Jan. 25, 2012

i am in Star valley Wyoming. there are techincally 2 parts to Star Valley, there is a north and a south valley and we are in the north valley. i am serving with one my old companoins agian, elder Ortiz. we served together in layton and i asked the mission president if we could serve together again, becuase we were really successful together and we are really good friends and so president olson put us together again and we are super excited. but star valley is really really cold, it has snowed the past 5 days that we have been here. and i have driven in it the past 5 days which has been pretty fun. the area is really beautiful out here. honestly it is a really cool place. but we didn't leave until friday and so elder ortiz and i pretty much had 2 down days. we had to go with one of our senior missionaries who works in the office and we picked up our furniture and then we got it all packed up in a trailer and left on friday. but the drive took us 5 hours to get up there... and then yesterday we had zone conference in logan and that took 2 1/2 hours to get down there. so this place that we live at is pretty far away. but we live in a 1 beedroom trailer and it is actually really nice. it has recently been remodeled and so it is awesome! it is probably one of my favorite aparments on my misison. but we live in a town called Etna, Wyoming.

the people out here are really excited that we are out here. the stake president is super nice and all the bishops that we have met are super nice. in the past there have been only 1 set of missionaries to cover the 2 stakes out here in star valley and the missionaires would never make it up to where we are at because it was too far away, but now that we cover their own stake, so they are super excited and they have a lot of missionary work to be done. so we are excited to be here and hopefully i am here for a while becuase the people love to feed us dinner which i am totally ok with. the poeple alwalys just sign up to feed us which is awesome. but anwyays i love it out here and hopefully i don't freeze, but our trailer is super warm so anyways that was our week this week.

Jan. 17, 2012

transfer day is tomorrow, and guess what...i am getting transferred again... i am actually going to star valley, wyoming.  i am going with my old companion Elder Ortiz, and i really got along with him so that it is going to be really fun. things have been going pretty good this week. we had 2 baptisms on saturday, so that was pretty awesome. a 9 year old boy named Mike got baptized and he was super excited about his baptism and was really happy, but it was a good experience. and also this other girl named Heather who is 14 got baptized. and she is the one who is a foster child and her foster parents live here in south ogden and she was super golden and pretty much wanted to be baptzied when we had our first lesson with her. it is going to be sad leaving this area and to be so far away from the people when they get baptized but i am always looking forward. 

Jan. 10, 2012

things have been pretty good this week. we had the confirmation of one of our investigators named lisa, and it was really good, we also had another good thing happen. we had one of our recent converts named toby, who was baptized last month, was able to batpize his 8 year old daughter so that was really awesome. but thigns are going really good for him and his family. so that is exciting. but also we have 2 more baptisms coming up this weekend, which we are excited for. but they are for these 2 people. one of them is a 9 year old boy named mike who is really excited to be baptized and then the other one of is for this 14 year old girl named heather, who is actually a foster kid and she is living with this active family. so it is really awesome.

 

but i don't know if you have heard about the ogden shooting that happned recently, but anyways it happened on 33rd street and we live on 36th street. we really didn't hear anything, but we saw about a million cop cars fly by our apartment which was pretty crazy, and we actually followed them to the place and there were about 40 cops there which was pretty crazy. but anyways there was this other misisonary companionship that actually serves in that area and they were in a lesson really close to where it happened, but anyways they heard everything. 

Jan. 3, 2012

i am proud to report that we had another baptism this week. it was this lady named lisa lowrey. i have actually only taught her twice but my companion had been teaching her for about the past month or so. but anyways she came to the conclusion that the church was true when she prayed for about 5 hours one day. so that was pretty awesome. we met with her this past wednesday and she wanted to be baptized on the next monday. so we made it happen last night and it was amazing.

 

we are teaching some people whose names are melody and angel and angel has been in prison for the past 4 years and just barely got out a couple of months ago and while she was in prison her kids joined the church and her son is actually on a mission on arkansas. but anyways we took them to the baptism last night that we had and melody told us that she felt a lot better about bapism becuase she thought that a mormon baptism was when she stood in front of the whole congregation during sacrament meeting and then poured a bucket of water on her and called her baptized! haha when she told us that i was like. wow, good thing that we took her to a baptism and it was pretty funny too becuase we had a dinner/lesson at their house afterwards and she has like seizures and stuff, and she is like on a lot of meds and she looked/acted as if she was high. but also angel didn't get a call from her son on christmas which kind of sucked also and so what we did was we called the arkansas misison president and asked if he could talk to his mom and he said that it would be ok, and so we called her son and talked to him and so then we set up a surpise phone call at the lesson and angel got to talk to her son for about 30 minutes so that was pretty awesome!

 

also one of our investigators, the one who is 88 years old, was supposed to be baptized on the 17th. but the old person home that he lives needs 30 days notice and also when he get's baptized they need to have atleast 2 employees in the font with him while he gets baptized. so we are going to have to wait a month for him to be baptized. so that is going to be kind of annyoing.