October 28, 2012

Dear Family,

What a wonderful week we have had here.  We had Carrie's baptism on Saturday and the confirmation that following day.  We had a good turnout at the baptism.  Around 50 people were there... including 2 investigators from some of the other missionaries serving around us.  One of the investigators that came was able to set her own baptismal date afterwards which was super sweet!  The spirit that was their was great and i know that everyone who attended was able to feel it.  It took three times in the baptismal font until she was completely submerged.  On Sunday Elder Taylor confirmed her and then we had the primary program that day.  That was great.  We had 2 more investigators we found from Congo that came to church that day and we sat with them and explained what was going on around them.  Their names are Prince and Simeon.  It was pretty funny actually because they called us Sunday morning and said that they needed a ride to church.  Prince was a referral we got from the MTC and then he brought his friend along with him to church and we are both going back over on Saturday to teach them.  They speak a little English, more than saliboko and his family, but mostly french and swahili again.  So we are bringing the one ward member we have to come with us and translate into french if needed.  Saliboko and his wife Tunza and her sister Mawazo all accepted to be baptized on the 24th of November.  They were all at church again this last week as well.  We got a text message from our relief society pres that Tunza went into the hospital because she was having really bad back pain from her pregnancy and they decided to go ahead with the c-section today so we are going over later to check up on her and make sure everything went ok.  We have scheduled to teach the Plan of Salvation on Thursday so i don't know if that is going to happen, but it would be a super sweet lesson to teach to someone who just had a baby 3 days before.

While we were walking around we found this house that had turned their tree into a giant pumpkin (see picture).  A lot of houses really go all out for halloween decorations.  For us on halloween our cars are parked at 6 o'clock, but we can still have appointments if the families we are going to teach come and pick us up.  So we will still be teaching two families that night.  Some of the ward members gave us some candy on Sunday and i'm sure we will be getting a lot more later as well.  The weather has been getting colder here and i've had to start wearing some sweaters and even the beanie at night.  We are preparing for our mission tour that will be next month.  Elder Clark from the 70 is coming out.  He hasn't given us any assigned reading or anything so we don't know what he is going to be talking about.  Well i know that this church is true!  I love you all so much

Love, Elder Peterson

October 22, 2012

Dear Family,

 

This has once again been a fabulous week.  We have the baptism coming up on Saturday which will be fantastic!  Carrie has asked that I baptize her which i'm way stoked about.  We have ironed out all the details and we are hoping that we will get a good crowd there as well with people inviting their friends.  Also we are lucky to be close enough to the other missionaries in our district that they can bring their investigators to see the baptism as well.  Something else really cool that happened is last monday night the bishop called us and gave us a referral for Saliboko and Tunza-John.  They are married and she is from tanzania and he is from congo and they have 3 kids and she is expecting her 4th in november.  She has a brother that is a member and he got in contact with the bishop and said they wanted to learn more about the church so we went and taught them the first lesson and it was way sweet.  They don't speak too much english so we have to go slow and make sure they understand.  She speaks mainly Swahili and he speaks mainly French.  We did secure books of mormon in both of those respective languages that we were able to give them later in the week.  Plus she has a sister named Mawazo that wants to learn too.  They all came to church on Sunday and a whole one of the middle pews was full of just their family! It was so sweet to see them all walk in.  The ward made a good effort to go and pick them up and actually had to make 2 trips because their were more bodies than they were expecting!  One of our ward members served his mission in Switzerland and still is fluent in french so he translated for them in priesthood meeting and in sunday school.  Just a super good sunday.  We are definitely seeing the blessings come from being the most exactly obedient missionaries we can be.

 

The zoo last week was fun.  You can see some of the pictures i'll attach here.  We are going again today, but as a district this time and having a picnic as well.  it's nice when it's free zoo month!  It was funny when we were looking at the lions because they were all just taking it easy and lounging and then a plane flew over and they all hopped up and watched it fly over them and until it went out of sight and landed at the airport nearby.  I also pet a goat and a sheep and fed some ducks and swans.  It was interesting because at the bird aviary some of the birds weren't in cages, but just in some tree things set up down the middle of the path with a sign that just said caution: birds may bite or something like that. I tried to snag a pic of the lion looking like it was roaring, but it didn't work out too it's intended purpose.  It's mouth is still open though.  Also they had dinosaurs at the zoo.  Don't ask me why. This week we did a role play with the bishop and his family and had them practice with us how they can invite their neighbors to the primary program which is also next week.  It was fun... but it can be really awkward sometimes too.  It wasn't this time though.  The great thing about it though is that they went out and did it that week and both the ones they invited agreed to come!  Hopefully they actually show up.  Primary program is always one of my most favorite sacrament meetings of the year.  We also had some old families who moved out of the ward recently come back because her sister was getting married. It was good to see them again.  Her parents (who are serving a mission in SLC) also were able to come to attend the wedding and then will be going back to their mission today.  It was good to see them as well since I had known them before they left.

 

Something that i found in my scripture study this last week is found in alma chapter 4.  This is where Alma delivers up the judgement seat and allows being the high priest over the church become his full time job i guess you could say.  But there is a pattern that we can apply in our own lives here... Especially being full time missionaries and member missionaries.  Step 1 is in verse 3.  At the end it says therefore they were awakened to a remembrance of their duty.  When times got hard, they didn't shun God and move away from him, but rather they were awakened to their duty and desired to draw closer to Him.  Step 2 is in verse 18.  It is when Alma delivers up the judgment-seat unto Nephihah.  He gave up something that was not a bad thing to give up, but was drawing him away from a more important calling.  Plus he consciously decided to give it up, it is not something that he lost or that he was forced to leave.  Then Step 3 is in verse 19.  Near the end it says seeing no way that he might reclaim them save it were in bearing down in pure testimony against them.  That is our duty, to bear pure testimony.  I know that as we remember our duty and give up the things keeping us from doing it to the best that we can and bear pure testimony to the people we come in contact with that we will be able to reclaim and rescue them.

 

Love, Elder Peterson

October 15, 2012

Dear Fam bam,

 

This has been a great week as usual.  It's been really rainy the last couple of days.  And it was also during the days we did not have the car so we got wet quite a bit but it didn't dampen our spirits.  We really needed the rain though so it was good.  It might be just a little too late to save the piggies though and help the pork prices.  Things are still going well with Carrie.  She is ready for the 27th. We are going over there tonight and will be setting up all of the details for the baptism itself.  We had kind of a funny story this week.  We were visiting with our investigator friend Koudzo, and we were reading Moroni 6 with him which is all about church.  His Book of Mormon is in french though because that is the language he best understands.  So we are reading in English and he is reading in French and we finish the chapter, but then he reads another verse and Elder Taylor and I look at each other and realize we don't have any idea what he is reading or where he was, but when we asked him what the chapter was about he understood it so as we talked about it, we were able to teach well.  He also sang a song to us in French about God helping prophets such as Jonah and Daniel and said he wants to sing in our church sometime.  Now all we have to do is actually get him to come to church which is proving to be difficult.  I invited him to come listen to us sing in the choir yesterday and he still didn't show up.  We are still able to meet with him weekly though and feel of his good spirit when we read with him and teach him.

 

Mindy and Mark, I got your package this last week. Thank you so much!  It was a delight to open and see all of the goodies.  Also the gloves will come in handy this next week as we go help a sister in the ward tear her roof off so she can put a new one on.  We will be on the ground picking up the stuff they throw down so no need to worry about us falling off of a house.  While Elder Taylor and I were out tracting this week we met a nice family.  The parents names are Dennis and Lisa and they let us right in and gave us a glass of ice water and we read 3 Nephi 11 with them.  It was a super sweet experience especially because Elder Taylor had prayed over a map before we left and felt like we should go there and we saw a miracle!  We will be going back soon to see if they read more of the account of Jesus Christ's visit to america.  We are going to the zoo today for P-day.  I guess it's free today so we'll go check it out.  I love you all and i know that this is the true church!

 

Love, Elder Peterson

October 8, 2012

Dear Family,
   This has been a fantastic week. Not only were we able to watch all of conference at our ward building, but we had pretty good attendance as well. Plus we had people feeding us lunch between both sessions which was super nice of them. Also Carrie received and answer from God that the Book of Mormon is true!! We set up a baptismal calendar with her (which is a calendar that lists times when we are going to meet and what we will teach and also other things she can do to prepare) and she is even more willing than before to do whatever is needed to be baptized. She continues to be well fellowshipped in the ward and I can't wait until the 27th. We taught her the law of chastity last night which was Elder Taylor's first time, and he did a good job. We mostly just read out of the pamphlet because it's less awkward that way if you aren't real comfortable talking about that stuff yet. The announcement for younger missionaries definitely is awesome. I loved it when they showed the people in the audience with the dumbfounded faces after Pres Monson announced it over the pulpit... priceless. I definitely think it will bring an increase in especially sister missionaries. I think I would have left a year earlier if the option was available, but I'm super glad that I got to go to college and meet the people I did and have the experiences I had.
   Since today was Columbus day and all of the High Schools around here had the day off of school we played basketball this morning with some of the young men in the ward. It was fun and had been a little while since we were last able to play. We also learned that the zoo is free on weekdays all this month so we are going to be going to the zoo next week for p-day. We had a fun get to know you district meeting this week. There were no new missionaries in the district so we had to be creative to get know each other better. I think that this will be an advantage because we have a lot of unity going into this next transfer and that should help us achieve our baptismal goals.
   I have to say one of my favorite talks was by elder Nelson. Just the repeated phrase of "ask the missionaries, they can help you" was a feel good talk. I'm thinking of just burning a bunch of cd's with that talk on it and handing it out to all the people that are struggling to get back into the church and won't let anyone help them. I also really enjoyed Elder Uchtdorf's talk in the priesthood session about being in the different circumstances. Since I've served in small branches and in a large ward now I can relate to that talk. It really made me appreciate more the faithful members that came every week to church in those small branches. I know that this church is true. I'm glad to hear that everyone is doing well and I hope that continues :)

Love, Elder Peterson

These are some action shots of when we went to Bro Robinson's place of work. He is a machine tester pretty much for John Deere so we got to go see a lot of big machinery. The first is an action shot of me operating the smallest excavator that Deere makes (it's the only machine that I was allowed to try out.) The controls are the same in all of the excavators though. The next two are the biggest excavators that they had on the site. Probably as big as the titanic! The next is Deere's latest and greatest. It has 560 horsepower. Last two, the giant loader and a dozer with a claw on the back.

October 1, 2012

It is crazy that it is October already. I don't really know where the month of September went. It's also weird to think that i'm half way done training my boy and i'll be out of this area next transfer. Our whole district is staying the same. I got released as District Leader after 6 months of being DL here in the same district and Elder Meservy will be taking over. He is a great elder and will do a great job. As for me, i get to take a 6 week break from leadership (aside from being a trainer) and President told me i'll be put back into a leadership position after this next transfer. In fact there is only one elder from our whole zone that is leaving and his companion will be training. We got our car back this week. it is good timing too because the tubes in E Taylor's bicycle wheels popped so we were walking long distances for a while there which i don't mind, it just takes a lot of time. Things with Carrie are going good. We attended a baptism with her over in Davenport and then she went to the RS general broadcast. She is also coming to General Conference this week and we'll be playing general conference bingo with her 2 kids haha. We also helped her take apart an old entertainment center and trash it so we've been keeping good contact with her and she loves the church! At the baptism all of the missionaries in our district sang "i like to look for rainbows" for a special musical number and it went great.

This last week for district meeting I had every missionary prepare a 10 minute talk on a different Christlike Attribute and that went well. All of them came up to me afterwards and said that the one they studied was one that they needed to work on. So between inspiration and the fact that if you study any of the attributes you realize you need to work on it, it was a really good meeting. We then had little ceasers for lunch and for dinner we had plans to eat with a member, but they ended up cancelling because their kids were feeling ill and they ended up bringing us over little ceasers pizza. So we had 3 pizzas in the fridge this week and a stomach ache to go with each. At church this week we also a had a student from some religions of the world class at college come to sacrament meeting. The ward welcomed her really well and Sis Ferguson and her son sat nex to her and fellowshipped her and then after the meeting E Taylor and I answered some of the questions that she had... both for school and personal questions. She was really impressed and might be coming back with her family next week for a session of general conference. Our second councilor in the bishopbric is moving to Germany on wednesday so he was released and a new brother was called. The mission prep class started this last saturday and we had 6/7 of the boys attend from our ward. That was great! They talked about their favorite missionaries in the scriptures and compared them to latter-day missionaries. It's an every other week class and we are going to be talking about the Abrahamic covenant next session. I know that this church is true! I love you all,
Elder Peterson