn't get down at all, we just kept going. haha. cathryn (one of our investigators whose had a lot of missionaries) says we are definitely the goofiest/happiest missionaries that have taught her. haha. i definitely take that as a compliment. We are starting to help Gina quit smoking because she really wants to be baptized. so we've been working hard with her so she can move forward.  We went to see kory on thursday but he hadn't been seen in a few days... haha. so hopefully we see him again soon. he doesn't have a phone and he lives forty miles away in cheboygan, so he's not really one that we can go try to catch everyday.  Holly unfortunatly shined us this past week so hopefully we can catch her again.  unfortunately there is a TTOONN of anti stuff up here so before lessons we have to clean up a lot of things which isn't a big deal, but it sucks when people wont talk to us about it. but we'll catch her. haha. so i was reading in Doctrine and Covenants and found some sweet scriptures!  Doctrine and Covenants 35: 13-14. Its SOO sweet! haha. we (20 year old kids) are the weak things of the world and we've been called to Thrash the nations!! SO SICK! man, it's cool to be a missionary and know that god is behind you one hundred percent as long as you're being obedient. i was seriously pumped after reading that. god's army of missionaries is thrashing the nations! Well, i'm basically out of things to say. like i said, this week there wasn't a lot of visible success, but we still worked our butts off and know that no missionary work is wasted. ok, one last scripture Doctrine and Covenants 130: 20. this one is sweet too. it's basically saying if we keep the commandments god cannot go against the law that is in heaven. he has to bless us. so don't make exceptions to keeping the commandments of god. god knows it's hard. he's trying our faith, but he WILL bless us. That's all i have for you folks today so cya later! haha.

March 4, 2013

another great week here in michigan! Unfortunatly we weren't able to teach holly this week cuz she wasn't home all week, but we'll be seeing her tuesday. We have to do a lot of door knocking out here because the church is pretty small here. but we found some people to teach this week which was awesome! i'm a little pressed for time this morning so i can't share a whole bunch but i have a couple awesome experiences that happened this week that i'll share. so we were up in cheboygan at lunch with a family ( the dad is in the coast guard, fun fact. haha) and they said they were out doing there home teaching and they were seeing a sister that is less active and this family the home teachers were like "well we have to go because we're feeding the missionaries lunch." and this black guy in another room heard and freaked out and was like "you mean the elders?! the elders are back in cheboygan?!" some how this guy got lost in the mix and no one filled out any paperwork on him so we didn't know about him. so we went to see him and he was pumped! haha. he was like " oh man, let me find my Book of Mormon! the Elders are in my house!" he was way awesome! he is a lutheran, but he has a testimony of the Book of mormon and loves the book of mormon. so we'll be visiting with him when we go to cheboygan.  So that was way cool to find him and start teaching him. moral of that story, do your home teaching!! it is SOOO helpful when members do there hometeaching and are willing to help.

 So thursday night i was trying to find a member to bring to gina's lesson (the one with the baptismal date) while elder wright was filling in the area book. i called like nine sisters to come along with us and none were around! so i called the ward mission leader to see if anyone popped into his head and he gave me a couple sisters names so i gave one a call that i didn't really think would fit for gina but she said she could come with us. well we go and teach gina and the sister was a champ!! there stories were exactly the same! god proved to me how he knows best on that one. well to continue the story we told the sister before the lesson to invite gina to church and she did and it was awesome! so yesterday at church we had four investigators there! Gina and Kory ( the black guy) sat with us and the other two were with other families that we asked to fellowship them. and it was testimony meeting and nobody bore weird testimonys, they were all way powerful and everyone felt the spirit. so it was awesome! then to show how much kory loves the book of mormon, during priesthood the guy teaching was like does someone want to turn to alma 40? and kory jumped and grabbed his book of mormon and was like" oh man nigga, I got that!" haha! it was sooo funny! he loves the book of mormon. i'm loving it here in michigan. elder wright and i don't get down. it's sooo nice not having a companion that gets down with things don't go smooth. in fact for the most part, days do not go how we plan. but we always have a good time and keep laughin and rollin with the punches. no need to get down over something that you can't really control. remember to always find the good in life. cuz it's always there. well, my people, i'll cya later! haha. Peace!