Down in the Arkansas

  Another week has come and gone in a flash.  I haven't given a weather update in a while, and this week was a little bit more reportable: the vestiges of Hurricane Laura swung up here in Arkansas. We were told to go to our "safe house" for the day, but the parents of our safe house were at work..... so we just stayed in our apartment (with permission, of course). There was a fair amount of wind and rain. We lost power for 1 minute. Not too bad. Also we have had some brutally hot days this past week. High heat and high humidity. That's about it on that front.  Hah, get it? Front.  ok We spent a lot of time editing a video. If anything, the storm keeping us inside has given us some time to work on it. If you ever have wanted to learn how to do video editing, kdenlive is a really good software. It's free and it's pretty good quality.  We had more really good lessons this week! Someone we are teaching is so awesome. She convinced her mom to let us go to her mom...

Hey this week was amazing! Hope yours was too. We did a lot of service, so the week went by super quick. But usually when you do a lot of service, you aren't able to do a lot of teaching and so at the end of the week you don't feel as spiritually uplifted. Well, the Lord provided us with so many opportunities to be spiritually fed. We have began to teach someone who is living with a member. We watched the movie Joseph Smith: The Prophet of the Restoration with them and invited them all to pray about it. The roommate opened up and said she hadn't prayed since she was 9 years old. So she agreed to say her first sincere prayer in over decade. And during our later visit, she testified of the inexplicable joy and peace that came over her as she prayed. And at a home sacrament meeting with them on Sunday, another friend was there and the roommate was testifying of how answers about our message came to her. It was definitely one of the best moments of my mission thus far.  Right a...

  Remember last week how I said "until further notice there will just be two missionaries in Beebe."  "Further notice" came about 3 hours after I sent that email. We got notified that we'd be picking up Elder Schuerch (pronounced "shirk") and Elder Kitterman, a reassigned missionary who flew in that morning. We got to drive down to the mission home that afternoon and pick them up. We took the opportunity to stop at Popeye's and get some fried chicken because Beebe doesn't have a Popeye's.  So now there's four of us! It is my first time in an apartment with 4 missionaries. The dynamic is very different. Food is depleted pretty quick. But we have done pretty well. The members have been great at supporting us.  We have done a lot of service. We make furniture for one of the members here who owns a flea market. It has been satisfying my urge to build something.  Sunday was a struggle. One of those days where you have a bunch of stuff planne...

Hope you're week was good! Ours was definitely interesting.  Someone we are working with who was on date for baptism had to take herself off date. She is so awesome though. As it says in Preach My Gospel, everyone ultimately has their agency to chose to reject our message. But she is sooo prepared so there will definitely be some missionaries in the future who will be blessed with the opportunity to continue to teach her and help her along the covenant path.  Also, a further progression in the case of the elusive second set of missionaries that are supposed to be in Beebe. Elder Baird, who has been waiting for a companion in Danville, AR, is now being transferred to Bartlett, TN, so that means that until further notice, Elder Danielson and I are the only Elders assigned to Beebe for the time being.  We had a lot of interesting street contacts as well. We went up to McRae (population: 650) to go street contacting and the first and only person we meet (we spoke for an hour ...

So this week is not how I thought it would turn out. But it was super blessed nonetheless.  I had a great least day in Hot Springs. I am going to miss that place. I played Magic the Gathering with my companion and someone we are teaching. He wrecked us.  In between leaving Hot Springs and going to Beebe, Elder Keele and I (both waiting to train) got to spend time with the Technology Specialist Elders. That was fun. One of them, Elder Widtfeldt, participated in the same robotics competition I was in during High School so we talked a lot about that. We also like all the same youtube channels, so we talked about that for a long time too. People in robotics seem to just have good (or really bad) taste in entertainment.  At the end of the orientation on thursday, I got assigned my trainee, Elder Danielson. He is awesome. I barely need to train him. He's ready to go. He is far more prepared than I was!  I was thinking our apartment was going to have four missionaries in it...