K, D, Zone Conference

Hey everyone, I hope y’all are doing awesome! Summer is here! So since you can’t hit the ski slopes for me, now go and start hitting the pool parties (; 

Things have been going pretty well down here, still a little slow since it is hard to find Spanish people, (and we can only teach Spanish) but we have still been super blessed this week. We had another awesome couple lessons with K and her family and we found out they all have been praying and seeking to know if it is true, and now they are starting to read the Book of Mormon. I am super excited to see how it all goes, we get to meet with them tomorrow. It was super exciting this week, cuz when we went by their house last Friday we were just talking about the Gospel of Jesus Christ with them and K randomly brought up that for the first time in forever she actually had Sunday off of work.  She told us that she would be coming to church, and that was before we even asked them about coming to church again so we were super excited.  She was very excited about being able to come too, which was great to see. Sadly, at the last second, she was called into work and we didn’t have time to try and get a ride for her kids - since she found out that Sunday morning. It was a bit of a bummer too, but I was just grateful to see how excited she was to be able to come to church. We will keep praying for her, and working with her, and I hope she will be able to have work off, or be blessed with another job that makes it so she can come to church with her family. 

Another thing that was super exciting this week was with a guy that I used to teach at the very beginning of my mission named D, he finally, after about two years of investigating, decided to get baptized!!! It was so awesome to see him finally make that decision to join the church. I even was able to go and visit the La Place ward where he was getting baptized, so I could see it and celebrate it with him and his family. He has changed so much over the past two years and I can see how much happier he is, and how much happier his family is too. His wife was already a member that had become reactivated when Elder Barron and I were working with her in our first transfer together. She was sobbing the whole time the baptism was taking place because she has been the biggest support throughout D’s whole journey, and she had really seen the ups and downs he had had throughout it, and personally witnessed how much he had changed. This whole event really showed me the importance of this church, and how it truly does bring us closer as families, and how we can find true and lasting happiness and joy by following what Christ taught us. The church is true!

Lastly this week we had zone conference. It was a really sad zone conference for me because it was the last one that the majority of my companions are going to have. I got to see the go home testimonies of 5 of the 8 companions I still have in the mission. Elder Mccormies, Bertonneau, Gee, Israelsen, and Johnson are all going to be going home in just two weeks! It is crazy how fast the time has gone by, I’m going to miss all of them. But it really was a special conference being able to hear them all bare their testimonies, and see how much they have all grown in their missions. They are all going to do awesome as they return home to normal life, and I know they all will be super strong member missionaries in the future. 

Well that is it for this week, I love you all and hope you have an awesome week!

Goodbye McCormies

Baptism

D and all the missionaries who taught him

Awesome members from Utah took us out to dinner

K, storms, crazy convos

Hey everyone how is it going? I hope y’all are having a awesome time getting ready for summer!

Haha the weather down here is getting back into its good old crazy Louisiana storms. We have had a few huge lightning storms this week which was super fun to watch! I have never seen so much lightning in my life. Haha the scary thing was the first one that came through, Elder Johnson and I were a good 7 or so miles away from home; so we hightailed it back before the storm came over us. Got to love that Louisiana weather. 

This week has been pretty good, we were able to find a Spanish family this week that we are pretty excited to keep teaching. We knocked on their door and they let us in almost immediately. When they sat us down the mother, K, immediately told us she wants us to come over as often as we can to teach her and her kids, since they have not had much experience with church or the gospel for a long time She knows they need to have more spiritual nourishment in their lives. That was great, but then she went on to tell us that all churches were true, so it didn’t matter which one you went to, since they all have the word of God, which is a pretty classic thing we hear all the time down here, especially from Spanish people for some reason. Anyways, after that comment we decided to jump right into the restorations lesson describing how Christ established his one true church in his time, and how it was changed and split into many churches that all contained truth, but they also all contained errors due to human opinions and faults. Right after we told her about that she was all like, oh wow that makes sense, so we shouldn’t go to any church since they all are missing something! Then we told her about the restoration of the true church and how it brings organization and truth back to the earth since God is not a God of confusion. Haha right after that she was super excited about that, and how the true church of Christ had been restored, and she again told us to come over whenever we could and that she would try to make it to our church. The only issue with her is she works every Sunday, but she still wants her kids to be able to go to Church - so we will see what happens. 

Being down in New Orleans again has made me remember a lot of things from my first time being down here as a greenie missionary. Haha I totally forgot about all the crazy conversations you have with people down here, haha especially on the weekends. It has been a little bit interesting to have people stop us for a bit while knocking doors, or walking around, and start telling us crazy stories about the world or their lives. The other day we had a Hispanic guy that kept talking to us about how President Trump’s wife is an illegal immigrant, as well as a whole bunch of other stuff that made us laugh a bit. These types of experiences for sure make things memorable haha!

I love you all and hope you have an awesome week!

Last call home!

Hey y'all, I hope you had an awesome Mother’s Day!

I can't believe that I just had my final call home to my family before I come home from my mission! I never thought this day would come, and it is a little bit trippy! It is amazing how fast a mission can go by! It was great to see my family again and finally meet my brothers fiance!

Things this week were pretty good, we were able to find a few new Spanish investigators so that was great! we had set the goal to find 10 each companionship of the district but I didn’t realize how hard it is to find Spanish people in New Orleans because they are more spread out among all the English speaking people; so you can go knocking on doors for a while and find some people for English to teach, but none for you. It is really like a hunt for the Spanish down here, but we were lucky enough to find 4 new Spanish people to teach and so hopefully things go well with that.

I did get the chance to help out on a lesson with one of the English companionships down here in NOLA. They have a guy named M  that they are teaching, who is actually in a seminary to become a minister.  He is a super sharp guy and knows his Bible very well, and even knows a lot of history that is outside of the Bible. And so M  had a bunch of questions about doctrines and stuff and was wondering about how they tie into the teaching of the Bible.  Apparently I am now classified as someone who "knows the Bible" in our mission and so my companion pretty much volunteered me to go and sit in on a lesson with this guy. It was super awesome! This guy really just wants to know about what we believe, and he loved the scriptures we were able to share with him about the afterlife, Book of Mormon, and pretty much everything else. He had a ton of questions that I think we were able to answer really well. I for sure felt the spirit during that lesson and I’m sure he did too. He even told us that he was for sure going to start reading the Book of Mormon now, and start praying about it to know if it is true. He is a great guy! What I thought was super awesome from the whole experience is that he taught us some new knowledge too; so we were all able to grow and be edified together.

A small fun story that happened this week is that after we had a lesson with one of our investigators S we were walking down the street and ran into the same bunch of kids that we talked to last week. They were super funny and asked us to help carry some wood and stuff with them so they could build a fort. We helped them out, and while we were walking one of them suddenly said, "I just saw something inappropriate." We were a bit confused and asked what he saw, and he pointed to some cigar bags on the sidewalk. Haha! We got to agree with him that cigars are not good and that we shouldn’t do any drugs, pretty much we did a low key word of wisdom lesson and at the end all the kids were like "I’m never going to do drugs!" and one little 8 year old was like, "I can never smoke cuz if I do how will I ever make it to the NFL!" Haha it was super fun to see how they all wanted to break the norms of the area and stay clean from all that stuff.

Oh and one more awesome thing that happened this week is I was able to visit with one of my old investigators in Metairie for a little bit on Saturday night. his name is M and he is one of the investigators we were working with a lot when I was in my first area. After a ward party I decided to stop by his house since we were already in Metairie. We did, and we got to see him and catch up for a while. It was so great! And come to find out no missionaries had visited him since I left, so we were able to ask if the missionaries could come over and he said he wanted them too, but he just had to ask his dad.  Missionaries will most likely be teaching him again so that is another reason to celebrate!!

I hope y’all have an awesome week and finish up the school year strong!