Hey Family!
Here is a special Happy Birthday Shout out to you Dad! I wasn't on the ball to send out a card months in advance. It sounds like you had an enjoyable birthday which is good! This week has been pretty interesting for me. Our investigator Sasha is having troubles quitting coffee so she won't be baptized on the 10th after all. We are still working with her to get her on the right track though. Other than that, things have been great. We are teaching a lady named Kim who got dropped about a year ago because she never kept commitments. We ran into her in the library and she wanted us to come over. She actually kept the commitment we left her of reading 2 Nephi 31 which is all about the doctrine of Christ. This week i've been thinking about temples lately. The closest temple to me is the Winter Quarters temple in Nebraska but since it is out of my mission boundaries we are not allowed to go. We are having 3 of our recent converts go to do baptisms on march 3rd! That has been one of our focuses i guess you could say. Getting recent converts thinking about and attending the temple. It's crazy to think of how many temples we have near us in Utah valley. I definitely appreciate them more than I used to. I'm sure it's even more of a challenge to go to the nearest temple in Russia.
We had an interesting/scary thing happen this week. Since E Herrin is the district leader we get to go on exchanges with all of the other missionaries in our district. We went to a city called Osceola this last week. I was working with a new missionary, E Hinman. We went to go visit this guy named Terry. He drank a lot beers while we were there. But all of a sudden the right side of his face just froze up and was all tense and he started screaming kind of. Then he would start laughing, but tears were flowing out of his cheeks. I didn't know what to think. I thought maybe he was being posessed by an evil spirit or something. I was just sitting there and reached into my pocket and grabbed my oil and was ready to put my arm to the square, but it ended. He said that he had just had a heart attack and he has one every night. We offered a blessing but he just wanted us to leave. He is still alive though, the elders went back to check on him. That about sums up the excitement for the week.
~Elder Peterson
February 21, 2012
Hello Family!
This last week has been pretty good. I actually haven't been talking with Dad about ways to get our names out into the community... i guess great minds just think alike. We were able to have a zone p-day this last week. President said if everybody in the zone remembered to do the weekly e-mail to him we could have a zone p-day and our zone did it. It was pretty fun. I'm feeling sore this morning though... I haven't been that active in a while now. And yesterday was also Presidents Day which is why I am e-mailing you today. We played soccer, basketball, ate lunch and had a nerf war. The weather was nice enough in the morning to play soccer outside which was fun. It was raining pretty hard by the time we were driving home though. But I am surviving the winter just fine. It really hasn't been too bad at all. People and missionaries when I first got here would always tell me how bad winter was here, but their stories haven't lived up to this mild winter.
For Valentines day we ate dinner over at a members house and had some really good fall off the bone ribs. I also wore a pink tie to celebrate the occasion. Brittany I got your package... thank you thank you. It has been serving me well. We picked up 4 new investigators this week and they all accepted a soft baptismal invitation. That is where they agree to baptism, but don't have a date set for those who don't know. They are in cities that are fairly far away from Lenox though so members have been really helpful in driving us there so we can save on miles, and they really add a great spirit to the lessons as well. Some members from E Herrin's last ward came and visited this last Sunday. They brought us a care package that had a bottle of fry sauce in it because the dad was recently in Utah. I was pretty excited.
In District Meetings we have been having some really good trainings. This last week some elders trained on faith and dilligence. Something that came to my mind while they were teaching is that sometimes people use faith as an excuse. They will tell you that they don't need to go to church or live the commandments because they have a faith in Jesus Christ. But faith is much more than that. If we really have a faith in Jesus Christ it will lead us to action. We will demonstrate love to Christ and our Heavenly Father by showing that we are willing to do their will... even if it is hard for us. Faith also increases our confidence in the Lord. Once we build that confidence, missionary work becomes easier. It constantly keeps a smile on your face, even when people don't want to listen to you. I know that this church is true!
February 13, 2012
Hello Family,
Love, Elder Peterson
Well it snowed again today. It didn't snow a lot, but the wind drifts make it look like it did in certain places that's for sure. It hasn't been super cold during the day yet but it's been getting down to about 2 below at night. I did find a blanket that I can use. And we got a space heater and that helps at night a lot too. We are still trying to find more people to teach. We've tracted into some pretty sweet families so I'll keep you updated on them. Sasha has moved her baptismal date to March 10th so that her family can attend. That's 2 days after transfers so i might not be here for that is the only bad thing. But we felt that the 10th is when it was supposed to be so i don't mind. We went over and had a big family dinner with her husband's family that all live in the little town of Blockton. It reminded me of our big family dinners that we would have with extended family and what not. Then we watched the restoration DVD and the spirit was really strong. Videos can really bring the spirit into a room and we use them often when we are teaching people.
We have that same problem with the "traditions of their fathers" especially with the Methodists. Except here in Iowa it's more of a "my parents took me here when I was a kid" and now they don't go at all but they still don't want to change. We've been trying to get our name out into the community lately. We have articles coming out in the Lenox and the Corning Newspaper. They only print one issue a week and ours should either be in the one this week or the one next week. Also for Creston, our biggest city in the area, we have some air time on their radio station that a bunch of people listen to on Thursday so i hope that goes well. We've also had plenty of snow shoveling service opportunities. We also served dinner at a soup kitchen type place and might start getting some volunteer work at a hospital so things are going well.
I've been studying up on Joseph Smith and church history lately. It always amazes me how in the early days of Joseph's life, specifically before he was 14, everything just aligned perfectly. Like how when he got the infection in his leg after typhoid fever that the only doctor in the WORLD that could have saved his leg was right there to perform the surgery. God's work will go forward no matter what. I'm just so happy that I can be a part of it.
February 6, 2012
Hello Family
It is crazy to think that 6 months have gone by already for me too! It seemed like just yesterday I was in the MTC. But then I look at everything I've learned and realize I couldn't have learned all of that in just one day. Well this week finally started winter. I miss last Monday, where it got up to 63 degrees. Today it is snowy and cold. On Saturday is when the snow storm hit and we got a couple three inches. Our cars were grounded so Elder Herrin and I pretty much spent the bulk of the day shoveling snow. We shoveled our own driveway, some less-active members, our churches, and the Presbyterian church. I'm just happy that the spirit can renew your body because we would have been dead yesterday if it didn't. This week has been a good one. Elder Herrin and I are still getting along superbly. We set a baptismal date with Sasha for the 25th of this month. She is excited about it. We are also hoping to set that same day for Miranda to be baptized. Her and Sasha are friends and if they shared the baptism I think it would be phenomenal.
This week we have seen miracles through what is called the 21 Day Promise. It's a promise where you first make a list of people who you know who could benefit from the gospel or do not have it in their lives. And then for 21 days in a row you pray both morning and night for those people and read your scriptures. The promise is that at least one person on the list will accept listening to the missionary discussions. I like this promise because it involves the members and they have to actually extend the invitation. Once they see that success can happen, they are not as afraid as they were in the beginning. We have had some really solid referrals come our way from this promise. The hard part is just remembering to do it every day for those three weeks in a row.
Since Elder Herrin is the District Leader now, I've been getting and will continue to go on more exchanges with other missionaries. It's been fun. We also have the opportunity to drive to the different areas and conduct baptismal interviews for those getting baptized in our district, and there are quite a few which is great! In our branch here in Lenox we are trying to organize a FHE group of some sort. We also have a temple trip coming up for the youth and we are encouraging our recent converts to attend. I'm hoping that if we can get enough of them to go that President Jergensen will let us go too. Our closest temple is the Winter Quarters temple in Nebraska and is out of the mission boundaries so we'd have to get pretty special permission to go.
Since it has been pretty cold here, can i request a blanket to be sent out? I have my comforter, but an extra blanket would be nice. I don't care what one. As long as it is pretty big and not the small baby blanket ones haha.
This last week I have been studying the King Benjamin address to his people in the first part of Mosiah. One of my favorite verses is 9: Believe in God; believe that he is, and that he created all things, both in heaven and in earth; believe that he has all wisdom, and all power, both in heaven and in earth; believe that man doth not comprehend all the things which the Lord can comprehend.
If we first believe in God then we will truly see and come to knowledge that He exists. I know that God is real and that He lives!
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