9.18.17 Missionary Clothes

Hello to all back in the lower 48!   ;)

This week was pretty great. On Monday we went fishing all day...you asked a couple questions about fishing and so will answer them. It doesn’t take that long to reel them in, but they do get bigger then the silver that I caught. The pinks that we were catching were pretty easy and didn’t fight but they are dying off and the silvers are starting to run. yeah I got pretty lucky on where I get to fish and my companion likes it even more than me. It’s fun, its literally like in our back yard. Its like a 5-10 minute drive. And thanks for sending me a package, I can’t wait to get it. I love receiving stuff in the mail!

our ward mission leaders name is brother mccmullin. He hasn’t done much help with the work.  He rarely responds to our texts. We have only met with him a couple of times, it was strange because he would sit on a huge bean bag and we didn’t even have an opening or closing prayer. My comp tells me that he has had much better MWLs in the past. We have got a ton of less actives on the list, but have only gotten contact with about a solid 10 id say. others have ignored us, or never been home or never called/texted back. But we did have the chance on Saturday to clear out Everett’s yard. he has raspberry bushes 5-6 feet tall all around his house. he is the less active that i mentioned in one of my previous emails. the ward planned a day where we would help him out; we took about 3 trips of a huge trailer to the dump. He had tons of junk like 20 tires,6 cans of massive propane tanks, and random garbage and scarp everywhere. we worked for a couple hours. it looks 100 times better, I should have takken a before and after picture but i never got around to it. it was also a bad berry season. he only had a couple berrys this year.

We are also going to try and work with the Sherrit family.  I mentioned them last week, but we are going to meet with them this week. The father is trying to come back to church because he wants more for his family. And the other members are not baptized and haven’t ever been a part of the church. We had an awesome text message from less active named sister hicks. her husband jeff is a non member and she told us that he is reading the Book of Mormon but wants proof that the church is true. so we set up an appointment on Tuesday to meet/ have a lesson with them. we are super excited about teaching someone. something that I been taught thus far on my mission is to never doubt my faith and to always press forward: the lord is preparing me and the people in my path though my faith in him. 

I have not had to give a talk yet. I only have bared my testimony my first week there. I really like ward council. it’s really nice to work with all of the leaders of the church and ask around for ideas for finding people. because I don’t know that many people compared to the leaders who have been there for years. it’s not getting colder, it’s just getting noticeably darker. it’s still about 50 like every day temperature wise. I haven’t bought any winter clothes yet, I heard it doesn’t get that cold here and so I might wait till I go back to anchorage to buy clothes and another suit case. I’m not sure when zone conferences are but I’ve had 2 so far.

This week we had zone conference, we had a member for the 70 come in and talk to us. His name is Elder Foster, and he taught us about having faith, setting goals and making a vison for the mission. He said the best thing that missionaries can do is though working with members in the ward. That’s the most effective way to get the work done he says. We went in to anchorage on Tuesday at 5pm. Then we were hosted by some elders in anchorage, we went to a teaching visit to a man named buster. we read the book of Mormon with him and it seems that he’s learning and understanding fairly well. he really liked us coming over and giving him company. We had zone conference on Wednesday and it was great. I got to see the missionaries that I came out in the MTC with. i never get to see other missionaries because we are the only one on the whole island. you were right about elder Packett, he told me his trainer breaks EVERY rule. so that must be hard to deal with. We woke up super early on Thursday at like 4:40 because they love to fly us at the crack of dawn. Then we were here the rest of the week visiting less actives, tracting for an hour every day, or doing service. its a wonderful time out here in Kodiak.

On Sunday after Sacrament, we told Valerie from two weeks ago that we would go to a presentation at her church today. Her church is called Christian Science. We met a couple of people there and they really appreciated what we were doing with our time on missions. It helped me realize how many people are far from the truth because they know not where to find it. There was so many things that the church was missing that our church has. Valerie said she would come to our church if we came and checked out hers. at this point we are trying any way that we can to be around large groups of people. I’d never been to anyone else’s church before so it was very eye opening to what it would be like for others to come t ours.

I had a great week!

Here are a couple pics from the week.

1. you wanted to see a pic of me and my comps missionary clothes and so we did :0

2.  a real pic.  We will have a better one latter, its hard to take a good one when someone else isn’t holding the camera. but I tried!

3.The Christian Science meeting place. They had someone who flies all around the world. they have some interesting concepts.... but they don’t have the priesthood. it’s just faith and prayer. it’s very different. There was about 15 people in the room when he was presenting for an hour and a half.

4. Here is a bunch of kale that we got from sister rice this week. She has like 2 huge green houses and enough kale to feed the whole island. my companion likes to make kale smoothies. He’s taking after grandma Talbot and her exotic grape fruit smoothies which I always heard so highly about.

5. a pretty silver fishy! caught him at mill bay

I love you all! have a great week!