Down in the Arkansas

Hello. This week has been a lot of ups and downs.  We had zone conference on Tuesday. Zone conferences are always really good. We talked mostly about the various things we have been trying to implement in the mission and how they all fit together.  Overall the work has been going slower. A lot of missed appointments and people not being home, and even when we promised cookies, people didn't come to church. We got to eat a lot of cookies on Sunday.  However, we set a man on date to be baptized! His mom is a member and he has been to church a handful of times in the past. He has had a lot of spiritual experiences in the past and is so ready to be baptized! On Friday we went to Hot Springs for pretty much the entire day. We had district council and President Interviews, then had exchanges in Hot Springs (to save miles. We don't have very many left). We taught a man who is currently living in a tiny house. And I don't just mean the house is small, it literally...

Hello. This week was pretty nice. We opened with the mission P-Day in Jacksonville, AR. It was pretty crazy trying to find rides there and back, but we did it. The Little Rock side gathered together for a good time, the Memphis side the next day. Since this is my first transfer on this side of the mission. There were quite a few missionaries that I had not met before.  The Arkadelphia area only really has one sizable city. And the other towns are over 15 miles away, making frequent stops there difficult on miles, and are much more spread out anyway, so missionaries over the years have mostly stuck to the city of Arkadelphia to do missionary work. And because Arkadelphia is still rather small (and especially small in the summers when many of the college students go home), Arkadelphia has been well tracted. We will be out and about talking to people, find someone new to teach, and it turns out the person is already recorded in our system and has been taught before. Every single p...

I may not be able to attend my brother's wedding this coming week, but I got to go to one this past Saturday. A member of the branch got married. It was a nice ceremony, of which I got to hold the rings and man the hymn player on the piano. We want to start teaching the husband so they can eventually be sealed in the temple. To both couples, have fun being married!  And also happy mothers day to mothers. I gave a talk in the Arkadelphia Branch on Mothers. I think it was the first talk in church I have ever given that actually folled the 15 minutes allotted. I have the tendency to rush through talks, and overestimate the length of my talk. I didn't do that this time.  School got out for Henderson (and Ouchita too I think?) This week, so the town is going to be a little less lively now with a lot of the students going back home for the summer. Well see if I stay long enough to see them come back.  Knocking doors this week we ran into a member who had fallen off ...

Hello all. We had a really cool week here in Arkadelphia. We were getting a little discouraged this week because by Sunday we only had one new person to teach. We had gone out and worked hard, but just no one was coming up. Then on Sunday, after serious prayer, we found 4 people! That was a really cool miracle for us. Our goal for the week was 4, so what we thought was going to be a pretty unsuccessful week turned out pretty great.  We also taught a man named Keith, who the Elders have been working with for a while. He is the boss of one of the members here and is a real honest seeker of truth. We had a long but good discussion on the topic of grace/faith/works, a very common discussion here in the south.  We've been using a lot of miles this past week for a myriad of reasons ( for those unaware, in a mission car we have a limit on miles per month),  so one day we biked. 15 miles in the hilly countryside. We made a journey out of biking to a dinner appointment...