Today was great! We did all of our Pday escapades which were a lot of fun, mostly just running around Walmart and trying to find the weirdest assortment of items. It was like a scavenger hunt, but your prize at the end is that they take your money. Today I found so many people from my time in Brazil on my facebook page which was awesome! I was so excited to be reunited to them after so long. One of the comments was, "well look who decided to show up", not everyone was happy it had taken me so long to get social media... It was so awesome to see so many familiar faces, though. Today we also got transfer news, our district is splitting up which we're all very sad about. Melody Lane is also being split in half, we're going to share our area with Sisters, which will be an... interesting experience... Our area is already small so we're not sure what to expect after it's split, in addition to that, having four missionaries for a ward just seems weird to me. We joined our Bishop's family home evening tonight which was awesome! Elder Collins and I got to give a great message on repentance, and they're super excited about working with us now. We also whipped out a Facebook post in like, ten minutes tonight. It was our turn to post, but it had been pday so we didn't have a lot of time to spend on it, we made our message about prayer, though, and it ended up being super powerful! I hope it really helps with our Facebook initiative.
7/14/2020
Today was great! We had a mission wide meeting to launch our new Facebook ads, and we have all been assigned shifts to watch over our pages so that hopefully we can respond to people's comments within seconds. It was awesome to see everyone on a missionwide level, but it was even better to see my district in person afterwards. We had an amazing meeting, that was without a doubt the best meeting I have ever had. There was no training, just a discussion, contributed to by every single member of our district with sincere and incredible testimonies. It's going to be heartbreaking to leave those guys this week. Collins and I had a number of successes with calls today, but the best by far was with a less active, we had been helping him prepare to receive the Priesthood, and at the end of our lesson asked if we could meet with his whole family next time. He said he would love that, especially because his wife has been wanting to meet with us because she's interested in joining the church. That's my first referral here! My brother Matthew is also famous now, on our Spanish page we created a post about children and Matthew is a model toddler, so he got to be the face of our post. Hopefully his cute face will bring lots of investigators.
7/15/2020
Today was great! We did a lesson with the members, the Andersons, and they were incredible! We've been attempting to inspire members to create Facebook posts to begin sharing their testimonies with their friends and family members, and the Anderson's are totally willing to help out! We are so excited to be making such thorough connections with members that they trust us enough to follow our invitations and directions. We also got to spend a lot of time with Elders Barstow and Forsgren today which is good because today was our last day as a district, transfers go into effect tomorrow. We also did the baptismal interview for the Custers today! Nate and Colton Custer were both being interviewed, they both passed and are excited to be baptized tomorrow! I talked to Nate a little bit about his conversion experience, and he shared the most incredible testimony with me, it was riveting to see just how quickly he's been progressing and just how truly converted he is. A bishop for another ward walked by us while we were talking and managed to tell us stories for like, a half hour straight. I'm not entirely sure how he can talk for so long, or how the myriad of stories he told relate to one another because he just went from one to another without pausing to breathe, but it was a very cool experience. If nothing else, it showed Nate and Colton just how friendly the members are.
7/16/2020
Today was awesome! All of the new missionaries arrived in their areas which means that Elder Collins and I are officially sharing an area with another companionship. As such, we spent a decent amount of time calling those Sisters today and explaining everything about Melody Lane to them, and trying to help them to have an easy time integrating. We've had a lot of troubles dividing up our area with the members and our teaching pool, but hopefully by ward correlation on Saturday (our organizational meeting with the ward mission leader) we'll have it done. The big event of today though was the baptism of Nate and Colton Custer. We had a lot of adventures during it, especially with filling up the font, at first it was full almost to the top, then we did our program and, come time for the baptism, to our dismay, it's almost empty. We had a testimony meeting to buy us some time where Elder Collins, Brother and Sister Custer, and I got to share our testimonies. By the time that we were all done the font was full and we were able to have the baptisms. Even though the gathering was super small because of the Covid restrictions, the Spirit was still very strong, and we had an incredible service. Brother Custer and Colton were both able to be confirmed immediately after, and Brother Custer was able to receive the Aaronic Priesthood as well. Elder Collins and I were so excited that we got to be a part of their conversion. This was the first baptism in the Colorado Denver South Mission that came from Facebook finding, so that's a pretty cool success as well. The Custers were true converts, and that made for the most incredible baptism.
7/17/2020
Today was great! We had our first meal with members tonight which meant that we could finally build member relationships in person. It's been very disappointing to not have much contact with the members so to be able to play with kids and talk to adults face to face was very nice. Collins and I also had a lot of success in our calling of the members today, we got some responses and even if some of them were pretty morbid (like one guy who told us about how he was working on making caskets for his wife and himself), it was nice* to connect a little more to the members in this ward. Our Facebook ad went live last night, so we got to do a shift monitoring that ad. The idea behind the shifts is that everyone takes about an hour out of their schedule and by doing that we're able to respond to any page interactions within seconds, thereby increasing our chance of talking to those who interact with the page before they lose interest. Today was also really good because we were able to plan out what we want our talks to be, so this Sunday we're going to completely turn this ward around.
7/18/2020
We're not going to get this ward completely turned around. Today during our nightly devotionals our President was like, "at the end of tonight transfer news will be posted". I looked at Collins and was like, "so how long has it been since our last transfer?" he replied, "one week". Things have been picking up pace, and because of that, I'm getting transferred out of this area after only having been in it for three weeks. Collins and I are trying to find creative ways to get out of transfers, but all of our pretended scenarios end poorly, usually with the AP's coming in with guns to get us. The rest of today was really good though, we finally found a new investigator and got her on date for baptism. Sister Clark is the wife of Brodie Clark, an active member who we've been doing lessons with. They also have two kids, both living with them, a 14 and 19 year old, both whom we're hoping to meet next time so we can get the whole family on date. We did a service project for the Olsen family, we had dinner with them last night and asked if we could do anything to help them, and then made them let us come back over today to paint doors. It was a blast! I had so much fun with it. We also officially got the ward completely divided up between the two companionships that are going to be in Melody Lane too, which is also great, because it's been a very painful process and I don't want to do any more electronic work like that for a long time.
7/19/2020
Today we got to give talks to our ward! It was an awesome chance to introduce ourselves as the missionaries and teach our ward that we mean business. The ward has been divided in half because of covid, but it works out really nicely because now we have two companionships in our ward, so one companionship for each half works pretty well. Each half of the ward meets in a separate meeting so we got to give our talks twice today. In our first meeting we had to share a time slot for speaking with Sister Anderson (no relation), which didn't work very well, I gave an abbreviated version of my talk but it was still long enough that Collins backed down and didn't give his talk which I felt very bad about. In our second meeting only Elder Collins and I were speaking so I got to speak as long as I wanted and only feel a little bad when our meeting ended after an hour instead of 45 minutes like it was supposed to. Our talks went really well, though, this area is going to completely turn around, our talks might have pumped us up more than the ward. We had a lesson fall through which was a little disappointing, but not entirely unexpected. We did set up a return visit for tomorrow though so that we could help him put the coffin he built for himself into his storage shed. We also got to do an incredible faith building devotional tonight which was a really good ending to the night.
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