My week has been great! On Monday we went to the Tyler zoo and saw all different kinds of animals. that was really fun! and.. yes we are allowed to do that:) later that night we had a lesson at our investigators house. the one that just showed up to church. So we taught him the restoration with bro. tannery our ward mission leader.. Well Paul is his name and he is in the process of building his house and so he lives in a trailer right next to it. since his trailer is too small to sit in we sat on some lawn chairs outside and started teaching.. well while teaching it started thundering off in the distance and then it started sprinkling.. so we moved the chairs into his half built house which does have a roof on top of it. a Tin Roof to be exact.. you can probably tell where this is going. well as soon as we started teaching about joseph smith it started pouring rain and my ward mission leader was about 3 feet from our investigators face yelling at him because it was so loud because of the rain! hahaha. funny how that happens right? it was pretty funny though.. On wednesday we drove to Longview which is about 40 miles away from where we live.. We had a specialized training where we were trained by President Durrant and the assistants:) it was awesome! i love those meetings because they are so powerful and you get to see other missionaries and chat with them!
On Friday we had 2 lessons at 7 that night so we split off with members and i went to teach Jennifer Herrington with Bro. Price. She lives so far away from the church and it takes about 30 minutes to get to her house from the church.. well we read Alma 32 with her and its on faith! i love that chapter and explains faith very well.. well jennifer had a baptism date for april 7th but she needs to come to church 3 times and didnt last week so i reset her date for April 21st so hopefully she can make that date. She did come to church for the first time yesterday so we were excited to see her there! Saturday was a long day of tracting. I like tracting down County Roads which are roads where houses are far apart from eachother. i dont like knocking on houses that are right next to eachother. Well we were tracting saturday morning and i rolled my ankle but it was a bad one so we just kept tracting and then later down the street i step into a hole that i didnt see and rolled my ankle pretty bad. i was kind of mad because stuff like that happens to me all the time and no one else. (im referring to my companion haha).. well that night my ankle was double the size of my other one and now my ankle keeps popping. it doesnt hurt as much though.. we didnt get a transfer call saturday night so i guess im staying another transfer and Elder Hedberg is the new District Leader! He better not try to use that against me or somethins gonna happen. Hes already bossy as it is and i have to put him in his place!
Sunday was awesome and we had a very powerful testimony meeting in the bullard ward. i got up to bear my testimony. I love bearing my testimony to people. it doesnt scare me at all! That night we had dinner at the Atwoods house. The people that i got a hat from.. well they have over 300 acres of land and have a ton of animals. mostly goats though.. like 500 goats! well their 13 year olds son drove us around their land in a Ford F-250 truck. and i gotta say.. he was pretty good at it haha. They had to get all of their billy goats into a pen and so we helped them with that.. oh was that a task! after we got them in the pen we had to pull one out at a time so they could take a picture of them.. so i got in there and i was going to town on these goats! I grabbed them by the Horns and i was yanking them out of the pens haha. They tried resisting but were too weak for me;) Thats the week in the life of a missionary!
Elder Dilan Christensen serving in Dallas, Texas! 6/11 - 6/13
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Monday, March 19, 2012
Allergy season arrives in Texas
The weather there does seem a bit crazy! but it is nothing like Texas weather. they always say.. if you dont like the weather then wait 10 minutes haha. that is so true. :)
My week has been crazy! but really slow because it was spring break here and a ton of my investigators were out of town for that. so our numbers didnt look so great:/! Umm... so spring has already started this year here in Texas and that means allergy season... yayyyyyy!!! NOT! every morning i wake up with a stuffed nose and our car is covered in pollen! it is horrible. Texas makes my allergies 3 times worse here than it does in idaho so it sucks!! So Tuesday we had district meeting and it was okay.. not as good as they usually are. it was on the effective use of the missionary planner and i already know how to use it so i guess it was just a refresher haha.
On Wednesday we went to Tyler to help the Tyler missionaries members by going to a storage unit and picking up this heavy shop table and some other stuff and taking it back to their house. after that we went to one of their investigators houses who is a Mexican and they made us some real Mexican food. it was so good! After that me and Elder Lefevre went on another exchange haha.. its like the 3rd one we have done this transfer. i love that missionary! he is so funny! we had dinner at a members house (walls) that night who has a really good looking daughter haha but she wasn't there:(! Friday was the only day we had a lesson and that was with Kandie and Anna. Rickey was sleeping so he wasnt there haha. but we did invite them to be baptized and they accepted so that was super cool! They will hopefully be baptized on April 21st if everything goes as planned! The rest of the week we tracted a ton and found a few potential people so hopefully we will start teaching them.
Saturday was when we tracted the most and that morning we tracted these trailer homes and this lady who was gardening out front came up to us and said "i know who you are.. you are Mormons!" she started yelling at us saying "your religion is false, the book of Mormon is not true, you should read you bible and not that trash!" She also said.. "do you know how joseph smith was killed" and i told her "that he was martyred in the Carthage jail" and she said "no he smuggled a gun in that jail and was shooting the guards so they fired back and killed him" hahah. she was way angry at us and i thought she was literally going to slap me!!! anyways.. we tracted all that day and then decided to go to this inactive members house and her son was there who was also inactive and they said they were going to Tyler for Chinese food and they invited us to join them! That was way nice of them.. Elder Hedberg prophesied that.. He said 2 hours earlier that maybe we will get dinner from an inactive family haha and we did:)!
On Sunday i helped the whitehouse ward bless the sacrament cause there was like no one there and so i helped:) its been a while since i have done that kind of stuff haha. But in Bullard ward a guy who i didnt recognize was there and my ward mission leader was talking to him and it ended up being a man who was investigating the church. He was actually a media referral that me and elder moses received when we were together. it was actually the first night we were together and my GPS took us to a road that didn't exist so we kinda dropped him.. well he showed up yesterday and stayed for the 3 hours and now we have an appointment with him tonight! we are excited! Later that night we did some less active work and visited this family who the dad is a high priest and used to be on the high council.. well he was very rude and told us to leave.. come to find out his wife wears skimpy clothing or whatever and someone made a comment like a year ago and that's what made them leave the church! pretty stupid! people don't realize that THE CHURCH IS PERFECT! NOT THE PEOPLE! so that was a little irritating! There you have it! my exciting week!
My week has been crazy! but really slow because it was spring break here and a ton of my investigators were out of town for that. so our numbers didnt look so great:/! Umm... so spring has already started this year here in Texas and that means allergy season... yayyyyyy!!! NOT! every morning i wake up with a stuffed nose and our car is covered in pollen! it is horrible. Texas makes my allergies 3 times worse here than it does in idaho so it sucks!! So Tuesday we had district meeting and it was okay.. not as good as they usually are. it was on the effective use of the missionary planner and i already know how to use it so i guess it was just a refresher haha.
On Wednesday we went to Tyler to help the Tyler missionaries members by going to a storage unit and picking up this heavy shop table and some other stuff and taking it back to their house. after that we went to one of their investigators houses who is a Mexican and they made us some real Mexican food. it was so good! After that me and Elder Lefevre went on another exchange haha.. its like the 3rd one we have done this transfer. i love that missionary! he is so funny! we had dinner at a members house (walls) that night who has a really good looking daughter haha but she wasn't there:(! Friday was the only day we had a lesson and that was with Kandie and Anna. Rickey was sleeping so he wasnt there haha. but we did invite them to be baptized and they accepted so that was super cool! They will hopefully be baptized on April 21st if everything goes as planned! The rest of the week we tracted a ton and found a few potential people so hopefully we will start teaching them.
Saturday was when we tracted the most and that morning we tracted these trailer homes and this lady who was gardening out front came up to us and said "i know who you are.. you are Mormons!" she started yelling at us saying "your religion is false, the book of Mormon is not true, you should read you bible and not that trash!" She also said.. "do you know how joseph smith was killed" and i told her "that he was martyred in the Carthage jail" and she said "no he smuggled a gun in that jail and was shooting the guards so they fired back and killed him" hahah. she was way angry at us and i thought she was literally going to slap me!!! anyways.. we tracted all that day and then decided to go to this inactive members house and her son was there who was also inactive and they said they were going to Tyler for Chinese food and they invited us to join them! That was way nice of them.. Elder Hedberg prophesied that.. He said 2 hours earlier that maybe we will get dinner from an inactive family haha and we did:)!
On Sunday i helped the whitehouse ward bless the sacrament cause there was like no one there and so i helped:) its been a while since i have done that kind of stuff haha. But in Bullard ward a guy who i didnt recognize was there and my ward mission leader was talking to him and it ended up being a man who was investigating the church. He was actually a media referral that me and elder moses received when we were together. it was actually the first night we were together and my GPS took us to a road that didn't exist so we kinda dropped him.. well he showed up yesterday and stayed for the 3 hours and now we have an appointment with him tonight! we are excited! Later that night we did some less active work and visited this family who the dad is a high priest and used to be on the high council.. well he was very rude and told us to leave.. come to find out his wife wears skimpy clothing or whatever and someone made a comment like a year ago and that's what made them leave the church! pretty stupid! people don't realize that THE CHURCH IS PERFECT! NOT THE PEOPLE! so that was a little irritating! There you have it! my exciting week!
Monday, March 12, 2012
100% Rabbit Fur Cowboy hat, mysterious house with 8 cats and missing resident, Choctaw Indian and his "sweet grass"
First off i just wanna say that i absolutely hate daylight savings time when on a mission. well the springing forward one. the falling back is tons better! I had a member yesterday at church catch me yawning for like the 10th time! she told me that i have been yawning all day and that i needed to stop haha! But this week reminded me alot about plano.. Lots of tracting! oh so much funn!!! can you sense the sarcasm? On Tuesday we worked all day in Frankston Texas. That is where Brooks Atwood lives and works so we stopped into his hat store and i bought myself an all black 100% Rabbit Fur Cowboy Hat. so i am now one more step forward to officially becoming a real cowboy haha. i just need boots now:) We went out with the stake patriarch that night his name is Joe Odom. He knows so much its ridiculous! well we stopped by a member that has 2 types of cancer and he has like 2-4 months of living according to what the doctors say!:/
On Wednesday we were in Arp Texas and we stopped by a lot of inactive members and this one house we stopped at is a very nice house and he lives right on lake tyler. well we have stopped by this mans house a ton of times but i have only been there in the night so you cant really see anything. well that day we were there during the day and of course no answer.. but he has like 8 cats living in his house.. The same TV screen is on every time we go over there. his pool is almost black and has turtles living in it and his mail box is packed full and has a wasp nest growing on the mail! Me and my companion were like detectives haha. we were coming to the decision to where he just moved out of his house and left all of his stuff there.. or he killed his wife and then committed suicide and they are both dead in the house... what do you think? hahaha. but what are the cats living off of? their carcasses? sorry if you are getting nauseous at this point. well on to a better note.. we had a fantastic lesson that night with 3 of our investigators (kandie, anna, and rickey). we taught the restoration to them and then we invited kandie to give a kneeling prayer. it was so special and she said it was her first time and it was a perfect prayer!
Thursday was a lot of tracting and that night we had a lesson with Jennifer Herrington way out in the sticks of Jacksonville again. well we taught her the Plan of Salvation and then i committed her to baptism on April 7th and she accepted:).. she is a really quiet person but maybe thats just her personality. who knows? we had another lesson planned for Kandie, Anna, and Rickey on friday but they had to cancel because anna might have pneumonia and they had to take her to the hospital. The rest of the weekend was a little slow for us but while we were tracting yesterday a man across the street yelled and asked us how we were doing.. he also said we looked nice because we were in our suits. i think he was referring to me though cause im a boss:)! well this man was a Choctaw Indian and he let us in. well it went really bad because he was saying so much false doctrine. he didnt even believe god loved everyone! it was kind of sad. so i told him i find it hard to believe that our heavenly father would put us in families so we can grow and learn to love one another if he didnt love us. so that was pretty much the end of that.. he gave us some plants called sweet grass.. he said it was something they use in his tribe to get rid of bad stuff? Weird! Well that was my awesome week in a nut shell;)
On Wednesday we were in Arp Texas and we stopped by a lot of inactive members and this one house we stopped at is a very nice house and he lives right on lake tyler. well we have stopped by this mans house a ton of times but i have only been there in the night so you cant really see anything. well that day we were there during the day and of course no answer.. but he has like 8 cats living in his house.. The same TV screen is on every time we go over there. his pool is almost black and has turtles living in it and his mail box is packed full and has a wasp nest growing on the mail! Me and my companion were like detectives haha. we were coming to the decision to where he just moved out of his house and left all of his stuff there.. or he killed his wife and then committed suicide and they are both dead in the house... what do you think? hahaha. but what are the cats living off of? their carcasses? sorry if you are getting nauseous at this point. well on to a better note.. we had a fantastic lesson that night with 3 of our investigators (kandie, anna, and rickey). we taught the restoration to them and then we invited kandie to give a kneeling prayer. it was so special and she said it was her first time and it was a perfect prayer!
Thursday was a lot of tracting and that night we had a lesson with Jennifer Herrington way out in the sticks of Jacksonville again. well we taught her the Plan of Salvation and then i committed her to baptism on April 7th and she accepted:).. she is a really quiet person but maybe thats just her personality. who knows? we had another lesson planned for Kandie, Anna, and Rickey on friday but they had to cancel because anna might have pneumonia and they had to take her to the hospital. The rest of the weekend was a little slow for us but while we were tracting yesterday a man across the street yelled and asked us how we were doing.. he also said we looked nice because we were in our suits. i think he was referring to me though cause im a boss:)! well this man was a Choctaw Indian and he let us in. well it went really bad because he was saying so much false doctrine. he didnt even believe god loved everyone! it was kind of sad. so i told him i find it hard to believe that our heavenly father would put us in families so we can grow and learn to love one another if he didnt love us. so that was pretty much the end of that.. he gave us some plants called sweet grass.. he said it was something they use in his tribe to get rid of bad stuff? Weird! Well that was my awesome week in a nut shell;)
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Monday, March 5, 2012
Beautiful weather in Texas!
I hope the weather is good where you are because it is B-E-A-UTIFUL! Me and my companion have been doing a lot better this week and im very grateful for that because it makes the work move slow and nothing really gets done because their is so much contention between eachother. so it has been tons better! On tuesday we had district meeting and it was great. it was more of a talk session than our district leader just teaching us. we talked about how we can work with less active and part member families more instead of tracting all the time and not seeing any success at all! So after district meeting.. me and the district always go to this real mexican food restaurant called Don Juans and always get Tortas. oh man they are so delicious! They are also the cheapest which is why we get them haha. they run about 3.50 for one. Well me and Elder Lefevre have been going on lots of exchanges lately if you hadnt noticed. because my companion doesnt have a license and Elder Lefevre cant drive because he got into a crash a couple of transfers ago. so when we go on exchanges with that companionship Elder Lefevre has to come with me and my companion Elder Hedberg goes with Elder Cardenaz.. Well we went on another exchange tuesday after district meeting and it was great! Me and Elder Lefevre worked a lot on the less actives in the ward and we ended up scheduling a few appointments with them. that night we had a member.. Bro. Price take us out to the sticks in jacksonville and met with a less active family and her son is inactive who has a non-member wife.. (you can probably see where this is going:)) Yep! we asked her to take the lessons and she said she was interested in learning more...:):)! So we scheduled an appointment for the following night! yay!
So on wednesday we exchanged companions back and we went to visit some of the less active families that we scheduled appointments with. that was very successful! we also went to our lesson that night to see Jennifer Herrington our new investigator. Bro. Brooks Atwood was the member that took us out. (He owns a really nice cowboy hat making company and i'm going to get a hat from him:) he charges half price for missionaries:)) well anyways. on the way out to our lesson of course the topic of politics came up and he is so conservative! He told us that he wishes this country would fall and that when it does he would bunker up at his house with all 15 AK-47's and enough ammo and food to feed 6 families for 2 years!!! hahaha. he also said that he would suck the blood from Obamas dying throat! It was super funny!! But on to a better note. we met with our investigator and taught her the restoration and the lesson went great. although im not sure how strong her knowledge is on the gospel or on our savior Jesus Christ! But thats why we are here and we will definantly fix that!:)
So we had another lesson with our other investigators Kandie, Rickey, and Anna.. that went well. we just finished the plan of salvation with them. Saturday morning we went to a Recent Converts house with the Elders and High Priests of the Bullard Ward and helped clean up his backyard. He is 83 years old and has not kept up with his back yard in who knows when. there was sticks everywhere. so we cleaned all that up and then we took it to a members house and burned it all! the fire was huge!! So yesterday was sunday and church was great! After church we went to our investigators Kandie, Rickey, and Anna's cause they invited us over for dinner. Rickey ended up smoking a turkey and Kandie made lots of italian food! it was so delicious! The downside of that event was.. they were all drinking and it made us as missionaries feel like crap cause the spirit was not there at all! so we didnt end up teaching the lesson we wanted to we just left after eating.. For the rest of the day i just did not want to do anything because of how bad i felt... but oh well! i got over that today:).
So on wednesday we exchanged companions back and we went to visit some of the less active families that we scheduled appointments with. that was very successful! we also went to our lesson that night to see Jennifer Herrington our new investigator. Bro. Brooks Atwood was the member that took us out. (He owns a really nice cowboy hat making company and i'm going to get a hat from him:) he charges half price for missionaries:)) well anyways. on the way out to our lesson of course the topic of politics came up and he is so conservative! He told us that he wishes this country would fall and that when it does he would bunker up at his house with all 15 AK-47's and enough ammo and food to feed 6 families for 2 years!!! hahaha. he also said that he would suck the blood from Obamas dying throat! It was super funny!! But on to a better note. we met with our investigator and taught her the restoration and the lesson went great. although im not sure how strong her knowledge is on the gospel or on our savior Jesus Christ! But thats why we are here and we will definantly fix that!:)
So we had another lesson with our other investigators Kandie, Rickey, and Anna.. that went well. we just finished the plan of salvation with them. Saturday morning we went to a Recent Converts house with the Elders and High Priests of the Bullard Ward and helped clean up his backyard. He is 83 years old and has not kept up with his back yard in who knows when. there was sticks everywhere. so we cleaned all that up and then we took it to a members house and burned it all! the fire was huge!! So yesterday was sunday and church was great! After church we went to our investigators Kandie, Rickey, and Anna's cause they invited us over for dinner. Rickey ended up smoking a turkey and Kandie made lots of italian food! it was so delicious! The downside of that event was.. they were all drinking and it made us as missionaries feel like crap cause the spirit was not there at all! so we didnt end up teaching the lesson we wanted to we just left after eating.. For the rest of the day i just did not want to do anything because of how bad i felt... but oh well! i got over that today:).
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