What's up y'all?! This week has been quite a roller coaster ride but it flew by! We had zone training on Tuesday and found something out that blew our minds! Our goal for 2013 as far as baptisms go is 450, we are only at like 230, so pretty far behind. President Smith has been talking with general authorities about the changes coming up in missionary work and about goals for next year and has set a goal for 550 baptisms for 2014. What awesome faith that my president has in the new revelation our prophet has given, we're going to do it! After zone training I had my tradeoff with the zone leader Elder Judy in Navarre. I SAW THE BEACH FINALLY! It was a really good tradeoff and I learned a lot from him on how to become a better companion and missionary but the most exciting thing about the tradeoff was at night. We were driving home and it was dark and then out of the trees we see this MASSIVE black bear run across the street, it was so cool! it was a little scary knowing that we were only about a half mile from our apartment but it has been the coolest thing to happen on my mission so far. I have been feeling really inadequate this past week and have been praying and searching hard on how to become better at the things i need to. I always feel like missionaries kind of blow smoke up the green missionaries butts on how good they are doing but Elder Judy, Nelson, Foster, and Wilkey have said that this new generation on missionaries are more prepared. Elder Nelson told me last night he feels like I've already been out 6 months and that I'm training him. Its nice to hear and I feel that that was genuine. I still have things to become better on and still have those feelings of inadequacy which is good because I am, I'm representing the Savior himself here! I feel like I am becoming use to being on a mission since I'm starting to get a few mission dreams instead of dreams about home, they'll always be there though! The count this week is 153lbs! I'm doing a little better. On my tradeoff with elder lane I made my(Kari bates) biscuits and gravy for lunch and they think that I am some amazing chef, haha I love it. Elder Lane was talking about how he wants to lose weight and he said he tried to eat more to exercise his face muscles but it didn't work, hahaha the kid is so funny! We were trading back over at pine forest area and they got these super hot jalapenos from a member over there and I didn't believe them since it was just a jalapeno so I tried a sliver of one. HOLY SMOKES! I've never eaten something so hot in my entire life. I was literally crying and then I made the stupid mistake of wiping my tears with the hand i ate the jalapeno with so then my mouth and eye was killing me, worst decision of my life! I'm good now though. I filled my prescription this week at Walmart and while we were at the counter this crazy guy comes up to us and starts bashing us like crazy! In a Walmart line of all place. He didn't know much and was so rude. Elder nelson and I agreed it was the worst bash session we've been in on our missions so far. He rebuked us to hell in the name of Jesus Christ with no authority so he wont have a fun time on judgement day...punk! I cannot believe school has started all over the nation, one summer down on my mission, one to go!

   This week I wanted to talk about a talk that I studied in my personal study. Its called "His Grace is Sufficient" by Brad Wilcox. If you only do one thing that I ask you on my mission from these emails READ THIS TALK. It has changed my life and view on the atonement than anything ever has. I know that this talk was written through revelation. I'm not going to expound on it at all, I just want y'all to go read it. I know that this church is true and that we are the ones that are to take it to the world. I love and miss y'all. All is well. 

Elder Welch

This past week has flown by and I think that this next week will go by even faster since I have a tradeoff with the zone leaders tomorrow and one with my boy Elder Lane on Friday! He goes home in January and he’s already requested me as a companion. I really hope I don’t "kill" him (Serve with him his last transfer). This last Tuesday I had a tradeoff with Elder Simmons and stayed in Fox Run.  He hits his year mark this Thursday. On Thursday we did some mormon.org things so we could get use to that since that’s what we will be doing once we get iPads. Anyway, we get done with that and go to bike back home and just barely leave the parking lot when I try to hop a curb. Something that happened that happens to all missionaries.....my bike tire popped.  All we could do was laugh about it, good thing bike tires are cheap! Last night we went to a Baptist Manor to visit one of our members there that doesn’t get a lot of company. Once we finished up with him we start heading out to talk with him a little bit in the hallway and out of nowhere all of these old crazy people bombard us! One was yelling, “Please Lord help me".  One was trying to get me to take them out of the manor, one asked me how much they paid me and said she would double it if we would stay the night.  One of them asked me to mow their lawn.  It was the most hectic, crazy, and funny thing that’s happened to me so far on my mission. I thought it was cool that the one old lady saw Elder Nelson and me as representatives of Jesus Christ without us even telling her and she was too old to be able to read our tags without glasses for sure. Elder Nelson and I died laughing once we got out into the car. After we were at the manor we headed to dinner over at the primary presidents house, and no I didn’t call her crazy or tell her she was in the primary because she is crazy.  Anyway, we get done with dinner and her husband was about to give his children back to school blessings when he offered to give us a blessing as well. I had been wanting one just to kind of guide me and a boost so I was so happy he asked. Some of the things that he said in the blessing really helped. He said that I was "saving the world" and that I do more than I notice, he also said that my siblings back home would be going to school teaching the gospel, being examples, and saying how proud they were of me. Mostly encouragement things but i really needed it and it helped a lot. He then asked me to give him a blessing. I use to be so scared to give blessings and honestly didn’t know how to follow the spirit well enough in the blessings to know what to say. The one thing I have noticed that I have gained from my mission is to know and act on the promptings of the Spirit. A cool experience I had this week with a prompting of the Spirit is when we went to go to a potential. We taught him about the book of Mormon and were trying to discern his needs, all he kept saying to us was "this book won’t give me what I’m looking for".  Then after we testified to him about the book and asked him what he is looking for all he would say is 1 Corinthians 7......Honestly Elder Nelson and I had no Idea what that chapter was so we couldn’t help him.  I did feel prompted to show him a picture of the temple, testify of eternal families and the plan of salvation.   So I did and asked him if he would like that for his wife and family someday.  He looked at me with big eyes and said, “Yes”.  I didn’t think anything of it, just that I freaked him out. Once we got back into the car I looked at 1 Corinthians 7, it talked about marriage. The Spirit just makes my job too easy, I love it and have a testimony of the Holy Ghost.  Right after dinner we dashed over to Marcus's place and I knew he wouldn’t be able to come out and see us but we still made an effort. He has a really bad back and bad arthritis and it acts up when it is overcast. It has been raining for 3 days nonstop so I just figured he would be cooped up inside. I’ll keep y’all updated on him when we get to meet with him. We haven’t really been able to meet with any of our investigators these past few weeks, I don’t really know what’s going on but we are trying our hardest still. That’s the bad thing about agency, if I had it my way I’d be in the font all day long! "Onward, ever onward" and "Press forward", are my motto right now. After that we went to another less-actives house and gave them back to school blessings as well (we'll be giving a lot this week). It was really cool to be on the other side of the blessing for the first time in my life. I took the priesthood that I had readily available to me in my home for granted. I’ve always been thankful for my Dad’s worthiness and willingness to use his priesthood and all men everywhere should be striving for that.  If you’re not, I’m going to be blunt about it. You are not fulfilling your purpose on this earth or in this church or as a father and husband. Get worthy and be willing to serve.

This week I wanted to share a message about an experience I had Tuesday at district meeting. Elder Nelson committed us to write in our journal attributes that we each wanted in our future spouse, and to bring it to the next meeting. Not physical attributes of course but what kind of person we want in a spouse. It was really hard for me to do it and honestly took a lot of consideration.  This is eternity we are talking about here people! Once I got my list written down and then it dawned on me why he wanted us to write them down. "If I’m expecting to marry a person with all of these attributes, I have to be worthy of it myself and live up to the standards I have set for my wife." Why should she deserve less than what I wanted? My challenge for y'all this week is to write down either those attributes you love in your spouse or the ones that you want in in your future spouse. Then to take serious consideration of where you stand in meeting those standards. I promise you and testify as a representative of our Lord Jesus Christ that if you set appropriate, good and eternal goals for your spouse and try your hardest to achieve being worthy of a person like that, that you will become closer to your Savior and will be more like Him. When we try and look at Christ like attributes, it is sometimes hard to think you can achieve that (even though we can).  By doing this you take a look at what potential you think you have, it gives you a goal and incentive to achieve that goal, and I would hope that the things you wrote down would be things that Christ himself would have had as an attribute. I love this gospel, I love Jesus Christ, I love my Heavenly Father, and I love y'all and the support you give me. All is Well

Elder Welch

 It has been a good week. Transfers happened and I actually really haven’t even been homesick since Elder Nelson came on Wednesday which is nice, I’m too focused on directing the work in the ward and trying to be obedient. I like it. So when Elders have a string on their ties or pants or shirts we burn them off because it takes the string clean off, I was burning a sting off my pants and kind of burnt a hole in my pants ha-ha, so they’re getting patched up! I didn’t see they were 100% polyester. It’s all good though. I heard Bishop called y’all and had a nice chat, hope that was nice. I love Bishop Smith.

This week was so long, day by day, but looking back it flew by! For all that haven’t heard our most promising investigator; Eileen, has been on a trip in New Orleans and was with family. She must have heard a bunch of anti-doctrine and got talked out of it by her family.  I say that because when she came back she was not interested in the gospel anymore, so no baptism this last week unfortunately! Transfers happened on Wednesday and Elder Nelson came on in to Fox Run! He is a great missionary and is so funny. He is absolutely massive, he played football, rugby, and wrestled in high school. He's been out 14 months and his personality has reminded me a lot of Brendan Smith. I love him. It’ll be a great and fun transfer! I’m excited for it. I love this southern food and it has definitely gotten to me, yes it is possible for me to gain weight unfortunately, I am now 150lbs, I have a baby fat role. It’s ok though, I’m going to watch it this week and rebuke it. I’ll be emailing next week at 145lbs. Crazy story for this week happened last night! We were at this younger couple’s house for dinner and he is in his residency for becoming a doctor. We were just eating and talking and all of a sudden he gets up casually and goes to the sink and it looked like he was going to puke, then runs over to his wife and starts hitting her shoulder. She is 8 months pregnant and she turns and starts giving him the Heimlich maneuver! She was literally picking him up every time too, I’ve never seen a little pregnant lady with so much strength. The funny part was her dad was there and it didn’t faze him at all, he just said he was fine and kept eating while he was choking. He was fine after that though. Today I hit my two month mark! Crazy how fast time has flown, 22 months left, but who is counting?! On Wednesday I got a text from my bishop and he told me that he had just gotten off the phone with my dad. I was pretty surprised and then he asked me to sing in sacrament meeting, so I got to sing One Voice yesterday and from the response I got I feel its touched a lot of people so that was nice. Although Eileen fell through we didn’t get 1 BCD this week (baptismal/confirmation dates) Elder Foster and I had been teaching Marcus since I got here and he had always been the hardest to teach because he won’t pray and ask for things cause he doesn’t want to question God and last time he asked Him for something it went completely wrong. Yesterday we taught him the gospel of Jesus Christ and I have never been so guided by the spirit in a lesson before than I did in this one. He committed to baptism on 9/14 and to ask if this church is true! He also felt like baptism was cheating because he screwed up and didn’t feel like he should be clean if he has messed up. I explained to him how it would be cheating Christ if we didn’t use what he died for. I explained that it would be like if he gave his son a new motorcycle and his son put it in the garage forever because he doesn’t want to break it, it would be useless.  I compared it to that and it helped him realize the purpose of baptism and why we need to use it. It was awesome and it was all because of the Spirit. I’ll be praying for him that he has the courage to ask and continue to baptism.

This week I wanted to share how teaching with the Spirit and being worthy of the Spirit is essential. I have experienced teaching with and without the Spirit and can testify that it is the Spirit that teaches. All I do as a missionary is give information and cry repentance. The Holy Ghost is what teaches and testifies what is true. It makes missionary work a lot easier when we don’t have to worry about being the real teacher we just need to be worthy of the Spirit. How do we do that? Obedience! The things the scriptures and the prophets tell us to do aren’t suggestions, they’re COMMANDments. We have been told to do them and will be judged according to our obedience to them. I’ve said it once and I will say it again because I’ve seen it in my mission work and in my life. Obedience brings blessings, exact obedience brings miracles. Strive to be obedient and I promise Heavenly Father will pour out His blessings upon you. I know the Book of Mormon is true! In the words of Jeffrey R. Holland, "No evil man could write such a book and no good man would write such a book unless commanded to do so by God". I love y’all and am grateful for all of the support coming from home. All is well!

Elder Welch

 My goodness, I’m already done with one transfer?! Only 16 more to go but who's counting right?? So on Tuesday our zone leaders had a tradeoff with us and I got to go with Elder Wilkey and stayed in Fox Run. I felt before they told us who was with who and where we were going that I was going to stay in Fox Run, I didn’t know why but I was right and I now know why I felt that. We just found out about transfers today and my companion; Elder Foster, is getting transferred and becoming a zone leader. That means I am staying here in Fox Run and kind of taking charge and training my companion on the area. I am overwhelmed with having to do that with only being 6 weeks out. No other person in my MTC group is doing that. It will be hard, it will be tiring, but it will be worth it and I know that the Lord is preparing me for greater things in my mission and in my life. Anyway...back to Tuesday. We had a full day of biking around and knocking on potential investigators and returning member houses and it was tiring! We worked really hard but planning for the next day did take a while, I’ll get the hang of it this transfer for sure! One of the few lessons we had planned for this week was with this lady named Gina. I knew once we got there that something wasn’t normal. She told us to go around the back to teach her since we couldn’t go inside to teach her with there being no male home. So Elder Foster and I made our way back around and saw her friend sitting there and I’ve never seen a lady so drunk and never smelt alcohol on someone so strong. So we sat down since we didn’t think Gina was drunk and could teach her. We were just talking for a little bit and then saw that her friend had no pants on and could tell that Gina was drunk as well, so we ended the conversation, bolted out of there, and dropped her. Craziest thing that has happened on my mission so far! It’s been a rough week though, 9 lessons total and a ton of tracting, August is the hottest time of the year too! I pray that this next week will be better.

    I’ve been thinking a lot this past week on what I wanted to share in this message and I’m still not completely sure where the Spirit will guide me during this so I pray that I will strengthen someone or help them to do missionary work as well. I kind of wanted to shape my message around enduring to the end. I have a story I want to share with ya’ll too, it’s not true of course. This older member of the church dies in a hospital one night and finds himself in heaven. He meets Jesus at the gate and Jesus welcomes him into the kingdom and the first thing that this old man sees are these massive mansions and he asks Christ if one of them is his. Christ says yes and tells him to come follow him. They make their journey down a road that has tons of the most beautiful buildings that anyone has ever seen and they finally reach his. Christ welcomes him inside and the older man is amazed at the beauty of the building. Marble floors, tons of space, and then he looks up and sees that there is no roof on his mansion. He turns to Christ and says, "what’s the big deal why don’t I have a ceiling?! Christ simply turned to the man and said, "We stopped building when you did".  Let’s not be like the man in this story, at many times in our life we feel like we are doing pretty well and settle for less than we and our Heavenly Father knows we can achieve. One way we can do that is by developing a lifestyle that Christ did. He was charitable. That is the one attribute that will lead to success in almost everything you do. Be thankful for what Heavenly Father gives to us, tell Him you are thankful, be thankful for those trials that He gives us to strengthen us, be grateful for the small things in life, and be grateful in bad times, mediocre times, and the best of times. I found myself having the hardest time this week, I was brushing away those things that Heavenly Father has given me and I wanted things my way. Faith in Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ means that we not only have that trust in Them, but to submit our will to Theirs and hand Them the reins. I love my Savior Jesus Christ and Heavenly Father. I have felt their influence in my life and so much in my mission. This week will be hard for me, I know it will be. I need to hand the reins over, it’s not my life, and it’s His time to be the sculptor. I know that our leaders are called of God and that this call for Elder Foster to leave will be the best thing for me and for him. I will press forward in faith. I will do what’s asked of me, and I will pray for that charity so that I can enjoy it. I love you all and pray for you daily. All is well!

Elder Welch