Chapter 8: Olathe

 

8/17/2020

Today was a great Pday, we spent a ton on food because we're not being fed by our ward, but it's all right; We called up the mission office and they gave us some extra money for food because they anticipated this happening with the huge increase of missionaries and increased burden on the members. We also had a two hour long dinner with our Zone Leaders tonight, it was just us and them and they wanted to know what we could do better in the future so that we would avoid future "dumpster fires", as they called it. We've had a lot of backlash on our some of the different posts we've tried out, and I was heartbroken because we had to delete all of our posts from that message board. I was pretty sad about that since I had only ever had positive interactions on my posts, but some others in my district have been struggling to make posts that are positive and welcomed by the community, so we had to delete all of our work. Oh well. We also talked to Pack and Fisher afterwards and they facilitated a group cry session where everyone talked about how their lives are hard and everything is horrible right now. Then we went to a gas station and met a guy, he said he'd be interested in learning a little more, so not everything is truly terrible.

8/18/2020

Today was another difficult day, but it did have a couple of highlights. We printed out 50 copies of a photo of ourselves and then wrote some handwritten notes on the back. We wrote a pretty long message for each member, so it was incredible to see just how many we got through, especially thanks to the skills that I had learned from that old-fashioned "writing lines" punishment. I used to write lines for things that I did wrong, and now apparently I'm much faster at writing because of it. Johnson's eyes boggled when he found out I was writing letters twice as fast as he was. When we were shopping at Walmart today to grab those photos, I said in the checkout to Johnson, "I don't know what we're going to do for food next week, this is the last of our money, we won't even have enough to get hamburgers after our district activity next Pday (an event that everyone had been planning and looking forward to). We finished paying and I turned around and a man was pressing a 10 dollar bill into my face. He told us the most Christlike line I had ever heard, "you go eat that hamburger." We tried to refuse and tell him that we weren't allowed to take money but he said, "yes you are, and threw it onto the pile of stuff I was carrying and left." He definitely wasn't a member, but he was an incredible guy, and I hope that I'm as sensitive to others needs when I'm older. We weren't talking loud, but he was listening and ready to help those that were wanting. We had a mission wide devotional today and it was really cool for me because I got to interact on three separate occasions, which was many more times than the usual allotted one interaction per person. I was so excited to have gotten the opportunity to share so much, although I'm sure others are sick of hearing my voice now.

8/19/2020

Today was great! We ran all over Olathe today delivering our handwritten cards. I should have known that ministering to our ward members one by one would have such a profound effect on them, but our results today still blew me away. We set up eight lessons today, and ended up only being able to deliver about half of our cards. We would go to the door and drop of our letter and it almost always ended the same, we would walk away and someone would call out after us, "hey, guys!" and then we would have a shouting match across the street where we would promise to come back soon for a lesson. We had some really  fun interactions, though. On top of all that, we had two lessons to teach that were very important, one was to the Relief Society president, and one was to our Bishop and his wife. Both lessons were in person and ended up having incredible results, now the Bishop and our Relief Society president are very eager to help us (Bishop's wife is awesome, she was already eager to help us). We also planned out and go the supplies to make a video about the Atonement tomorrow, we were asked to record an object lesson, and at first I wasn't very excited because all of the object lessons I've seen missionaries do have been terribly lackluster, it's not their fault though, they're trying to describe something infinite in finite terms, we came up with something pretty awesome, though, I'm very excited to film this tomorrow, because it's going to be an amazing video, it's not perfect, but the symbolism is there, and that means it can be so much more powerful. 

8/20/2020

Today was a great day! We filmed a video about the Atonement, and it ended up being super cool, but pretty long, so we're likely going to film a 30 second version of it tomorrow that we can post on our Montrose Zone board. We had a couple of lessons and it made for an incredible day, both of our lessons were with less active members, so it was really cool that we got to talk to them, because it really fulfilled our goal of reactivating the members. We only have a 10% activity rate so we have a long road ahead of us. We had a district counsel today and right after our district counsel got to do a bonding activity. We had a district lunch today, which was the first activity I've gotten to do in a long time, and all of the Elders were pretty excited about it, especially because it opened the door for mischief; Another district came to the chapel and brought lunch too, we stole their table that was piled with food, it was pretty awesome when they walked in and we saw the shock on their faces as they saw the entire table was gone. I also got to give a blessing to Brother Hightower today. We don't know much about what was going on, but the gratitude in his eyes was evident afterwards when he told us, "it worked."

8/21/2020

Today was another really, really busy day. We were posting for our Zone's Facebook page and it took almost all day to finish the post, but the end product was so good! We made our post with the Bishop and his wife, they were both pretty camera shy at first, but Bishop was a champ and did it in one try which is better than we usually do, and Sister Butzin made such an incredible video, it was worth all of the tries it took us. We were so excited to show them the end product, and they were very excited too when they saw it, it felt good to share in the excitement of making the video. We're really hoping that they'll take the video out to everyone else in the ward too, it would be awesome if they could share in their excitement with each other. We stopped by Makee Anderson today and shared a small thought which was a huge improvement to when we got cussed out last time we were there. We also went by Brother Hightower's because one of our appointments fell through, he made us a dinner tonight which was amazing since our dinner fell through. While we were there he told us the extent of the effects of the blessing we gave him yesterday: He had some pretty big struggles with anxiety, and yesterday was the first time that he had asked for a blessing in "many, many years". We talked to him for a bit about the Priesthood we hold and how it's the fulness of the Priesthood, we promised him that if he exercised faith in this blessing that he could be healed. Then we layed our hands upon his head. I got to be the mouthpiece and afterwards he especially expressed gratitude to me, even though I had nothing to do with it. I didn't think much of it because we were in a hurry, but today he told us that he feels healed of it, those anxieties that have dragged him down for so long are gone. I got to see a woman healed by a Priesthood blessing in Brazil, she was suffering physically and after we took our hands off her head she was crying and told us how she had felt it completely leave her. Today I saw that to the faithful the Lord can heal even the worst of mental battles as easily as physical ones. 

8/22/2020

Today we taught three lessons, and they all went really well, we were really busy and running around all day, but we did an awesome job, and we even managed to drop off some more personalized notes for members too. One of the lessons was with our ward mission leader, I knew he liked talking to us, but today we had to cut off what was supposed to be a half hour long lesson at the hour mark because we were just having too much fun talking to him. The poor guy's been through a lot, but he has an incredible testimony, and stands as the greatest ward mission leader I've ever met. We ended up driving a lot today and managed to find lots of areas that weren't documented properly by our car's mission safety system, which told us to slow down when we were going less than the speed limit. We always have fun when we go to Olathe which was where two of our three lessons today were, because it's nothing but farm fields, and often you get to see harvesters or tractors driving down the street, as if that was a completely normal occurrence. We even heard from some members that farmers will teach their kids to drive that machinery at like, 8 years old, and will often send their kids to school in those tractors instead of driving them. Their must be some law against it, but the police don't seem to care about it, and even if they did, I'm not sure what they could do about it, we've seen the two police cars the city has and they're both usually sitting out front of the station, looking like they could star in a film from the 1950's because of how old they are.

8/23/2020

Today was really fun, we got to take the sacrament to Brother Hightower which was an incredible experience, I think this is the fifth day in a row we visited him, this was a really good week. We had a meeting with the ward leadership and I prefaced it to the other Elders by telling them, "they know you guys, I'm not going to say anything, I'll leave it to your discretion as to what should and shouldn't be said." Then the ward leadership started asking me questions and I accidentally took over, and the other Elders didn't end up saying anything. Oh well. By far the greatest thing we got to do today was having dinner with our Relief Society president, we got to talk to her and her less active son for about an hour, in which time we tried to not scare them by eating too quickly because we were starving. We asked Sister Logan if we could record her testimony which she gave permission for, and then gave an incredible testimony! We were so excited because this was the fifth one, and we were going to try to make compilations of five testimonies at a time which means this is our first and test run of this project. We're really hoping when the rest of the members see the video that they'll be excited to do it too. Everyone has been super impressed with the Bishop and Sister Butzin lately because of their stardom, the incredible roles that they played in our videos. I think it really built their confidence in Facebook, as well as the whole ward's confidence to see their Bishop doing something he wasn't super comfortable with, and still doing an amazing job with it. We recorded a 45 second version of our object lesson for the Atonement, so we'll get to post another video this week, but it'll probably just be a smaller one that we post on our personal and ward pages. 

The scripture that I wanted to share today is a small,  but incredibly powerful one, in D&C 6 we read: 36 Look unto me in every thought; doubt not, fear not. What would happen if we really did look unto the Lord in every thought, what if, in everything that we did, rather than first considering our fears or letting small, fiery darts from Satan attack us, we looked to the Lord with an eye single to Him? We would be impenetrable, full of faith, and always abounding in good works, nothing can be so important as following this counsel, that in all things, we look to the Lord.

Chapter 7: My Companion Leaves Me To Die

Here is another great video clip that Elder Anderson and Elder Johnson put together.

God's Love

8/11/2020

Today was our Pday which was pretty cool, we had a lot more success today than I thought we would, we ended up getting our 2nd testimony from a member which we were pretty excited about, he was super talkative, and super excited about his opportunity to help us. Evidently these members are ready to go, they just need someone to give them that push, both testimonies we've gotten were from people when we were sitting right in front of, we're going to have to start recording more that way. He talked so much, and lived so far away, that we ended up not having time for anything else, or our devotional at night. It was a blast though to get to scream my lungs out to Nathan Pacheco's music (even though I can't hit any of his high notes), and to teach that lesson, today was a great day.

8/12/2020

Today was super busy, it was a lot of fun, though. We had three different lessons lined up today, which I think is the most we've ever had, usually we get one or two lined up, but having three lessons, and one of them with a new investigator, was incredible. Our investigator today taught us how to cast for fly fishing, which was pretty awesome, and we left a Book of Mormon with him, which was even more exciting. Nick was very excited to have some people to talk to, we had an awesome lesson. We tied the whole fishing thing back into the "fishers of men" verse which he really like, and then we lovingly told him he was our favorite kind of fish, which he seemed to like even more. We had dinner thanks to Brother Hightower tonight, I'm afraid we're going to eat him out of house and home, but he treats us like we're his sons, and always has place for us. I really love that man. We met a guy who was pretty crazy when we were talking to Brother Hightower today, he runs a cafe and this man came in who was cursed with information he couldn't understand because he looked beyond the mark. We talked to him about God and he said that we were limiting God to be our perception of Him. He was pretty crazy, but it was almost refreshing in a way, I haven't met a guy that crazy since I was in Brazil.

8/13/2020

I'm getting lots of reminders of Brazil, today we went to a bad part of Olathe and the homes were so trashy that it reminded me of Brazil, we also got some street directions from a couple helpful guys, that's definitely not something I've seen since Brazil. What was probably the most fun though, was the dog that came growling at us. There was a giant dog that marched growling at us as we were heading to our dinner, and it freaked out Johnson so much that he started running and completely abandoned me, while I walked up to the dog and calmed it down. It's good to know that if we ever get in a bad situation that I'm on my own for self defense... Today was really good for personal study, I got to talk to Brother Vincent and he dropped off my weekly subscription to "Deep Doct." It was some pretty cool stuff. We had our weekly planning with the ward, except that didn't go very well because only the missionaries and the ward mission leader showed up. We had a fun discussion on our own, though. We then got to do a lesson with Jesus, which was a pass off lesson to the Elders in his area. That was probably one of the saddest lessons I had ever done. We had an awesome lesson, before we passed him off, though. We helped answer his questions one about Priesthood authority which was really well explained, and one about feeling the Holy Ghost and what the fruits of the Holy Ghost are. it was really cool to get to be a part of, but when it finally came time to say "goodbye", all of the fun evaporated, it was heart-wrenching. I was so sad about him leaving, and he was really connected to us too, he said that if he ends up getting baptized, he wants us to do it. That was pretty flattering, and cool to hear.

8/15/2020

Today was pretty good, but didn't end very well... I was really excited because I've been studying Hebrew, and today I overcame the challenge that's been holding me back for a few days: Hebrew doesn't use vowels, and trying to read the "vowel pointings" (modern day reminders of how the word would have been pronounced so that the language wouldn't be lost once all the native speakers died out), trying to read those vowel pointings and all of the letters of a new language was too much, but today I finally got them all memorized, and so I can actually read and pronounce these words! There's a really cool promise about the Book of Mormon (I don't know where it is, but I've tried it and know it works), if you read out loud in the language you're trying to learn from cover to cover, you'll be able to speak enough. For me, as someone who has that goal, and today had the chance to use a language I had been learning by reading the Book of Mormon, I was astounded to see that the promise held true even before I was done reading, that by trying to do this I was able to be blessed to speak in tongues: Today we had an encounter with a Spanish speaker, this awesome guy named Emanuel helped us break into our house (he got through our lock in literally three seconds which is kind of concerning for our safety) and afterwards I was able to have a conversation with him in Spanish! He was super excited once he found out that I spoke, even though it wasn't that well, and it made for an awesome encounter. That was definitely a tender mercy since we couldn't have met him under any other circumstances. It was really cool to see that Book of Mormon promise in effect, because now I'm trying to read a scholar's translation of the Book of Mormon (it's not as inspired as the first presidency's revelation, but fingers crossed that the Book of Mormon promise still applies to it). Today most of our work time was spent making and posting a video, we made a video about Christ's hands being their in our life, and it got taken down by our ZLs. I had received personal revelation to make that video, and wasn't very happy with the reasons that they didn't want it on our area page. This also presents a problem for us because the stake president is coming to visit our church this Sunday, we don't have any videos up yet, and it's important that when the Stake President announces his "New Releases" video to the stake that we're able to direct them to what we have as our videos. I'm not entirely sure what we'll do now, maybe we'll just post the other video we made that isn't perfect quality.

8/15/2020

Today was okay. We went down to Olathe to try to give a letter we wrote to one of our investigators we had lost contact with, that was the last thing we could possibly do to try and get in contact with her, and for all intents and purposes, she's no longer our investigator, that could change if she reaches out to us, but otherwise we've lost a little lamb. We got to talk to Brother Hightower a little which was great, he seemed a little more stressed out today, but he was so excited when he heard that we were coming back tomorrow to bring the sacrament to him. We got to bring back spoils of war with us today, Brother Hightower gave us food and since all of the Uncompahgre Elders are out of food and members to eat with, we shared that gift with them. We also managed to get a post set up for our ward conference tomorrow, it's going live an hour before everyone will arrive at church, so no one's going to see it, but at least it'll be there after church.

8/16/2020

Today was pretty busy so I don't have time to record much. We taught three lessons, got a new testimony video, and had to delete all of our posts from the Facebook page we had been proselyting on.

For today's spiritual thought I wanted to share a few verses from Doctrine and Covenants 21:

        4 Wherefore, meaning the church, thou shalt give heed unto all his words and commandments which he shall give unto you as he receiveth them, walking in all holiness before me;

5 For his word ye shall receive, as if from mine own mouth, in all patience and faith.

6 For by doing these things the gates of hell shall not prevail against you; yea, and the Lord God will disperse the powers of darkness from before you, and cause the heavens to shake for your good, and his name’s glory.

As we strive to obey all of the commandments, God will provide a way for us to find the Tree of Life, even Jesus Christ. We have to be patient and faithful, though, if we hold out faithful to the end, God will prepare a way in His time and His way, for which I am so grateful because He knows all, and His ways are always better than our ways.

Love, 

Elder Anderson

Chapter 6: Alcohol and Dead Fish is Sins Don't Do It

8/3/2020

Today was the most successful Pday I've ever had. We had interviews with our President, it was really cool to get to meet him in person, I asked him some doctrinal questions and asked him for a blessing, which meant that my interview took twice as long as any of the other guys. I felt really bad about taking so much of his time, but it was the first time I had gotten to meet him in person so I was very excited. Pday itself was very good, we got groceries and I got my mission funds card working which was nice. Tonight we had a dinner appointment with a Sister named Nikki. She had been fellowshipping one of the people who lives with her, a woman named Virginia, and she's about as golden as it gets. Nikki was the best member missionary I could have ever hoped for, and we had an incredible lesson with her and Virginia. It was really only supposed to be dinner, but Virginia had so many questions that it turned into a lesson. Afterwards Johnson and I were very excited, we had someone to work with, which we were ecstatic about.

8/5/2020

Today was another great, successful day. We woke up this morning and the Sisters were asking us when we were coming by to pick up our car. We were very confused, but very excited that we would be getting a car. The Sisters were being transferred out, going into a couple different trios so they didn't have any use for the car, so the car went to the nearest pair of Elders sharing a car, which was us. We got to stick with the Tacoma because we're working in the sketchier part of town where the roads aren't so good, and the other Elders got the Sister's car, the Kia, which they're very excited about because it has a "sport mode". It's very nice to not have to worry about sharing a car, which works out really well, because we set up a lesson for tomorrow, a day that we don't have the car. We had a mission wide devotional today which was a lot of fun, because I got to see a lot of friends. I was also super happy because we had a lesson with a member today that we got to do in person. We talked to John Smith about farming (I promise, it really happened) and learned a lot about him. That man has the coolest testimony, we were privileged to get to hear from him. We also got a chance to sync up with the ward today and try to plan out the rest of our week, which was very successful. We're very happy to have so much support from our ward.

8/5/2020

Today was a little disappointing. We had our big lesson that we were really hoping for fall through, which we were pretty sad about, and our Facebook posts didn't do as well as I hoped that they would, they've flopped pretty bad lately. We did disarm an attack against our posts which was cool. We had a pretty good time calling people today. We talked to a lot of members, probably more than we've ever done in a day before, so it was cool to get some success there. I also juiced the skin of a pineapple today, courtesy of my Brazilian training. It was so much work, and yielded two tall cups pineapple juice. It took me almost a half hour, though, so I'm never doing that again, unless I need to flex on the Brazilians that I use every part of the pineapple. There is a Brazilians in Colorado group on Facebook, juicing a pineapple skin could make for a pretty great post...

8/6/2020

Today was an incredible day, we had a lot of appointments all line up today, which made for a very hectic day. We got to teach a couple of lessons to members which was cool, we talked to Brother Hightower and Sister Ray, both of which were exceptional lessons. In Brother Hightower's lesson he invited someone who was eating in his restaurant to sit and learn with us, and so we had another person for our lesson, we were able to connect with him and we're hoping to teach him again soon. In Sister Ray's lesson, we invited her to share a recording of her testimony with us, and she was like, "okay, I'll do it right now", she made her recording, which was AMAZING, and then she shared it with us immediately, the first testimony video we've gotten from a member, which we're ecstatic about. We got the keys for our new apartment today, and the new place is so nice, we're super excited about it. We had to get keys for another companionship as well, they live about a couple of blocks away from us, and we're super excited because they have a washer and dryer, and even though we don't they're willing to let us use theirs on Pday, which means that we won't have to spend extra money on cleaning. One of the Elders who's living in that house said that he spent $150 on laundromats in his last area, so he's very grateful that we have a way to clean our clothes without that huge cost burden. I got to give a training on working in Facebook groups because we've been so successful which was a lot of fun to do. We also got cussed out at our dinner appointment, which was slightly less fun.

8/7/2020

Today was kind of annoying. We were supposed to publish a video today to our area Facebook page, so we spent all day working on our video, I recorded the ending of "Love Is Spoken Here" for our video, I made a timelapse of a painting, and we recorded a video along with a scripture and a short testimony, all for an incredibly powerful 30 second video. We spent multiple hours on those 30 seconds to try to make our message short and clear enough that it would reach anyone, no matter the attention span, that watched our video. After we combined all of these elements in a horrible app called Filmora, the app saved our video with these black lines running up and down throughout the whole video. We were crushed, we had done so much to be able to share that video, and then for the visual part of the video to be so broken was very disheartening. I did get to call my family and share a spiritual thought with them, though. My last comp didn't want to join in for my spiritual thought, but Johnson was willing to, so we taught and testified together, which I was very appreciative of. We also made a massive amount of cookies today, no one should ever mix up the amount of cookie dough we did. When we were making up the cookies we also made lunch, I ended up running a four person kitchen to make red thai curry, and it was a pretty awesome experience to break out a meal so quickly with so many hands working.

8/8/2020

Today was great! We had a lot of success which made today a lot of fun. We were able to set up a ton of appointments, some of which were with new people who we hadn't set up lessons with before. We had a service project with our Ward Mission Leader this morning, and dinner with a lady who's my new favorite witch doctor. She knows a lot about herbal medicine, and was all too excited to teach me about some of the things she's learned that can help people. I'm super excited because she shared a ton of stuff with me, so now my cooking will have witch doctor healing powers in addition to tasting great. We made Brazilian rice and beans for lunch today in our four person cooking ordeal, it turned out super well! Our work went so well today, we did some great Facebook work and work with members.

8/9/2020

Today was incredible, we had a super successful day. We had a great testimony meeting in church today, although some of my favorite members were off on vacation, so I was sad that they weren't there. We had the opportunity afterwards to take the sacrament to a brother we had been teaching. It was the first time in 18 years he took the sacrament, and today that spiritual drought ended. Today we worked with the Spirit, so much so that I couldn't stop to study for myself, our work was so completely consuming, so successful, there was no time for anything else. Our work tonight took place when we should have studied, when we should have taken breaks, and when we should have been eating. It felt great to find so much success, to do so much good. We hit an incredible amount of our goals, we took zeroes for the last two weeks but had a goal to find three new people, put them on date, and bring them to our Sacrament meeting. We got incredibly close, something that blew away the other members of our district, who have been struggling to find new people. We started conversations and helped people today, we found new ways to work and ways to express Christ's love to people. We worked in faith, and we were directed to where we needed to go.

8/11/2020

Today was incredible! We didn't think that we were going to get much work done because we had Zone Conference today and we were supposed to move into our new house. Zone Conference was awesome, this is the first time we've had members as excited about the work as we are, President Taylor, our Stake President, is really doing everything he can to promote our Facebook work, it is incredible to have such a valuable asset in our area. I also got to have lunch with Elder Eden which was pretty great. We moved into our new apartment and set up all of our furniture, I felt like an Ikea specialist. Our new apartment is really nice, and for the first time ever for me, I'm parking our car in the garage, I can't believe that a missionary appartment even has a garage. We had our first real lesson with an investigator today. He doesn't live in our area, so we're going to have to pass him off, but it was still really cool. He was so hungry for knowledge that we taught him about the Restoration, and like, half of The Plan of Salvation. The biggest success for me, though, was what happened when we challenged him to baptism. I have a habit of always challenging people to baptism on the first time, most missionaries are scared of it because walking people through their concerns can be hard, but I was fortunate to serve in Manaus for so long, it taught me how to walk people through their concerns. When we challenged him to baptism, he told us he didn't want to be put on date for baptism, but he told us later that he didn't feel like we were pushy like other religions he had talked to. It was incredible to me that I had learned to invite people to baptism with such love that they didn't feel like I was being overbearing, or demanding something of them that they weren't ready for. That was incredible to me. We also had dinner with our Ward Mission Leader tonight. I got to learn some farmer physics which absolutely blew my mind, we made a pump from an irrigation ditch to his plants by performing a pumping motion with a piece of regular pipe, I was amazed that once we got the water flowing that it would just keep going, it shocked me to see the water going up above the irrigation ditch and continue without slowing. I got pretty good at starting it and told everyone there, "you'll have to call me 'farmer Anderson' now". That was a mistake. it was very fun, though.

For today's spiritual thought I wanted to share Ephesians 6. Ephesians tells us that with the armor of God that we'll be able to withstand all of the wiles of the adversary:

11 Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.

12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

13 Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.

If we cleave to God and put on the whole armor of God, we will not be left comforters, we will have the strength to overcome our weaknesses. 

I love you guys!

Chapter 5: Good Food And Better Work

7/27/2020

Today was a pretty exciting Pday. We woke up and completely forgot to do our laundry so we might be fubecas and do it some time later this week. The Elders we share a car with had a lesson this morning so we had to wait for them to be done before we started Pday activities, but the wait wasn't bad at all, our hotel as wifi so we can send emails without any problems. We went exploring around our hotel this morning, we checked out some stores in our area as well as some old train tracks. There's also a lot of really cool statues and decorations around our hotel so it was cool to take pictures with those. After our sightseeing trip the Elders were about done with their lesson so we went shopping and picked up stuff for the week. Then we went to get haircuts with an incredibly political man. He was waving his razor around in a pretty threatening way as he was talking, it made me nervous and I didn't even ask him for a haircut, I can hardly imagine what my comp was thinking. We went to a Sonic for lunch because the Sonic in this area is run by a member and they give us food for free since they like the missionaries so much. We tried not to take advantage of them and tip the server pretty generously, but now that I think about that, approximately 0% of that tip is actually going towards Sonic, so I suppose that doesn't help very much. We went to the church to email for the rest of our Pday and some nice Sisters came and dropped off a pitcher of lemonade filled with strawberries which was pretty good and well appreciated. We had to run back to the apartment to get dinner from a member, which absolutely blew my mind, I've never been fed on a Pday before, a mission in the States really is like serving in a different world. We got to do some Facebook work tonight and a devotional with our mission, both of which went pretty well, though we didn't have much success with finding on Facebook, Johnson even got his post removed from a page which we had a pretty good laugh about. Then we came home and called up the Elders so that we could have a talk about what's in the Hill Cumorah. Deep doctrine is such a great way to end the day.

7/28/2020

When we woke up this morning we went down to get breakfast, and then to study doctrine with the guy who is becoming my new favorite member: Brother Vincent. Brother Vincent knows a ton about the Gospel, so getting to study with him is really, really cool. We had a couple lessons today, one with Sister Logan, our Relief Society president, and one with a brother Hightower, who's going to our ward because he doesn't like some of the people in his ward. Brother Hightower is a less active, returning member who's planning to come back to church for the first time in more than 20 years this Sunday. We're super excited, and super glad that we got to teach a lesson to him today. Brother Hightower owns a restaurant and made some hamburgers for us before we left which ended up being super important. We had a big service project afterwards and weren't able to make time for dinner, so I very hurriedly ate that hamburger while we tried to book it over to the lady's house that we were going to do service for. When we got to the service project we found out that the lady was completely unprepared, she didn't think that we were going to want to actually work today, so she didn't have anything really prepared for us to do. We tried to figure out what the best plan of attack was for this lady's unkept yard and decided we would try to do most of the work with tools, and we ended up just pulling some of the bigger weeds in her yard. We did make an incredible difference over the course of an hour, and when we were done we called out her family and asked if we could share a scripture with her family. I thought scriptures were universally accepted as being good from my time in Brazil, and so I wasn't anticipating it at all when she said, "no." I was so shocked, I didn't have anything ready to rebut with, and so we thanked her and left. Johnson and I were pretty angry afterwards. Fortunately we had a nice devotional afterwards to help put us in a good mood again. I'm not sure what I would do without those devotionals.

7/29/2020

Today was great! This morning we got to go out with the other Elders in our area and start our work at the church pretty early, it was nice to get a jump on the day. I got to unify the Elders for lunch today which was pretty great. The Elders here have a terrible tradition of all cooking separately and eating their own meals, so today I told them that I was cooking and was going to make food for everyone. They were pretty shocked that I wanted to share the food I bought with them. We made fajitas, I cooked a steak in three minutes, we set off our fire alarm, and made food incredibly quick. When I cooked at my last house, that would have taken me a half hour to do, I literally did it in three minutes, it was crazy. Our meal was pretty great, especially because it was the first time that I got to cook in a very long time. Our work today was pretty awesome, we got to call members (which didn't go very well) and do a lot of Facebook work (which also didn't go very well). It was still meaningful work, though, and I was just excited to get to do it, so I thought it was pretty great. 

7/30/2020

Today was an incredible day. We got to do work in the vineyard today (not the Lord's vineyard, a wine vineyard). We moved some pipes to help a lady out, and what blew my mind is that she actually seemed more appreciative of our message at the end than the work that we did to help her out. She even passed us her father as a reference! We were pretty excited to be able to talk to her and to be able to help her out. We played with her dogs for a bit while we were waiting which was pretty fun. Elder Johnson threw a dog toy and I raced the dog to the toy. I won, and subsequently belittled that dog every time I saw it for the rest of our service, "you will always be #2". It was a good chance to get out of the house, and we even got to drive a golf cart for it, which we found out from our DL (district leader) later that we shouldn't have done. Oh well, we got some pretty great pictures. We also had a great dinner with our Ward Mission Leader. We had a dinner of beets and meat. It was pretty good. We also got to eat with a man named Henry, who our WML (ward mission leader) is a caregiver for. We heard some pretty great stories from both of them, and had an awesome lesson at the end, Brother Beutler promised to share his testimony which brings us up to five separate families who are joining efforts with us. We're pretty excited to be having so much success. 

7/31/2020

Today was really cool! I had my first Facebook success today which was pretty cool. We had been creating a lot of content, but it just didn't seem to be reaching anyone, but Elder Johnson and I felted prompted to work with renewed effort in our area, we had kind of been targeting the whole world and not focusing that much on our area as much as we were focused on just reaching anyone that we could. We started making simple Christ related messages and posting them on message boards for the cities that we work in, and started having pretty immediate success. The posts we made immediately outperformed any of the posts that we made for our church Facebook pages, and gave us an incredible new group of people to work with. For every person that interacted with our posts we reached out to them and sent them individual messages. Surprisingly, I haven't had a negative comment (which blew Elder Pack's mind, he got destroyed for posting about free service without a Christ centered message, and ours were explicitly Christ centered), and had a lot of positive replies to my messages. Even if people didn't want to engage in further conversations with us, they were really courteous and kind about it, which was a testimony to me about how much good our posts were doing. The best conversation that came out of it was with a woman named Debbie. She told us she wasn't interested but appreciated our efforts, I told her, "Thank you Debbie! That's so kind of you to say, I'll be praying for you!" and that response touched her so much that she opened up enough to have a very personal conversation, I got to share scriptures and messages with her and listen to her and all the stuff about missionary work that I love so much, it was incredible.

8/1/2020

Today was a lot of fun. For the first time in my mission I'm part of a house of four. I'm super excited about this chance to get to cook for a house of four. I'm also pretty excited because the other missionaries we're living with are super righteous so it should be a great experience. Today we got to help out everyone in our district because of some of the successes we've been having. We got to work more on Facebook today, but it didn't yield all of the same successes that we got yesterday. We were a little more bold today, kind of testing the waters, and I think it scared people a lot. We tried a couple different posts, and our simpler, hinting at Christ messages are the ones that are blowing up. It's pretty interesting to see what is "too far" for everyone. We made a post about faith and it absolutely bombed. We later made a message showing us as missionaries and talked about how we're here to bring joy through Christ and got a bunch of positive feedback on our message, which was super cool.

8/2/2020

Today was fast Sunday and it was incredible. We had an awesome fast and testimony meeting, There was only time for five people to share their testimonies, but I got to be one of those five, for which I was very grateful. Fast Sundays are especially nice for missionaries because the time that we would use for eating we can solely devote to studying. Today was an incredible day for learning and spiritual growth. We did have a surprise visit from our beloved mission President as we were doing our Facebook work today, he came in and both Elder Johnson and I were pretty surprised and excited to see him. We knew that he was coming down for interviews tomorrow, but had heard nothing about him stopping by our church building. As far as I know, Johnson and I were the only people who got to talk to him and his wife, so it was a pretty cool moment. The other fun thing today was dinner. I thought that I was going to be cooking dinner tonight, and that the Elders had a dinner appointment, but after they left for dinner, we got a call from a family asking if we were still coming  over for dinner. We told them that we definitely were (while Johnson and I shook our heads at each other in confusion about where we were supposed to be and how we'd get there). We told them that we'd give them a call after we worked out transportation with the other Elders. The other Elders had taken the car and we had no idea how we were going to get there, so eventually I decided to call the guy back and he told me that he had just talked to the other Elders in person (apparently this was their dinner appointment) and he had just sent them back for us, so we could expect them in about ten minutes. After that confusing mess all four of us arrived at their house and had an absolute feast. We ate like it was Thanksgiving, and all of us completely crashed afterwards. We were entirely incapable of movement after going from not having eaten all day to bloating up on food. I was very happy.

Today for a spiritual thought I wanted to share a piece of President Monson's favorite verse: D&C 84:88.

I will go before your face. I will be on your right hand and on your left, and my Spirit shall be in your hearts, and mine angels round about you, to bear you up.

God has given his strength to us, he is here bearing us up, and I promise that His angels are around us, around you, to carry you through your burdens. 

Love you guys,

Elder Anderson