January 28, 2013

Dear Family,

 

Great news!  I'm officially out of the boot!  woot.  We went to the hospital this morning and the doctor told me that I healed up quite nicely.  I'm just really tight so he gave me stretches to do and a sweeto brace to wear for a couple of weeks and while i'm doing activites and such.  Our district leader also came with and got checked out and now he is in a boot for the next 6 weeks.  We'll see who else in our district needs one in 6 weeks time.  We haven't heard anything about them outlawing basketball yet, but we'll see what happens.  I don't think they will... at least not for a little while yet still.  The weather has been pretty dramatic lately.  In fact they even cancelled church yesterday because of it.  We just got an ice storm Saturday night so everything just pretty much had like a tenth of an inch of ice all over the place.  Driving was a no go so they had to cancel church.  Also we couldn't really go anywhere, but by noon it was more slush and water because of the warmer temps so we got to do quite a bit by the end of the day.  We actually set 5 baptismal dates yesterday.  All of them for March.  3 with a liberian family and 2 with a members neighbors who we started teaching.  We also picked up 6 new investigators this week and the work is going swimmingly.  Lots of things to be happy about.  Today the weather is super foggy and there has just kind of been a mist in the air for the last 2 days.  Not super cold though.

 

So the liberian family we are teaching is sweet.  They understand English real good but they talk to each other in Liberian (or whatever the language is called) then ask us the question in English.  The father is super interested and the wife as well.  They have a son who is a senior in high school and he hasn't been as interested in the gospel, but he always participates in our lessons.  Well last night when we were teaching them he really opened up and we really showed him how he could be blessed from the gospel and just had a sweet lesson. As we were leaving the wife told us that we need to hurry up and baptize Charles (the husband) so that he can change and change his mind about deciding to marry her.  So we learned they aren't married and we just laughed and we'll cover that problem next time we are there.

 

We also met with our friend Dave Maxwell this week.  He is our friend that plays the bass at the hope lutheran church and we went and saw him that one saturday night.  Well we taught him the restoration and it really clicked with him.  Unfortunately for us his wife is fairly anti i guess.  She realizes that us going to their church was basically just so we could get a foot in the door and talk with them about our faith.  She didn't like that.  But Dave realizes that everything will change if he gets an answer to his prayer that the church is true, and frankly it scares him because it doesn't really put him a good situation right now family wise.  He is such a great guy though and would make a great member of the church.  We are waiting to hear back from him over the phone to see where to go next with this because we don't even really know what is going to happen here.

 

Our ward has 2 youth classes.   An older one and a younger one.  i think the age line is 16 or something like that.  Our youth also combine with the spanish branch so they get some more youth from there.  I heard from Clayton around Christmas.  He is just lost in life right now and a mission isn't looking good.  He was moving down to St George to live with Torrie at the start of this year to work down there.  He went to a year of school at USU and now is moving down south i guess.

 

I know that this church is true!  The gospel blesses families and i'm so greatful for the wonderful family that i have.  I have definitely seen the blessings in my own life and in my own family from this gospel.

 

Love, Elder Peterson

January 21, 2013

Dear Family,

 

This has been a great week.  I do only have one week left in the boot now.  This district must just be bad luck because our district leader, Elder Cutler, hurt his ankle pretty bad last monday playing basketball.  He is on crutches and his ankle is swollen up. He hasn't been allowed to go see a doctor yet so he doesn't have a boot or anything.  It doesn't look quite as bad as mine was though.  We have a zone p-day today with the Des Moines and Oskaloosa zones combined.  It is going to be a lot of missionaries in the stake center.  I'm not exactly sure what we are to be doing, i've just been told it will be fun-ness.  I might just be warming the bench with Elder Cutler but we'll see.  The weather has been crazy here this week.  2 days ago it got up to 60 degrees and today we came outside and it is 1 degree.  It snowed yesterday and we spent our Elder's quorom lesson time shoveling the snow on the church grounds.  We are expected to get snow flurries all this week.  Hopefully i can stay healthy through the cold weather.  Thank you for the tips on keeping warm mother.  For some reason I had just decided not to/forgot to wear thermals so my legs were cold but everything else was fine.  Thanks for the updates on who all is leaving on Missions.  That is pretty crazy to see that people like Sean Weitzel are old enough to serve missions now!  But i guess with the age reduction it makes sense.  Wade mentioned that Ben Swenson just gave his farewell.  Where is he going to?

 

Things with Kirk have been going interesting.  We taught him inside the homes of 2 members this week and we re set his baptismal date for in February.  He seemed like he was doing really well.  But then after we got out of all of our meetings we had on Sunday we didn't see him at church so we asked him if he was still coming and he said that he wasn't because he didn't have a good feeling.  We have gone through this once before with him so hopefully we can turn him around again.  We weren't able to meet with him last night either because he was busy doing snow removal for his job.  On the upside we picked up 9 new investigators this past week!  That is a new record for me.  And none of them are single people either haha.  3 are a family from Liberia, 2 from Kenya, 1 from Dominican Republic and the rest are american.  We are keeping ourselves quite busy with this expansion into our teaching pool.  It is a good story of how we met Leena (the dominican republic lady) and her husband JD.  We called up a priest in our ward that morning and asked him to come on splits with us because we needed to go see a single lady and needed another man to come with us.  We went and picked him up and she wasn't home so we tried some other people and they weren't home either.  We still had about an hour and change before he had to be back home so we tried this less active man that the bishop asked to go see and he wasn't home either, but no suprise there.  We did feel like we needed to knock on his neighbors doors though.  We knock the first and it's an older man who tells us that we can't solicit here and he's really not interested.  Then the second door was Leena and she let us right in.  It worked out great because we wouldn't have been able to go in if we didn't have Chad with us.  Then while we were teaching her, her husband came home from work early that day for "some reason".  He joined in on the discussion and they were both pretty excepting.

 

In other news, Amber's daughter Hope is getting baptized on Feb 2.  Amber is our recent convert who was baptized on Dec 1.  Hope has asked me to confirm her so that is pretty exciting.  We also went back and ate at the same members house where we think we got food poisoning from... and we are still alive!  No food poisoning this time.  We went to the youth class on Sunday and got to see the new "Come Follow Me" curriculum in action.  It was pretty cool.  The youth took turns teaching the class in companionships on different topics.  One laurel got up and was talking about how we learn from the spirit and she couldn't hold back the tears her whole time up there.  It was a really good lesson for all who attended.  Welp I gotta get running to meet up with all the other missionaries at the stake center.  I love you all and miss you!

 

Love, Elder Peterson

The church is true!

January 14, 2013

Dear Family,

 

This has been quite the interesting week.  It's been a lot colder lately.  On Saturday Elder Dyer and I were out finding for 5 hours because we didn't have any set appointments and my thighs were frozen by the time we got home!  We ended up coming home just a little early because my ankle had had enough of walking by the end of the day.  We did find some very kind people who let us in from the cold for a short time.  One guy named Richard let us in and we invited him to church to which he said he would come, but when we called him Sunday morning he decided that he didn't want to come anymore.  On Sunday we did have a less-active fellow named Tim Fife come to church though.  He is someone we have been working with for a while now.  He is a super nice guy, he would do anything for you service wise.  We didn't have the car this week and on Sunday morning the thought popped into my head that we needed to call Tim and ask him for a ride to church, so i followed the prompting i received.  He said he would take us and we invited him to stay with us for sacrament meeting to which he did!  That was exciting.

 

I have been in the boot now for 4 weeks and i still have another 2 to go.  I am counting down the days.  It's kind of sad because President Jergensen has allowed us to have a zone p-day to which we are having ours with one of my old zones as well on the 21st so i don't know how much i'll be able to participate depending on what we end up doing.  I do not recall going to that morningside with Jon Bytheway, but i know that talk that you are referring to.  The war chapters talk... it's a good one.  We met a pretty sweet part member family this week named the Schafers.  The husband is a member and the wife is not.  They have a 6 year old daughter.  The husband really wants to come back into activity and wants to baptize his daughter next april so we are going to be working with him for a while.  Plus we will be teaching his wife now and hopefully he can baptize her as well.  That would be swell.

I was studying up on faith a little bit this week and spent quite some time in Hebrews chapter 11.  It's kind of like the Ether chapter 12 of the book of mormon.  It just gives a lot of examples of faith that people/prophets have had.  One that stood out to me was the example of Moses.

 

24 By faith Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter; 

25 Choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season;

26 Esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt: for he had respect unto the recompence of the reward.

 

What a great example that Moses set by preferring to suffer affliction with the people of God rather than enjoying the pleasures of sin for a season.  He knew where true happiness came from, through his faith.  Sure sin may bring some temporary pleasure, but long lasting happiness comes from having faith in Jesus Christ, repenting, baptism, Receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost, and enduring to the end.  The reproach of Christ means that he would rather suffer shame or punishment for Christ and stand as a witness of Him in all things than have all the riches of Egypt.   Just something i've been thinking about lately :)

 

Love, Elder Peterson

January 7, 2013

Hello hello Family!

It has been another good week as a missionary. We started off the new year by having interviews with President Jergensen. It went great and I always love having interviews with him. We were asked before we came to have set goals for ourselves. As I was praying about them, I felt the need to set the goal to get 12 baptisms before I come home. I will have to work very hard to get this goal, but it is now a commandment because it came from the Lord. We've had some cool stories happen this week. We saw this man and his friend stuck on the side of the road so we stopped to help him. His name is Damion and he had I guess been sitting on the side of the road for 5 hours and nobody had stopped to help. We called a member who had some jumper cables and he came to help. Also while he was there, some other members drove by and stopped to help. We got his car started and he only made it a couple three blocks before it died again. We were following him though so we just had to push his car onto a less busy road and while we were doing that another member drove by and offered to help so he now really thinks highly of the members of our church. We gave him a BoM and told him to read it and pray about it. He lives out of our area, so we gave him the other missionaries phone number. A cop also drove by and stopped to take over the situation so we left.

Things with Kirk this week have been interesting. We taught him the Word of Wisdom on Wednesday and it went swell. He committed to live it, and he is a party-er so we were really impressed with his faith. I wish he could look back and see where he started when we first met him to where he is now. He has changed so much. We had scheduled with him to take us to church again, even though we had the car, so we could make sure that he went. On Sunday we knocked on his door and he told us that he had some good news and that he had some bad news. The good news was that he could still take us to church but the bad news was that he wasn't going to stay. We asked him why not and he said because he had been praying about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon and had gotten some weird feelings that didn't really sit right with him. He couldn't really describe the feelings when we asked him about them though. They weren't the feelings he had experienced before when he had been praying. On our ride over to church we helped him convince himself that he needed to stay for at least sacrament meeting, and he did! We told him to come listen to the testimonies of those who had come to know that the book of mormon was true and that Joseph Smith really was a prophet. The ward really delivered too. There were a lot of testimonies born on Joseph Smith and we know Kirk felt the spirit. He told us that he still wanted to meet with us that night. We actually had other plans, but we set up for Tuesday night.

Sunday all of our appointments fell through. It was stacked up to be a sweet day too. We had lessons planned with 2 new investigators and we had a member family coming with us to teach Layton and we were going to set a baptismal date with her for Feb 16th. But none of these people were home or met us where they were supposed to. However since our plans opened up we decided to go see Kirk and we watched Joseph Smith:Prophet of the Restoration with him. I think it really helped him and we are still going to teach him on Tuesday in a members home, the Bruins (who we spent Christmas Eve with). New Year's Eve was fun. We went to a members home around 6 and had dinner and drank some Martinelli's before coming in at 9 and being asleep by 10:30. I think I woke up at 12 to some pot banging, but i didn't check the clock before rolling over and just falling back asleep. That is super sweet to hear about Rachael's baby! Some pictures would also be super sweet ;)

It's been getting warmer lately and the snow is starting to melt. We still have a lot though. I've been reading through Our Heritage again and I came across this quote that I really liked. James S. Brown, who was a member of the mormon battallion said this when he was in California right before the gold rush and right after they got honorably discharged. "I have never seen that rich spot of earth since; nor do I regret it, for there always has been a higher object before me than gold. ... Some may think we were blind to our own interests; but after more than forty years we look back without regrets, although we did see fortunes in the land, and had many inducements to stay. People said, 'Here is gold on the bedrock, gold on the hills, gold in the rills, gold everywhere,... and soon you can make an independent fortune.' We could realize all that. Still duty called, our honor was at stake, we had covenanted with each other, there was a principle involved; for with us it was God and His kingdom first. We had friends and relatives in the wilderness, yea, in an untried, desert land, and who knew their condition? We did not. So it was duty before pleasure, before wealth, and with this prompting we rolled out." I was thinking about what the "gold" of life can be and what we all give up in order to build up the kingdom of God. Right now I feel like there has been a lot that I have given up to come out on a mission, but what we receive in return to being obedient to our duty as members of this church is by far greater than anything we may have to give up. There are people in this world who are wandering around not being able to find the truth because they know not where to find it. And I am here to help them find it. So it is duty before school, work, girls, music, etc etc. I love this church with all my heart and i know that it is true. So let's all live it!

Love, Elder Peterson