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
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