What a great week it has been! I will try and type super fast but we don't have much time to email today so forgive me if it is a shorter email. These past couple of weeks have been a growing process for me. I really have been trying to get the most out of the last few months of my mission and have made promises with President that raise my commitment level, the Lord is blessing me with opportunities to grow. Monday was a LONG day in the office. There are a lot of apartments closing so we had to move a lot of companionships around in a mini transfer to make arrangements for that. Tuesday we had a zone training. My zone leaders right now were two elders that I was a zone leader over in Mobile so it was cool to see them up there teaching me. I went on a tradeoff with one of them after that and it was a pretty good day. We had a super cool experience that night with a less active member. Missionaries had been trying to get him to come back to church since the late 80s and there wasn't much progress at all. When we just dropped in on him and after a lot of small talk he said "if you want me to come to church this is what you have to do..." and just told us a few points of criteria. Blessings!
The rest of the week we have basically be contacting the campuses and setting up appointments. We are on FAMU campus and in about an hour and a half we taught 3 lessons and had 4 new investigators. Even though there have been experiences this week that have made me struggle a little but there has definitely been blessings as well! I love being on campus due to the fact that we have so many people around us to talk to.. we've OYM'd and left a commitment with 270 people this week. loving life! All is well
Boy do I love serving on campus's. Monday was a busy day in the office. With our missionary numbers going from 250 to 185 in a span of 6 months we have had to get rid of a ton of cars and apartments so we decided which cars and which areas are getting shut down. On Tuesday we had our first district meeting on campus and it was so good! Elder Hintze is our district leader(he came out with me) and he just barely got done being a zone leader for about 7 months, he did such a good job! We had a tradeoff with the Dothan zone leaders that day and worked campus! For some reason it was freezing in the south this week! It was floating around the high 30s low 40's and with humidity that is freezing! Wednesday all we basically did was tradeback and then went to the office to figure out more of the logistics on cars and apartments. On Thursday we had another exchange but with
the Panama City zone leaders.
Elder Smellie came to tally with Elder Palau and I. We worked on FAMU campus that day and we were blessed so much! FAMU is rated the number one school for black people in the nation so it's easier to talk to people for some reason. It was election week on the campus so people were literally coming up to us asking us if we were going to school there and what we were doing. The best part about it all is that we talked to the entire student body. President, Vice President, everybody! We are in with the top of the food chain, it tall trickles down from there!
Yesterday we just finished up our final touches on moving our apartment. I love the work! Hope all is well this week!
Elder Welch
I knew that this week as going to be crazy but I didn't think it'd end up being this crazy. On Monday we had the black box guy from Salt Lake in the office so things were hectic! The black boxes are super cool though, Im definitely putting one in my teenagers car when I get to that point. They track your speed, braking, seat belts, if you go over a bump too hard, and if you turn too sharp. Depending on the severity of the violation it is put on our driving record and President gets a summary of it every transfer...good thing I drive like a grandma already. The guy was here all week to train us and all of the missionaries on these things so we travelled with him. His job would be so crazy to have, he is over all of the vehicles in 32 different missions...about 2250. We generally have zone conferences every other transfer but with how many general authorities have come into the mission the past year the last one we had was in April of 2014. We taught on the survey that I talked about a few letters ago, the mission...for the most part loved it.
Thursday night we went to a baptism in fifth ward. Our new investigator Eric came and we taught him a super spiritual restoration message. His fellow-shipper just got off his mission in Mexico 3 weeks ago and he is kind of having a hard time with English but we still used him in the lesson haha. Friday and this morning all that we have been doing is trying to move into our new place that is closer to campus. That has been a task in and of itself. Sorry that this letter is so short but honestly most of the days were the exact same, just in a different part of the mission. Love and miss y'all, all is well.
Elder Welch
Hello Everybody!
This week has been so good! On Monday it was a bit hectic because President needed to change transfers up a few times so that means we were busy calling people and informing them and also organizing the logistics of the whole event. Later that p-day we also had a bi-zone dodgeball tournament, we came into it being 2 time champions but this time we lost it in the finals...sad day. The plus side of all of this is that our district now will destroy in the tournament, I'll mention that later on in the letter.
On Tuesday we had a really good district meeting and President threw down in the mission wide conference call about consecration. He listed like 5 things he wanted missionaries to be or have as attributes and then asked for 50 elders and 50 sisters to email him this week to volunteer. I know if the mission takes this seriously that the work here is going to BOOM. The rest of that day we were preparing for the new missionaries to fly in. We were lucky that the flight got delayed about 30 minutes, it helped us out a lot. Transfer time has to be one of my favorite parts about this assignment. We get to see the new missionaries fresh off the plane and spend that whole day with them and train them. The rest of the week we get to spend with the missionaries that have been here for a while.
Wednesday we had a fantastic meeting with the missionaries that are training the new ones. Even though we were the ones that were teaching, I learned so much for the people in the room, we had a lot of fun role plays too. We got a new companion. He actually goes home at about the same time as me, he is a spanish missionary so they go home at weird times. He was a zone leader in the Fort Walton zone for the past 9 months and he made that place boom so we thought we'd see what he could do for the mission. His name is Elder Palau. The rest of the week we have been trying to figure out what we are doing on campus and get a lot of the information on the church records all squared away. We had a little bit of time to go on campus yesterday and there was SO MANY PEOPLE. I was quite overwhelmed. We not only cover FSU now but we also cover FAMU. We got to walk around FAMU for about an hour and we saw two black guys singing and holy smokes they could throw down! I have never heard anything like it in my life. It was one of those situations where you don't want to mention that you sang in choir too because you don't want them to make you sing haha. It's been a great week full of blessings. i hope all is well at home. Love and miss y'all!
Elder Welch
So I'm going to apologize ahead of tie for the terrible email I'm sending out right now, we have been running around like crazy with it being transfers time! I love it! Like I said last week, we don't have any investigators so that meant that we have a lot of finding time. I'm not going to lie, I wasn't looking forward to tracting for a full week but there was a method that we used that made it fun. A Survey! The first thing that it does is helps us get into the door, it's super bold! We did family history survey which asked people their options on things and then used that to interest them in family history, it worked wonders! The first door that we used it on we not only got in the door but were in there for 50 minutes talking about their family. Just to give you a glimpse of how out of the ordinary that is...I've been on my mission for about 20 months and have only gotten into 4 doors from tracting, three of them being from the survey. We even got to go to FSU campus for a few hours and try it out on how it works with an OYM'ing situation. There were a lot of other good things that came from that survey, we will be teaching the whole mission about it in two weeks.
Other than the survey and contacting, we worked on transfers with president all week. There was one night where we were at his house until 11:15 working on it and there has also been some changes today as well. Riley received the Aaronic priesthood on Sunday and will be going to the temple on Saturday! All in all it was a great week with a lot of blessing to account for. Love and miss y'all, hope all is well.
