Did you know that you are only 24 inches away from Heavenly Father?

We had a great week this week! District meeting was very powerful! We were taught how to use different study techniques and how to study more effectively.. especially for our investigators. what i learned the most was.. you are only 24 inches away from our heavenly father. the distance it takes for you to drop to your knees and pray to him! i have definantly taken advantage of praying on my mission because i know that prayer really does work and that my day always goes by so much better when i have a prayer to start me off! we have had about 6 cancelled appointments this week from different investigators. its way sad when that happens. 2 reasons why. you dont know what else to do besides tract when that happens and number 2. you want to teach them the gospel so bad you feel sad for them! We did have a lesson with our top investigators though on thursday. it was with mykel-15 mikayla-13 Corrine-13 and colton-11! when we got there we first asked the parents if we could set baptism dates with their kids because they are under legal age limit. well we had our lesson and actually had dana (mykel and mikaylas) mom join in on the lesson. at the end of the lesson we set baptism dates with all of the kids except corinne. she is still not sure because she also attends her dads baptist church.. of course!! well when colton agreed. corinne was like.. what about dads church? and coltons said. that was until i found this one! it was the coolest remark that kid has ever said! he has ADHD so he is bouncin of the walls all the time! when we were leaving with a prayer we asked dana frost to give a kneeling prayer and she did. it was such a cool experience!!
Friday night was the whitehouse christmas party and that was great! i got to meet more of the ward and enjoyed an awesome christmas play by the primary kids!:) Saturday was a very long day! we drove to jacksonville which is our farthest part of our area. i never thought i would be in a town where white people are a minority! there is black people all over the place! not that its a bad thing. its just different. we had a lesson later that night with our investigator natalie price. it was also her birthday and we gave her a full set of scriptures. she loved it!!!! she was very grateful! she will eventually be baptized when she decides to quit her smoking habit. On sunday Dana frost brought her children to church all the way from arp which is about a 30 minute drive away. talk about dedication! she also had a migraine and still came! (Dana is not a member). after sacrament they were leaving because dana was too sick to be there so we asked her if we could give her a priesthood blessing and she agreed! so we gave it to her and it was very neat! i could definantly feel the spirit working on her and her children!! anyways.. that was my awesome week!:)

Picking up trash, fixing cars, proselyting at ward carnival. All in a week's work for a missionary!

This week has been great and has gone by super fast! pdays are the start of the weeks and they come and go but when it is pday its so nice! a mission is so exhausting but i love it! on pdays. we get together with the tyler 1 and ysa elders and we just hangout and play a board game called settlers of catan! It is so addicting and is probably the best board game ever made! we had zone conference on tuesday in tyler and all of our zone was there! after our lesson we had lunch and then had a ginger bread making contest! it was so fun. our ginger bread house looked like a cross haha. it was pretty sweet though! we are teaching 4 kids right now that all want to be baptized but we just need to get permission from the parents because thats a rule! lame!! thursday was planning day and we planned with the tyler 1 and ysa elders and since planning goes all the way till 2 in the afternoon. we had tons of spare time so we played settlers of catan!:)On friday we had a lesson with our investigator who had a baptism date for this saturday the 17th but thats not going to happen because she doesnt have the desire to quit smoking. she knows the church is true and loves coming every sunday with her 5 kids! she wants to be baptized before her oldest kid turns 8 which is sometime in february! shes a great lady though! later friday night we went to a baptism for the tyler 1 and ysa elders. the girl was 19 and her name was tayshia hunt!! She is from washington state and she actually went to high school with kellen moore! pretty cool right? i thought so! Saturday was a day of service!!! we started off by picking up trash on a highway that the bullard ward adopted! after that we helped fix the emergency brake cable on a members ford truck. well i mostly watched elder derrick fixed it. that made me kind of mad because i am always helping when it comes to fixing cars! elder derrick worked in a shop for his job before the mission so he thinks he knows the in and outs when it comes to cars haha! he knows quite a bit though! anyways.. after we fixed the car we went to the whitehouse carnival to set up the ward bean bag toss. we also got permission to set up a booth right next to the bean bag toss with all of our commissary (bibles, books of mormon, pass a long cards, etc.) well the carnival started at 2:30 and went till 8:30. since we were not allowed to actively prosolyte and could only talk to people who came up to us and asked questions. we only talked to about 10 people in 6 hours! it was a terrible turn out and i froze my butt off! the bullard ward christmas party was that night too and we missed that! it stunk! on sunday we had 6 investigators at church! we were very excited about that! overall the week turned out to be pretty successful!

Pictures from new area - Whitehouse

Christmas light injury & meeting Glenn Beck

Me and my companion have been super busy this week! we have been doing a lot of tracting and a lot of teaching!! we have an investigator who has had all of the lessons and has a baptism date set for december 17th but she is struggling badly with kicking the habit of smoking. i have heard that smoking is the worst habit to quit.. even harder than quitting drugs like marijuana or cocaine for example.. she knows the church is true and told us the other day that she wants to be sealed in the temple with her husband when they are both worthy.. her husband is a member but inactive and also smokes. on wednesday we helped and 83 year old man in the whitehouse ward put up chrismas lights. and knowing me... i always have to be injured some way or another.. i was threading the lights through my had trying to untangle them and one of them just had to be broken and it sliced my finger open. it was bleeding pretty bad! but i just put a band-aid on it and kept working:).

On Thursday i went on an exchange with Elder Fry, and since we went on an exchange i got permission to finally drive our car. its been 5 months since i have driven so i thought i would be rusty. not even! its like riding a bicycle. once you learn you don't forget how to haha. i am horrible at backing out my companion too so i dont ever do that! Thursday night while on our exchange me and elder fry went to the church and played basketball with the young single adults branch. i was balling it up! i think people were a little jealous;).


Saturday was definantly my favorite day of the week!!!! Glenn Beck was doing an autograph signing at the hastings in tyler so me and my companion went with elder fry and his companion elder wheatley and we went to talk to people standing in line.. the line was huge!!!! a lot of people recognized us too!! it made me feel like a celebrity haha. there was also protestors and my companion had this bright idea that we should go and contact them. well guess who was the brave one of the group. this guy! none of the other elders contacted them! well when the line shortened up we hopped in line and i got to shake glenn becks hand! it was way cool! we also got to get a picture with him:). so as you can see.. i am super tired from last week! i fell asleep in sacrament yesterday.

love you tons!love elder christensen