Saturday, October 30, 2010

October 25

The biggest up of this week was Saturday. We got to go to the Reno Temple (picture below; more info at http://mormon.org/searchResults?theme=blue&query=temples) with a guy named Casey Bohner who goes into the MTC on November 10th, headed to the Lansing Michigan Mission. He has been doing a lot of stuff with us. It was super sweet. We had a really good time. It’s about 1 hour 30 min drive into Reno and its actually fun because there is a real highway. Which is cool.


Sacrament meeting was very good this week. It was the primary program and we had 0 investigators, but we had 5 less active families there. I think 2 of them were just there for the program, but he other 3 we have been working with and had no reason to just come to the program, so that was very exciting.


What do I do on a typical day? Well, I wake up at 6:30 and get ready for exercise. We usually go for a run or play a little basketball now that we are really close to the church and can. Sometimes we'll just stay in the apt and do some pushups and crunches and stuff, but that usually ends up being less productive. After that we take our turns showering and eating breakfast. Which is always delicious. At about 8:00 our personal study starts and we do that until 9:00. Right now I am reading in the Book of Mormon for part and I am starting to read Jesus the Christ for the other part. I already finished Our Search for Happiness and Our Heritage (http://scriptures.lds.org/en/js_h/1). I also read Joseph Smith History (http://scriptures.lds.org/en/js_h/1) once a week because Elder Pearson's wife asked us to. That is very interesting. There are a lot of different things in there that I’m already starting to notice. Today I highlighted every place where he set a good example. Next week I’m going to highlight everywhere somebody else set a good example. It’s interesting. Then we have comp. study from 9:00 to 10:00. Usually that consists of one chapter from Preach My Gospel and an activity in there and a section from the white handbook. Oh, ya, and sharing whatever we learned in personal study. Then I’ve got language study from 10:00 to 11:00. Usually I do exercises from my practice book and read out loud. We also play games to try to memorize words sometimes. Like I spy or 20 questions in Spanish. That kind of thing is pretty helpful. Then we have lunch from 11:00 to 12:00. I make something good and eat it. Then we go out into the world. Usually we start off the day with either some kind of service (we move a lot of people) or with a visit to somebody who’s less active. There are a decent amount of less active members that are retired, so that is nice. Usually we do one or both of those things until about 2:00. At about 2:00 we usually try to have a lesson or at least contact with one of our couple retired investigators. We usually have a lesson or at least a short visit and that brings us until about 3:00. At 3:00 we start either making member visits or giving lessons to less actives who have kids starting to come home from school, which means we can go into their house because its not just a single mom at home (only if their kids are older though). We can usually do that until about 4:00 or 4:30. At 4:30 a few days a week, we have dinner. We do it then so we can get a full dinner, lesson, and talk about referrals before we have to be at the church for our Spanish class, which we teach at 6:00 but have to be a little early for to unlock the church. Then we teach our class at 6:00. That usually goes until about 7:00 or 7:15 and we usually have an apt. set up either with a member family or an investigator at about that time. So we go teach a lesson or do a family home evening or something until about 8:15. At that point we either go back and talk to the church ESL students, sometimes teaching one of them, or we have another lesson. We always have to work to find lessons for the nighttime because you can’t make visits unannounced after about 7:15 here because everyone is starting to go to bed. It’s weird. I think it’s because there are like 0 lights here, so the moment it gets dark people start thinking that its getting late. It’s definitely funny and a challenge, but we find things to do. Then at 9:00 we go back to the apt and plan for the next day. Usually I grab a snack and do something else and then I’m in bed by 10:00 most nights even though our bed time is 10:30. Then I get up and do it again.


What do I eat? I cook just about everything for breakfast. Almost everyday I have chocolate chip pancakes and sausage with an apple or banana or something for breakfast. I also sometimes scramble, fry, or make an overeasy egg with toast. For lunch I almost always eat pasta roni or rice a roni with good bread with melted cheese or something. I’m eating pretty well. I get creative sometimes too. One time I made a salami, roast beef, avocado, mozzarella, onion and green pepper sandwich toasted under the broiler. It was way good. I'm going to try Ramen stirfry soon from the cookbook I have. I eat pretty well most of the time.


Wednesday, October 20, 2010

October 18

This week was interesting overall. Tuesday we had our meeting with Elder Pearson (http://new.lds.org/church/leader/kevin-w-pearson?lang=eng). It takes about 1 hour 30 mins to get to Reno. It’s a much nicer drive than most of what we do. Mostly because we actually get to be on a 4-lane highway which is just cool now by itself. Going into a city was actually a little weird, but to be honest felt so good. Reno is a nice city. They have trees and buildings and things that block the desert landscape. I didnt get to see a lot of it though. Plus where we were was actually Sparks, not that there is really a difference.

Elder Pearson was probably the best teacher I have ever seen in my life. He is very, very smart and understands his audience very, very well. He drew us lots of graphs and pictures to illustrate his point and they worked extremely well. He was very charismatic and pretty straightforward with us. He talked to us a lot about who we think we are now and who we really are/can become. He talked about we might think that we are a certain way and because of that we don’t want to lose who we really are and become like everyone else, but what we really need to understand is that we have no idea who we really are if we think in that way. That prevents us from changing and progressing, which is what we are supposed to do. He further told us that we existed before this life and made the decision to come here -- something I’ve heard 1000 times, but this time he added that if we existed before this life and can't remember it, then it is kind of judgmental of us to say we know who we are when we don’t even know many of the things that we have done. He talked about a lot of other things too, but his final point was really the most important. He reminded us that we are all literal spirit sons and daughters of God and that if we really understood that, we would not want to do anything except for His will. That doesn’t mean we all have the same personality or the same way of doing things. But it does mean that if we love our heavenly father anywhere close to the amount that he loves us, we will want to do everything that we can to align our will with His. That was how Jesus Christ lived a perfect life. He aligned His will perfectly with that of the Father.

We did a lot of service. We put in somewhere around 25 hours of straight service. On Wednesday we helped our investigators who have already moved like 5 times pack up their stuff again. We are now very efficient at packing their things. We can take their tables apart super fast and pack their truck perfectly. Then on Thursday we spent 4 hours in court with our 1 member that only speaks Spanish. He had gotten a ticket for letting somebody without a license drive his car, but he didn’t understand that he was supposed to go to court the first time, so he got arrested and spent a few hours in jail and then we had to go to court with him to translate because nobody in this town speaks Spanish. Once it all got straightened out the judge just had him pay his ticket and court fees and that was it, so he still got $300 back from bail he had to have posted. It was pretty ridiculous. Ended well though, so that’s good. Friday we started the longest move of all time. It was just us, their family, and a couple other people helping and it was completely unorganized. Absolutely everything was super heavy. The worst was the hot tub. That thing was huge. Eventually we got it up onto the trailer with 7 guys lifting. When we got to where it was going we had way too far to go, but thankfully we figured out that if we put 2 X 4s under it that it would be really easy just to slide to where it was going. It was. It took us like 30 seconds after that. We continued the same move again on Saturday, and got it all finished. It was really good for them though and helped them a lot.

We didn't make a whole lot of progress with people this week, but we definitely helped a lot of people, so it's ok. We did teach Tom and Gail. Tom believes that anyone can have the priesthood and that anybody who writes a good book is inspired and that the book is true. He believes all good religious books are given by divine revelation. So, he believes the Book of Mormon is true and that Joseph Smith was a prophet, but misses how that means that everything else we are teaching them has to be true. Any advice?

Saturday, October 16, 2010

October 11

We have been doing a lot of service, which is always fun. We helped one family split wood and completely tear everything out of their garden which afterwards made me feel pretty accomplished. We also helped one less active who is starting to come back to church clean up his backyard for prepare for his grandmother to return home from long term care at the hospital. She was roommates with a member there.

Last night we had dinner with Congressmen Heller and his family. They are a super nice family and have a sweet place out in Smith Valley. Definitely nice people.

We have been encouraging Church members to go to the new mormon.org and check it out and make a profile for themselves. I will probably finish my profile on there today. It’s really cool and I would definitely recommend checking it out if you haven’t. Watch some of the videos and stuff.

Tomorrow Elder Kevin Pearson of the Seventy (http://beta-newsroom.lds.org/article/seventy) will be having a day long meeting in Reno with all of us, so we are headed up there. Don’t really know what to expect yet, but we did all have to write talks. We'll see what happens. It’s about 1 hour and a half drive up there. We will leave about 6:30 to factor in traffic, which will not be fun, then it will probably end about 4 and after we will have interviews with pres black until 5 or whenever it’s our turn which probably means until 5. Then drive back

Friday, October 8, 2010

October 4

ITS RAINING!!!!!!!!!! Its been raining all day today and a lot of yesterday!!! Even occasional thunder and lightning. Its so awesome. I've broken out my sweaters and the vest. I probably dont need them very much yet, but I love sweaters. Oh, ya and we dont really have to wear our full suits if we wear our sweaters. It just doesnt work, because they cant have us wearing out our suits all of them time when its cold up here, so its all good, which is way awesome. Oh, and its about 60 today with a cooler breeze.


Well, the week started off last Monday with Paintball!!! That was wayyyyy fun. Theres a member of the Church in Fernley who owns a really big tournament paintball course and let all of us missionaries come down and use the course, his equipment, and 500 balls for $15. Super super good deal. Plus he fed us hotdogs and stuff. Hes a super cool guy. We got to play for a couple hours and we could have gone for way longer but we had to get back for an appointment. I got a sweet welt that I think I have a picture of too. It was super fun. Even the sisters came. they were funny. They didn’t care about getting hit at all and just hung with everyone else. I'm definitely going to be a lot better next time if we get permission again this transfer. Its also way sweet just to be able to hang out with other elders a little bit since we never get to.


After paintball we went to an appointment with a recent convert named Nabor. He’s super cool and we hadn’t been able to meet with him in forever because he works the harvest schedule right now so he can't even go to church. He took his one day off of the month and called us and asked us to meet with him, which was super cool of him. We then had a family home evening and another visit, both of which went very well. Really the only other highlight of the week was our lesson with the Sotos. We showed the Elder Holland's talk Safety for the Soul which Brother Hansen got on a DVD in Spanish for us. The spirit was very, very strong, but we haven’t been able to see them since, so we don’t know what’s going on. We'll find out tomorrow night when we have another lesson with them. They didn't make it to conference, but we did have one other investigator go. He enjoyed it, so we'll talk to him about it when he’s back in town on Wednesday. (he went in Fernley.)


As to General Conference, my definite favorite was President Uchtdorf’s talk about slowing down. (http://lds.org/conference/talk/display/0,5232,23-1-1298-7,00.html ) He is the best. He’s got jokes too. What a guy. Definitely something you learn on the mission that is super important is to just focus on the simple stuff because nothing else really matters that much.


Between sessions of conference on S
aturday we went over to the Hansen’s for lunch, which was good. They are such a great family and help us out all of the time with things that we need which is way sweet. Brother Hansen is a trapper for Nevada and Sister Hansen is working on getting her sub certificate now that all the kids are in school. On Sunday we just went back to the Apt and ate. Everybody here has Dish, so there were a grand total of 3 people there at the highest point. Kind of funny.


Transfers are this week, but we are both staying here in Yerington for another 6 weeks. They did give us more area to cover though. So things will be interesting. We now cover Silver Springs which means that we cover 2 wards and a branch now. Our area is huge; it goes 30 mins Southeast, 30 mins South West, and 30 mins North. Kind of ridiculous, but we will have to do.


I love getting mail. Its the best. I get super excited when I have some. You can write a short note too. I got a lot of letters about the wedding. That was nice. Sis told me she got homesick for DC when she went back to Vegas. I felt the same way when me and dad went back to Missouri after his case when I was in 8th grade. Weird because I barely remember living there.


Wednesday, October 6, 2010

September 27 (finally!)






This week Lilly (the little 10 year old girl from Schurz) was baptized and confirmed yesterday with her entire family there. Packed the Relief Society room. It was really cool. She has such a strong testimony and is a good example to those in her family that aren't members or very active...though most are. We didn't get any investigators to show up unfortunately, but we invited absolutely everyone we could. A few said they would, but things came up. A lot of our investigators are out of town on the weekends and for long periods of time during the week, which makes things hard, but I can’t really blame them. There’s just not much to do here. Then, those that aren't have to work.

Our number one investigator now is Brandi. She is definitely progressing, but she will have to get her work schedule changed a little before she can come to church. She told us that she has actually been to a baptism before, which is way cool. We have another lesson with her tomorrow, so I'll know more about how that’s going then. Also this week we were much better at making contact with our investigators and less actives. We have been doing really well on miles too, so we were able to take a trip out to Wellington this week

and talk to some members and potentials out there. It was kind of a trek and we got lost. Its about 30 mins out there, so it takes a lot of miles, so it was good we had a lot. It was really taunting because we were about another 30 mins from California which I really want to check off my state list, but it’s out of our area. We got to see some longhorns while we were out there. Not much else happened this week, but this next week looks like it will be pretty busy, which is always good.

The onion fields are crazy. There are just onions on top of onions and they have tons of workers just out picking them and putting them in those bags. I also have a video of driving past that field. The video is 30 seconds and the field isn’t done yet. We're driving about 55. There are just so many onions. The crazy thing is that that is one of the smaller fields. They are harvesting another one now that I hope I can get a pic of because it is massive. The onions are the reason that we cant get workers to come to church though. They require so much manual labor its ridiculous. Absolutely crazy.

We have one investigator who is a worker and his name is Miguel. He is a really, really great guy. Super chill. Hes about 25 and in Mexico he has a wife and 2 little girls. I think they are like 3 and maybe 1. He is going to visit for a while as soon as harvest is over, but then come back and work some more. There just isn’t work in Mexico right now. Things are super messed up. Other than Miguel there are a few new workers starting to go to the English class, but we haven't had a ton of contact with them yet. We're working on that. Hopefully we can get to teach some of them.

I have a recipe book that I have been using it for ideas. The other day I made a hogie. It had roast beef, salami, onions, green peppers, and mozzarella, on a hogie roll with olive oil and avocado toasted under the broiler. It was sooooo good. I’ve done some other stuff like that too. This morning I actually made myself an omelet with mozzarella, onions, and green peppers. That was way good too.