This week has been full of miracles! Our main focus in coming into this area was to work with the members to find success and so we talked to a few areas in the mission having success with member work and have come up with a series of lessons to teach them...it works Beautifully. Our first lesson with a member family was the Whiting family. The Whiting family has the reputation to be hard on missionaries and have high expectations for them so for this being the first one we were doing was super nerve racking! We taught the restoration focusing on the process of revelation God has for us to be guided(the first vision was a form of revelation, prophets, etc), we ask them how they came to know the Book of Mormon is true(basically how they've used and gained revelation in their live), and then share the quote by Thomas S Monson "Now is the time for members and missionaries to come together to labor in the Lords vineyard, to bring souls unto him." We emphasize revelation again and tell them this quote is telling us members can get that revelation for missionary work too. This is just one of 5 lessons but it has yielded great results...if any of my missionary homies out there want more info on it, hit me up! We have to type the series up for the AP's next week so i can send it to others as well. Monday we went to a members house and they gave us one referral already(we will be teaching them Monday). The Whitings have already given us one and are working on another one, it's just going really well, we've been blessed. 

   This week we have been in the building up stage from the whitewash and so we have been able to teach the Restoration quite a few times but now its time for us to help them progress. It's easy to teach people on a campus but a lot are noncommittal. I taught my first district meeting this week and I felt like it went really well, I'm focusing on those member lessons. 

   With being on a campus there are a lot of activities that we do to try and get in contact with people and interest them in the gospel possibly. The highlight of my week probably is every Thursday when we get to teach Chinese students english...there are millions here in little troy, they crack me up! I want to teach one super bad! Other than that a lot of this week was trying to get a committed teaching pool and contacting! Im pumped for general conference. all is well, love and miss yall #BecauseHeLives 

   Elder Welch

  Tuesday we had a good district meeting! Elder Hintze is the best district leader I've had on my mission and I am patterning a lot of what I want to do in district meeting after what he did. We picked up the new missionaries that day and it was fun to know who my companion was going to be and watch him that day before it was announced on Wednesday. On Wednesday was a very emotional day for me. I am not one for change, I think I get attached to things pretty easily, and I knew I was leaving behind something I had worked on so hard for the past 9 months. The bright side of leaving was that I got a hug from Sister Smith! That is something that no one usually gets until they are going on the airplane, it was the closest thing I got to a momma hug in a long time. 

  I was really unsure what Troy was going to be like but the best thing I can describe it as as far as size goes is about the size of Wells. The bright side to it is that there is Troy University which increases the size about 30%. We have done a lot of planning the past couple of days because we need to get a direction before we work and a lot of it is now starting to come together. Our plan for this area is to work the campus in the day time and during the night to have at least 1 member lesson a day about missionary work. We really want to involved the members in the community. We can baptize all we want on campus but it wont give support to the branch because they travel back home after they are done with their schooling. We think its a good combination. I love everyone, I love missionary work. Expect miracles! All is well! Love yall 

 

    Elder Welch

   Tender Mercy #1- We were walking around on FAMU one day trying to find anyone on campus and we came across one dude. His name is Sekou Muhammad...guess what religion he is!? It doesnt matter though. We shared a family history card with him and he was down. Not a huge miracle that we saw him and got a return appointment with him but it leads up to our second tender mercy. 

   Tender Mercy #2- We were at the family history appointment with Sekou and the library was about to close. He said we could go to a different room and continue but because of our busy schedule that day we ended the appointment with him even though he wanted to continue. As we walked out of the library in the architecture building we said our goodbyes to him and started heading for the back door (the same door we came in from). As we approached the door we all stopped and thought that it might be smarter to go out the front door to save some time, especially since we were in a rush! 

   When we went out of the door we were walking up to the sidewalk and crossed paths with a guy. His name was Clayton and he talked to him for maybe 15 seconds explaining the family search website, gave him the card, and then said goodbye. About 30 seconds later when we were about to get into our car he yelled back to us and asked us if we were affiliated with the "Mormon church." We all turned on a dime and concurred! He talked about how he is from Brazil and was wanting to get in contact with missionaries to learn more about the church, he even tried to call the 3rd ward bishop but no luck. We set up an appointment with him. 

The amazing thing about this story is the chain of events that led us to this man. 

 1) We scheduled the Family history appointment with Sekou at the perfect time and in the perfect place..and might I add, on a week where no one else was there! 

 2) Even though Sekou wanted to continue and was extremely interested, we ended up leaving a little early. 

 3) We were prompted to go out a different door.  

 4) We were directed to Clayton at a perfect time. (We were in such a hurry we wouldn't have went out of our way to talk to him.) 

 5) We only have one side of the story of how we were led to him, we are sure how he was led to us was just as inspired. There is no doubt in our mind that his ancestors led us to him and prepared his mind to accept the message. 

  Tender Mercy #3- The lesson we taught Clayton was amazing! We found out that he is from a small country town in Brazil where he said he never sees missionaries and that he was a foreign exchange student for this year and goes home in June. We taught him the restoration and boy was it powerful, probably top 10 of my mission on the scale of spiritual. He is so good at keeping his commitments...to be continued! 

  There are so many tender mercies that are right under our nose, if we dont look at the big picture, with an eternal perspective, we wont see them! The secret to happiness is gratitude! Love and miss yall!

 Elder Welch

  On Monday it was another busy day in the office and then a long drive over to Crestview to tradeoff with the Mobile zone leaders. Elder Riddle, Elder Palau, and myself stayed here in Tallahassee and worked the campuses. Elder Riddle is currently serving in a super small town so the pace of campus pumped him up, I love my area. We taught Celine and since she is leaving for Utah for the next few weeks it could have potentially been the last time I will see her on the mission. It's no fun leaving converts. Great lesson though! Wednesday was a cool day for a couple of reasons 1) Sabrina's birthday 2) MLC and 3) anniversary when I was assigned as a zone leader, it's crazy how fast a year goes by. We were asked to teach at MLC on Monday and so you can imagine the time we had to prepare for that with the tradeoff in the middle. We had some extra help and it went well. On Thursday we had another tradeoff, this time it was with the Fort Walton zone leaders. Elder MacLay, Elder Sorenson, and Myself held down home base here in Tally. We had a lot of appointments but they unfortunately fell through so we contacted a lot on FAMU. Normally people on FAMU are super nice and open to talk but for some reason Satan was pushing against us extra hard. We were bashed a couple of times, not many people out, it randomly started raining. We knew that there was going to be something good coming up though, Satan doesn't push extra hard for no reason. Friday we had one more experience when he was pushing back. We had an appointment fall through but saw a guy that we started talking to and ended up being able to teach. He had some concerns but the main thing that we saw was that when we were talking about 2 important things people starting coming out of the house or someone called him or some commotion happened that drew his attention away. The first time was when we were reciting the first vision, the second time is when we were teaching about the Book of Mormon, and the last time was when we were throwing down on anti doctrine! When the Lord hastens his work, so does Satan. When the day starting to draw to a close we had one last appointment with probably one of our most solid investigators so far, her name is Jackie. We have taught her the restoration super simply prior to this so we wanted to review it with her. It was such a powerful lesson. She talked about how she had been planning on getting baptized when she went home from break but now was second guessing it because of what she is being taught and what she is feeling. I would probably say it was in my top 10 most spiritual lessons. 

  My overall tender mercy for this week has been something that has been a mission long endeavor, I would possibly say even before that. Story time! About 13 months ago when I was a district leader serving in Mobile I was on a tradeoff with a missionary that was going to be going home a week later. When we were laying in bed he was discussing some of his plans. Whenever missionaries start talking about it I get a large amount of anxiety that comes along with the conversation. I remember the next morning getting on my knees and asking for help to be able to focus and for things to work out in time so that I can dedicate myself. Fast forward 5 months and I am serving in tally. Missionaries always talk about where they are going to school and try to recruit other missionaries but Elder Musgrave, who I only served with for 2 weeks said I should apply to BYU and that time it stuck with me. Eventually I decided to take action but realized I didn't have a good enough ACT score to get in, so that was my first step. Once I took the ACT I received my score back which was the EXACT SAME score as last time. So a little frustrated and upset and with some counsel from my good ole ma I still followed what I felt and still applied to BYU. This past weekend I get an email back from BYU saying that I hadn't been accepted to attend school there. I hope everyone can visualize my faith being crushed with each one of these blows. I was frustrated not only that I didn't get in but that I felt like I had wasted so much time. Why did I feel like I needed to do all of that stuff? Since I knew that BYU wasn't an option anymore I went back and emailed my counselor from SUU to start getting the ball rolling on things I need to do. Then I got the answer of why all of this even needed to happen in the first place. I get an email back from him saying that he was excited about my decision and due to me retaking my ACT my scholarship had been reconsidered and it now didn't cover half of my tuition but now covered quite a bit more. Nothing is a coincidence, all of those steps were necessary. The blessing that I was given here was great but I just love looking at God being so aware. The Lesson learned like I said at the beginning meant so much more than the experience itself. Love and miss yall. All is well! 

 Elder Welch