Monday, February 27, 2012
Meeting a General Authority, Elder Duncan
This week has been a rollercoaster of excitement and a companion who icant get along with quite yet.. On Wednesday we drove to Longview which is about an hour away for a Multi zone conference with General Authority Elder Kevin R. Duncan. He has been apart of the quorum of the Seventy for a year or less.. he was a mission president before that in the Santiago, Chile North Mission. It was great to be able to meet with a general authority and to ask him questions. He didnt come in to talk to us about what he wanted but he asked us what we wanted to learn and we spent about 5 hours on certain subjects that we felt like we could improve on. It was great and i definantly learned alot! Thursday night we went to Jacksonville to meet with Natalie Price and she is still struggling on quitting smoking but I told her that I know how special the power of the Priesthood is and I offered her a blessing and she accepted. In the past, she has always declined aPriesthood blessing but I testified how this blessing was a blessing from her Father in heaven and I know it would really help her. She asked me to give the blessing and that was a very spiritual experience. So while me and Elder Moses were together we did a lot of less activework in both wards.. and while we were visiting someone they were not home, but as we walked back to our car a lady from across the street yells "hey elders"! so we walked over there and found out that her name was Kandie Towne and she has been meeting with the elders since '98 and its been a while since she has seen us. Well on Thursday night i called to confirm our appointment with her for Friday night and she was crying on the phone for 30 minutes. She apparently got bad results back from a doctor and she was also saying how she really wants a change in her life. She said that her brother rickey and best friend Anna moved in with her and I heard her best friend in the background say.. tell them i really want to meet them and that i want a Book of Mormon! We told her that we really wanted to meet her too and she started to cry! So we went over on Friday and decided to teach the plan of salvation but only got through half of the lesson because there were questions going both ways and overall it was a very good discussion! They all said that alot of what we talked about cleared up a lot of things! So those are our new investigators that we are excited about teaching more.
Monday, February 20, 2012
New companion from Sweden and waking up at 12:30 am to teach an investigator.
I had a great week this week with my new companion! I picked him up on tuesday! His name is Elder Hedberg and he is from sweden! he has been out almost a year.. he turns a year old at the beginning of march. so he will be the third companion i have had that hit his year mark with me. After picking him up i brought him back home and let him unpack his stuff and then we went out for the day.. On wednesday night we had a rather weird appointment... It was with this referral we received from a member in the bullard ward. well this man lives in jacksonville in a senior residence/rehab center. well his name is Ronald Roach and he is 63 and we were talking to him about his religious background. well he told us he was saved about 15 years in a little black church.. the reason for him going to a little black church is because he says no one would accept him in any other church because of his voice... he told us when he sang he had a black man voice and he is white.. then he asked us if we wanted to hear him sing. and he just started singing to us. it was the funniest thing i have ever seen! it was so hard not to laugh haha. but as we taught him i felt kind of bad because apparently he has some stuff wrong with him and he cant remember very well so i dont know how much of our lesson he got out of it. i was teaching him to pray and i spent 5 minutes trying to tell him that we start a prayer by saying "dear heavenly father" and when i asked him how we started a prayer he would say "i forgot" and he just could never remember.. kind of sad..
i went on an exchange with my district leader elder lefevre on friday and we helped a 400 pound lady who is a recent convert mow her lawn because she is really not capable of doing that! but it was nice because it allowed us to do service instead of knocking doors for 3 hours.. you know.. the typical mormon missionary thing.. later that night we went to a spanish lesson and i just stood there listening. but when we left they were having a barbeque and spanish people always make tons of extras so they sent us home with tons of food! the best thing was a jalapeno pepper stuffed with cream cheese and then wrapped with bacon.. oh goodness its delicious! When i went to bed saturday night i was woken up at 12:30 by a potential investigator.. He asked me to talk to him about how his family can be eternal.. and i asked him if we could talk about it later that day and he said he wouldnt have time so i tried to concentrate while half asleep and was talking to him about how we will be a family forever and he also asked about tithing because he said he has been really successful his whole life.. it was a very strange conversation.. he told me that he will let me go back to bed while he sits alone in this huge ....... house.. he used a bad word but i wont repeat it.. i think he was drunk haha.
Church yesterday was great and everyone was very welcoming to elder hedberg.. A sister in the Bullard Ward is doing a biography thing on us and is going to publish it in the tyler newpaper. our pictures will be in it and everything.. pretty cool! We also had the opportunity in Elders Quorum to consecrate oil. that was a neat experience.. Before coming to email this morning we were at a members house doing laundry and he has a lot of property and he has a zip line that we were playing on. it was way cool. he even rode on the zipline and he is 73 years old haha. He also has this huge swing that you have to climb on this platform to get on because it has like a 45 degree arch. well i climbed higher thang the platform and when i jumped on it.. i fell off and ate it hard on the ground hahaha.. so there is my crazy injury story for the week.. i wasnt really hurt though. just banged up..
i went on an exchange with my district leader elder lefevre on friday and we helped a 400 pound lady who is a recent convert mow her lawn because she is really not capable of doing that! but it was nice because it allowed us to do service instead of knocking doors for 3 hours.. you know.. the typical mormon missionary thing.. later that night we went to a spanish lesson and i just stood there listening. but when we left they were having a barbeque and spanish people always make tons of extras so they sent us home with tons of food! the best thing was a jalapeno pepper stuffed with cream cheese and then wrapped with bacon.. oh goodness its delicious! When i went to bed saturday night i was woken up at 12:30 by a potential investigator.. He asked me to talk to him about how his family can be eternal.. and i asked him if we could talk about it later that day and he said he wouldnt have time so i tried to concentrate while half asleep and was talking to him about how we will be a family forever and he also asked about tithing because he said he has been really successful his whole life.. it was a very strange conversation.. he told me that he will let me go back to bed while he sits alone in this huge ....... house.. he used a bad word but i wont repeat it.. i think he was drunk haha.
Church yesterday was great and everyone was very welcoming to elder hedberg.. A sister in the Bullard Ward is doing a biography thing on us and is going to publish it in the tyler newpaper. our pictures will be in it and everything.. pretty cool! We also had the opportunity in Elders Quorum to consecrate oil. that was a neat experience.. Before coming to email this morning we were at a members house doing laundry and he has a lot of property and he has a zip line that we were playing on. it was way cool. he even rode on the zipline and he is 73 years old haha. He also has this huge swing that you have to climb on this platform to get on because it has like a 45 degree arch. well i climbed higher thang the platform and when i jumped on it.. i fell off and ate it hard on the ground hahaha.. so there is my crazy injury story for the week.. i wasnt really hurt though. just banged up..
Monday, February 13, 2012
Service project: "Bull Crap clean-up" ..no..really!
This week has been pretty slow... mainly cause i have a very trunkycompanion that i love very much and its hard to do stuff when you arethat trunky haha. but on tuesday we had district meeting and that wasgreat! my companion made me train every body cause he said i was goingto be the district leader when he left. so i gave a training on how usas missionaries need to feel the spirit so our investigators can feelthe spirit also! i feel like it was a great training. it lasted anhour and a half for heck sakes! that included some role plays whichwere pretty sweet i must say:). Wednesday was a rather fun day! not so much missionary related butfun:) hehe. so our car had the air bag light come back on so we had todrive into ford to get that checked out again. well the lady said thatthe technician was going to need the car for the whole day so he cantear it apart and find out what is going on with it. we didnt leavethe car cause we didnt have time today. so the wills point elder picked us up and took us to there place for the day. they live abou anhour and a half away from us and are still in our district! crazy!thats east texas for ya haha. well that night we went to a bull ridingarena and got to watch people ride bulls! it was way sweet! The eldersin this area go do service every wednesday at this arean cleaning upbull crap and then that night they get to go watch people practiceriding bulls. so thats what we did:) it was way cool! The next morning we went back to the arena and spent a couple hourshelping clean up crap too for service.. that was an experience! therest of the week was pretty slow but saturday elder moses actuallywanted to work for his last actual full day of working so we did:) Onsunday both wards announced that he was going home in sacramentmeeting. that was pretty funny. that made him a little red in the facehaha. we came back out to wills point last night so we can drop eldermoses of at the place where they take him into dallas today.. we spentthe night at one of their members house having dinner and then playingthis game called dungeons and dragons.. this game was apparently thegame to play before video games were ever invented. i felt very nerdywhile playing it. but it reminded me of my video game playing dayshaha. but that was my week and hope you enjoyed that hehe. i love you mom and hope your day is the best ever:)love elder christensen
Monday, February 6, 2012
The "Tall Wall" analogy
This week our car was having some problems so we had to take it in for a check up. I bet its because its a ford. fords are horrible cars. in my opinion. Our airbag light was on so we took it to ford and they said that they needed to order a new air bag for the driver side because the driver air bag was faulty. good thing I'm not the driver right? haha. poor elder moses! After going there we had to go to Pep Boys to get new tires, an alignment and an oil change. if we were allowed to work on cars i would have done the oil change haha. but were not. sad day!:( On Wednesday we had a multi district meeting and then we went on an exchange with the Tyler 2&3 Elders. I went with Elder Cardenaz. He is a greenie... we stayed in his area because he needs to start learning Spanish a lot better because his trainer.. Elder LeFevre is getting frustrated with him because he never talks in lessons. so on our exchange they had a lot of lessons set up so i just sat back and let Elder Cardenaz teach in Spanish. It was pretty fun being able to just listen and pick out the very few words i know in Spanish. haha. He did good. i think he learned a lot on that exchange.
Thursday was a pretty busy day for us. We went out to Jacksonville (The Armpit of our area) with Brother Bennett. (his son is Cameron meroney.. my recent convert) brother Bennett is also coming back to church from inactivity and is really loving and feeling the spirit so strongly in his life right now! he bore a powerful testimony at church yesterday and the members were thanking him a ton after sacrament for it... but anyways our day in Jacksonville was pretty successful. we went to look for less actives or people the bishop has no idea who they are. some of the members lived way out in the sticks! we were on some pretty bad dirt roads too! For dinner that night we met up at President Murray's house (2nd counselor in the stake). Oh my heck! his house is a mansion! it is ridiculously huge! He took us out to outback steak house and i ordered a steak:) We had a lesson after dinner with our Top progressing investigators. Kylie and Lexie. They will probably not be baptized this transfer because their mom keeps putting on the breaks and I'm guessing wants more time. oh well! they will definitely be baptized though:)
We went to the Ford dealership early Friday morning and got the airbag fixed. After that we went on another exchange with the Tyler 2&3 Elders and this time i stayed in my area and Elder LeFevre came with me.. We went to Flint to talk to a less active member but he was not home so we went tracting.. We ended up tracting into a guy that we met in Tyler a week prior. That was kind of funny. Well this guy's name is tony and he let us share what we had to offer. He really enjoyed listening to us and we set up a return appointment. He was also drinking and was drunk so hopefully he remembers our appointment haha. We had dinner with Quiroz family that night. A Mexican family in the bullard ward. They made us Tamales and Pozole. ah i love real mexican food! We had a lesson later that night in Chandler with this girl named Brianna Bishop. she apparently was baptized 3 or so years ago but the church has no record of her being baptized and neither does the mission office. so President Durrant said to go ahead and teach her and baptize her again. Well during the lesson i was teaching about Prophets! i was using this analogy. Imagine a really tall wall and we the people are on one side and our Heavenly Father is on the other side.. Can we speak to him? No! but if we have a prophet standing on top of the wall.. He Can speak to Heavenly Father and then the Prophet can tell us what our Heavenly Father wants us to do. Well this family is a little strange.. and this 13 year old girl says.. i have a question? Is this wall made of brick? i was laughing really hard inside. I had to tell her that what i was saying was just an imaginary thing. Bless her Heart! hahahaha. Well for the most part the lesson went pretty good. On the way home i get a call from my companion saying he found Briannas baptism record in the Area book at Tyler 2&3's apartment. i was pretty mad.. but oh well!
On Saturday we were finding more less active members. that's what elder moses likes to do instead of tract. i do as well because tracting is a poor way to find people! Well after leaving a house of this family that wasn't home. This lady across the street yells "hey elders!" so we went over to talk to her. her name is kandie town and apparently she was meeting with the missionaries when she lived in New York.. she said they helped her alot and that she wanted us to come back to teach her and she also wanted to feed us dinner! way cool! Miracles defiantly happen! We left her with a book of Mormon and i said a prayer for her and she was teary eyed after the prayer. I really think this is going to turn out to be very good! Well since yesterday was the super bowl and everybody was going to be very mad at us for bugging them during it. we went to the Wills Point Elders apartment and hung out with them for the rest of the night! it was way fun! we built a fire in their fireplace! reminds me of the good ol' times!
love elder christensen
Thursday was a pretty busy day for us. We went out to Jacksonville (The Armpit of our area) with Brother Bennett. (his son is Cameron meroney.. my recent convert) brother Bennett is also coming back to church from inactivity and is really loving and feeling the spirit so strongly in his life right now! he bore a powerful testimony at church yesterday and the members were thanking him a ton after sacrament for it... but anyways our day in Jacksonville was pretty successful. we went to look for less actives or people the bishop has no idea who they are. some of the members lived way out in the sticks! we were on some pretty bad dirt roads too! For dinner that night we met up at President Murray's house (2nd counselor in the stake). Oh my heck! his house is a mansion! it is ridiculously huge! He took us out to outback steak house and i ordered a steak:) We had a lesson after dinner with our Top progressing investigators. Kylie and Lexie. They will probably not be baptized this transfer because their mom keeps putting on the breaks and I'm guessing wants more time. oh well! they will definitely be baptized though:)
We went to the Ford dealership early Friday morning and got the airbag fixed. After that we went on another exchange with the Tyler 2&3 Elders and this time i stayed in my area and Elder LeFevre came with me.. We went to Flint to talk to a less active member but he was not home so we went tracting.. We ended up tracting into a guy that we met in Tyler a week prior. That was kind of funny. Well this guy's name is tony and he let us share what we had to offer. He really enjoyed listening to us and we set up a return appointment. He was also drinking and was drunk so hopefully he remembers our appointment haha. We had dinner with Quiroz family that night. A Mexican family in the bullard ward. They made us Tamales and Pozole. ah i love real mexican food! We had a lesson later that night in Chandler with this girl named Brianna Bishop. she apparently was baptized 3 or so years ago but the church has no record of her being baptized and neither does the mission office. so President Durrant said to go ahead and teach her and baptize her again. Well during the lesson i was teaching about Prophets! i was using this analogy. Imagine a really tall wall and we the people are on one side and our Heavenly Father is on the other side.. Can we speak to him? No! but if we have a prophet standing on top of the wall.. He Can speak to Heavenly Father and then the Prophet can tell us what our Heavenly Father wants us to do. Well this family is a little strange.. and this 13 year old girl says.. i have a question? Is this wall made of brick? i was laughing really hard inside. I had to tell her that what i was saying was just an imaginary thing. Bless her Heart! hahahaha. Well for the most part the lesson went pretty good. On the way home i get a call from my companion saying he found Briannas baptism record in the Area book at Tyler 2&3's apartment. i was pretty mad.. but oh well!
On Saturday we were finding more less active members. that's what elder moses likes to do instead of tract. i do as well because tracting is a poor way to find people! Well after leaving a house of this family that wasn't home. This lady across the street yells "hey elders!" so we went over to talk to her. her name is kandie town and apparently she was meeting with the missionaries when she lived in New York.. she said they helped her alot and that she wanted us to come back to teach her and she also wanted to feed us dinner! way cool! Miracles defiantly happen! We left her with a book of Mormon and i said a prayer for her and she was teary eyed after the prayer. I really think this is going to turn out to be very good! Well since yesterday was the super bowl and everybody was going to be very mad at us for bugging them during it. we went to the Wills Point Elders apartment and hung out with them for the rest of the night! it was way fun! we built a fire in their fireplace! reminds me of the good ol' times!
love elder christensen
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