Visiting the Zoo, teaching in the thunderstorm, wrestling with goats, and ...more injuries

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!

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!

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;)

Pictures from new area - Whitehouse

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:).

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.

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..

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

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

Burning Piles for service and another Texas Storm

We had a rather slow week this week but oh well... on Tuesday we went to Sis. Forhans. a less active lady.. and helped her burn her burn piles. it was way fun! knowing me.. a pyro!:) no i did not burn myself or any of the sort so dont worry haha. we will probably be going back to her house probably this next week or something so we can burn some more:) so much fun!
Wednesday elder moses had to be at the zone leaders appartment at 7 in the morning. because they were going to zone leader council in dallas and they asked the district leaders to come as well.. well we were a mile away from the zone leaders and they sent us a text saying it was cancelled.. apparently a storm was rolling through dallas at the time. and it was pretty bad! so we went back home and about an hour later the storm hit us. oh my gosh! it was huge! it rained very hard non stop for almost all the day. we were asked to plan that day cause of the storm. so we did. even after planning it was still too bad to go outside and tract so we stayed inside and napped:)
So on thursday elder moses ended up going in to dallas and i went on an exchange with elder miller. so i got to drive that day:)! we went to visit one of our investigators in flint. he lives about 20 miles away from us. He needs to be dunked! he comes to church every week and knows it is true. we just dont know what is holding him back. we ended up tracting for a couple hours after that and found no body.. all there was, was old people and they were cranky!
So on friday we went on a "quest" to jacksonville.. as elder moses put it. Jacksonville is considered the guetto of our area. there is so many black people there and hispanics! well we also went with the Tyler 2&3 elders. they are spanish. Elder LeFevre and Elder Cardenaz. we stopped at a rest stop called Mt. Selman and it is probably the highest point in East Texas and is like 2 feet short of being considered a mountain. you can see probably 35-40 miles out. its very pretty. well elder cardenaz is a greenie and he has a fetish of flipping elder moses' tag off because elder moses started that like his first week haha. well elder cardenaz was trying to flip his tag off and wasnt watching where he was going and walked straight into a pole! hahahahaha it was the funniest thing ever. he was pretty embarrassed and elder moses could not stop laughing!! hehe. well anyways. while in jacksonville we split up and i went with elder cardenaz and we visited jack parmer. a recent convert. and natalie price one of our investigators. she needs to be baptized too but she wont quit smoking:/
Saturday we had Interviews with the mission president. they went great.. i figured they would be a lot longer than they were but president doesnt ask us questions. he just wants us to talk to him about our area. so mine was like 5 minutes long. On sunday we had stake conference and President durrant was asked to talk. He gave a very great talk and had the whole tyler stake laughing. He told them this is how you remember my name. my name is Devin George Durrant. so my initials are D G Durrant. if you change the G to an O and say it.. it says.. D O Durrant. and if you say it fast it sounds like Deodorant hahaha. it was very clever i must say.. later last night we had a lot of appointments punch so that made us pretty mad.. but oh well.. Thats my Fantastic week:)

Another great week! Camerons' baptism

Cameron's baptism

This week went great! I told y'all last week that I was going to have a couple baptisms this saturday. Well I only ended up having one. It was for Cameron Meroney. It was definantly a great experience. We also had a lot of non member family members of Camerons there too so that was good! This week was a little slow because I got a cold earlier in the week and ended up getting a really bad sore throat and that put me out for a day or so. I literally couldnt even swallow my own spit. It hurt that bad! Earlier in the week we went on an adventure with Bro. Thomas to hunt down less active members out in Frankston and Chandler Texas. Oh my gosh! I am so glad that I am fortunate to have an actual house to live in back home because every body we visited lived in a trailer home and there was pitbulls galore! Everyone had a pitbull! It was a little strange. but scary! Those dogs are not something to play with!
We had a lesson on thursday with we had a lesson with Kylie Glover and Lexie Thomas. both sisters but different dads. they have been coming to church every week for more than a month now. and that was our first lesson with them. We set a baptism date with them for February 4th. it was awesome! They are so ready its not even funny! Friday we went on exchanges with the Willspoint elders. They live like 60 miles away from us and in the other district. We normally wouldnt allow exchanges like that but since Elder Moses's mtc companion is in the Wills Point area.. we allowed it. they had a whole day of trunkiness! hahahaha. my day friday on the other hand was kind of strange. I was with Elder taylor. he is a 24 year old guy and kind of a goofball. He is into a game called dungeons and dragons which apparently is the most nerdiest game ever.. and he tried explaining it to me and it was really weird. I ended up sleeping most of that day cause i was sick, so we werent very productive... Tonight should be a good dinner. Bro. Robison is taking us to this place called shoguns which is a japanese steak house. kind of like tapenyaki:) im super excited!!!!

Planning baptisms, Visiting a farm, hoping to acquire first Texas Cowboy hat

This week has been awesome!!! My companion Elder Moses is too trunky to tract haha so now if we dont have any lessons planned and we are not doing anything we will go hunt down less actives in both wards. and believe me!! there is so many less actives its not even funny! But this week we got 12 LTMP's (lessons taught with a member present). those are the best kind of lessons because when a member is present the investigator is hearing their testimonies too and not just ours. Friday i went on an exchange with one of the zone leaders, Elder Layton and that was an awesome day! We tracted for 3 hours or so and we were able to get along very well! We also went on the exchange so he could interview Colton and Corinne Clay for baptism and also Cameron Meroney! So this next Saturday we will be having 3 baptisms:) Corinne Clay is still saying that she is deciding between mormon and baptist but she passed her baptismal interview so more than likely she will be baptized!! We also are going to start teaching these 2 girls in the Bullard ward on thursday and they have been coming to church for quite some time now. I had no idea they were not members. So if we get special permission from our mission president we can teach them everything on Thursday and they could also get baptized on Saturday. so there is a possibility we could have 5 baptisms this coming Saturday:) if not then we will have 3 this week and 2 next week:)

Saturday we had the privelege of attending the baptism of Isaac Northcutt. He just turned 8 and he had asked me to give the talk on the Holy Ghost. The Northcutt family is so cool! They were the ones that let me skype home:). Well after the baptism Isaac's grandma came up to me crying saying how she loved my talk and that it was very good:)! That made me feel pretty good:) I was just surprised that Isaac had asked me to do it and not someone from his family! He loves the missionaries though! He asked me one day. "Elder Christensen... will you still be on your mission when i go on mine"? That was pretty funny! He was surprised when his mom told him that i will be 30 years old when he goes. Thats crazy to hear haha! Last night we had dinner at the Atwoods house. They are so cool! They own over 500 or so goats and then they have peacocks, horses, an emu, ginne fowl, etc. Anyways they have a flippin zoo at their house. They also live next to his parents house and they are the owner of the Atwood Cowboy hat which is a very popular cowboy hat. So i think I'm probably going to get one:)! So that was my week and i finally survived a week without using any bandaids:)

well mom i love you very much and hope your week is great!

love elder christensen

New Companion, Story of Forgiveness and..yes..MORE war wounds!

My week has been great with my new companion! his name is elder moses and this is his last transfer and his first time out in east texas! i have heard a lot of great things about him and they are so true! he is an awesome missionary and he is super funny! i picked him up tuesday afternoon and we went back to our apartment so he could set up his stuff.. well we went out to work the rest of the day and then came home and did our nightly planning session. which i havent done in a transfer because elder derrick didnt like to do it. we also had companionship prayer which i also havent done in a transfer cause elder derrick didnt like to do that either. well as the night went on we chilled and chatted it up until bedtime.. well guess what he did. i was doing something in the kitchen and he yelled for me so i came around the corner and hes standing in the hall way mooning me! hahahahahaha! it was so funny! so this whole week we have been catching eachother off guard showing the full moon! i think right now he is in the lead by one. 4-3. yeah were keeping tabs!:)
On tuesday we had a lesson with a less active family who has a unbaptized 10 year old son named cameron.. well we committed him to baptism on january 21st and we are super excited about that! elder moses has a goal for us to baptize 9 people this transfer. i definantly have the faith to do it. we just got to be very obedient and hard working missionaries! so as of now we have 3 set dates for january 21st and we have about 9 progressing investigators who are about ready to fall into the font! we had a lesson thursday night with our other investigators corinne and colton clay. we read 3 nephi 11 with them and corinne could definantly feel the spirit. you could see it all over her face! we brought bro. robison with us and he was telling corinne that he is going to the temple the next day and that he was going to put her name on the prayer roll and he explained to her what that meant and she was so surprised! she thought that was way cool! so she should hopefully be ready for baptism as long as she continues to keep committments!
On Friday we had an appointment with a tract out lady. well she totally forgot and her husband was telling us that we could come back this week so hopefully something happens with that. well bro. northcutt was with us that night and he lived around the corner from that appointment so we went to his house so i could do some laundry and we chatted with the bardsley and northcutt family. we also made a bon fire in the back and made s'mores:) it reminded me so much about camping! so sweet! well saturday came around and we went to camerons house for another appointment with him and come to find out that he had stolen some candy from a dollar store and his mother caught him. well she made him take it back to the manager and he chewed him out saying he wasnt allowed back in the store.. well if that wasnt bad and scary enough for this little 10 year old. his mom called the cops and had them come talk to cameron. they told him if it happened again they would put him in juvy! so when we went over there you could tell he was very upset so i put my arm around him and told him.. when he is baptized everything he has done "bad" in the past will be washed away and he loved hearing that. so our lesson with him was on forgiveness and we really layed it down on him:)!
Our next lesson that night was with natalie price and she ended up forgetting about our appointment and wasnt there. well her house is out in the sticks!!! she has a siberian husky who is female and a siberian husky/wolf who is a male. well they had puppies together. well natalie had told me about this earlier in the week and that her husband built a little barn for the puppies. well i wanted to go see them. well the female husky wasnt chained up and she was very friendly. the male on the other hand was chained up to a wire that was hung between two trees with a distance of 30 yards or so. that way he could run back and forth.. well the wire was right next to the barn so he was pretty much guarding the puppies. so we had to distract him so i could get in there and that was easy haha. well i was dumb enough to try and pet the husky/wolf mix and he jumped and clawed the crap out of my arm so my arm looks like freddy kreuger got ahold of me haha!
On sunday elder moses got a lot of crap from members about how old he is! it was pretty funny! he blended in with the members very well though! sunday night we went to a little town called "Troup" to hunt down less actives. well none of the houses have house numbers on them so you have to look on the mailboxes. well my gps took us to this house that didnt have a house number anywhere so we knocked on it and this old guy was friendly and told us it was the wrong address so we went to the house next door that ended up being the right address. well this guy was in his car and got out when we pulled up and he had this huge rifle in his hands. it was kind of sketch. well he told us that his wife (who is the less active member) wasnt home and that we should not go to the house next door. which was the one we knocked before him. he said that that guy would shoot us dead if we did. well thank goodness the lord was with us that night because he was very friendly! apparently he has had stuff stolen off his property and so he goes to bed with his hearing aids turned all the way up in case he hears something going on!! Scary!!!!!! anyways thats my crazy/fun week for ya;)! i love you mom! have an awesome week!
love elder christensen:)

6 month mark reached!

This week has been awesome and really busy! Monday sucked because i literally did not want to do anything because i was thinking about home too much! but i got over it and now im back in the routine of the things!! on wednesday we went out to jacksonville which is about 30 minutes from where we live and we went to a recent converts house and re-roofed his house from 9-4! boy i tell you what! that was a project. i definantly was feeling the results of that the next day!! not as much as elder derrick though haha. Thursday was my 6th month mark and i burnt a tie:).. well guess what! while i was burning my tie it dripped onto my finger and burnt the crap out of me.. so now i have this huge burn blister on my finger and i already used up all my bandaids haha.. and neosporin:). Friday we were able to go over to a members house and watch the byu vs. tulsa game! which byu won 24-21 but it was a horrible game! the whole first half byu was playing horrible! but they won so thats all that counts! later that night the family which is the northcutts took us out to eat at a place called cheddars. oh man its so good! if i remember right there is one in boise.. but i could be wrong. Saturday i went on an exchange with elder wheatley my district leader and saturday we decided to go on a bike exchange since we missed biking around in our last area:) it was way fun and we also found some huge lions that we rode:). well saturday was also transfer calls day and everyone in my district is getting transferred except me:(. elder derrick is going back to the city to mckinney and my new companion is elder moses. and he only has one transfer left so i will be the one killing off moses (sending him home). we will see what happens!

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

Transfer to Whitehouse

So, this week i got transferred to east Texas to a area called Bullard and Whitehouse. It makes Plano look so small! If we were to drive from on side of our area to the other.. it would probably take about 70 miles to do it! okay so my companion is Elder Derrick and he is from Salt Lake City, Utah. When I got here, he told me about all of our investigators. we have quite a bit and one has a baptismal date for december 17th so i hope that goes through. Her name is Natalie and she has a smoking problem, but I know the Lord can help her with that. We have about 8 investigators total right now that we are teaching. so much more than we had in Plano! My area reminds me alot like the mountains because there is trees everywhere... except no mountains haha. Thanks giving this week was great although it was kind of hard not being with family. The families we ate with were the Prices, Walls, Reaves and Bro. Parmer. We all ate together. The Walls have a daughter who is a year younger than me and she is gorgeous! It's so hard not to flirt with her being a missionary and all haha. So, this Bro. Parmer guy is way cool! He is 83 years old and about in january or something. the missionaries knocked on his door and said he wanted to be baptized on his door step! He was so golden! He received the melchizadek priesthood 6 months later!! Elder derrick also surprised me by saying I had to give a talk at church on Sunday. It was on the plan of salvation. Well when sunday came around, I gave one of the best talks i probably have ever given! It was awesome! The ward members really appreciated it too! These wards are great but super small! well that was my week.
love elder christensen

Linda Davis Baptism