Merry Christmas!

Hey everyone! This week has been pretty good. We were pretty busy this week.  We went down to the valley this week to go do a temple session. It was super good. After we went through the temple we had a ZTM. The Zone Leaders called me the night before and asked for me to give a training. I hate giving trainings. Especially when I don't have time to prepare. I thought I would get out of that when I wasn't a zone leader anymore but I guess not. 

Well the best part of the week was our baptism! Danielle Brown got baptized. She is super awesome. She is super ready to be a member and super excited to do what she is asked. One time we were talking to some people after sacrament and she was standing next to us waiting to go to class and she just takes off and said later guys I'm going to class. It was pretty cool to see how comfortable she is and how willing she is to learn. Well that's about it for this week. Have a Merrry Christmas! 

Joints Heirs With Christ

Hey everyone. This week has been super good. This holiday season is so nice to do missionary work with. Everyone's hearts are just softened buy the spirit around this holiday. We have been trying to take advantage of it and work really hard. We found a new investigator this week and he is super awesome. His name is Mike and he says he just wants to take his spirituality to the next level and he know that by taking the lessons he can do it. He is pretty solid and we are going to try and put him on date this week. Its been pretty hard work here. We only have like 5 real investigators we are teaching and the rest of the people we have are potential investigators that we are trying to set things up with. We dont have very many people to work with here but they all seem to be doing pretty good. 

We had a zone conference this past week and it was super good. Our whole mission read the Book of Mormon in 62 days and marked the Doctrine of Christ (faith, repentance, baptism, Holy Ghost and endure to the end). We talked about how each of the doctrines apply to us daily and why they are talked about so much in the Book of Mormon. We also talked about things we learned just reading the Book of Mormon in such a small amount of time. My favorite thing applied kind of to enduring to the end. It was Suffering with Patience. There are so many things in this life that we have to suffer for. Just trial after trial. Test after test. And sometimes its hard to see the meaning behind all of it. But in Romans 8:17 it says. "And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together". We must suffer WITH Christ if we are going to be joint heirs with him! Meaning that we will inherit all he has. Its pretty crazy to think about how much we are going to receive for the small suffering we do. And we dont have to do it alone we have Him to help us along the entire way! Suffering with patience is key. We just need to understand is for a purpose and the Lord is watching out for us. 

This week we are also having a baptism for Dani Brown! She is so awesome and so ready. She knows so much about the church and is so eager to learn. She is ready to turn her life around and knows the happiness that comes from the gospel already!

We went and explored a cave today!

I'm staying in Payson!

This week has been super good! So I forgot to tell you last week we had transfers and I'm staying. I'm also going to be the District Leader. It's been pretty good. We have been working really hard and just worked right through transfers. Usually everyone slows down the work during transfers just because they are worried about getting transferred and things like that but Elder Hampton and I literally didn't even think about it. We forgot we were even getting transfer news Sunday night. And I'll tell you what it payed off. We have Dani Brown planned on getting a baptismal interview Saturday and then getting dunked the next week. She is really on fire and doing super good. She had a ride planned out to come to church with her and her ride talked her out it that morning and so instead of just saying she couldn't find a ride she did everything she could to get there. She realized Satan was trying to work against her. She is super awesome and loved church and wants to come every single week. We have two more people that came to church that we are going to try and baptize this month too. They are pretty good too. They are always together and take the lessons together. They are currently living out of their car but love the gospel. It's a little bit hard with them because Laurie knows everything about God and Jesus and has them a part of her daily life while on the other hand, Brad, her friend doesn't even know who God or Jesus Christ are. So it's a little difficult teaching them together but they seem to really like it and are super excited to get baptized. It's gonna be a good transfer in Payson during this Holiday Season! We also got ourselves into a parade this week. It was really good and we just helped with the parade and walked next to the floats. It was a light parade and everything was covered with lights. It was really cool! A ton of people saw us and it was good to get our faces out in the community. Literally everyone was there. It was pretty awesome. Well take care back home and remember the reason for the season! 

Gratitude.

This week has been pretty good. Not too much of a different week. We had a few good experiences this week like always. The one I want to talk about was the Thanksgiving dinner we had with a less active. Well this less active lady called us out of the blue and said she had a friend she wanted us to meet and help get Jesus in her life. Well we went over and met the less active and her son. They are super awesome and live in a little humble trailer. We met the friend and tried to share an uplifting message that would touch her. But what touched me more than anything was the type of lives these few people were living. They had holes in the ground that they had to cover with boards so they wouldn't step in them. The turkey we had came from a food bank and we had some potatoes and gravy that came in a microwave dinner. Then they had some beans to go along with it. It was pretty different after coming from a dinner with 4 tables of food. With the little they had they were still super happy and glad to be together. The only things they wanted was a little bit of food and friends and family surrounding them. I was amazed at how humble of a dinner it was and how happy they were. Later on that night after leaving and thinking about it I was filled with gratitude for everything that I have. But most of all I'd like to express my gratitude for our Savior. Definitely the best thing I've learned on my mission is the relationship I have with my Savior. It so hard to even begin to comprehend how much he loves each of us personally. He literally took every sin I have ever committed and every sin I'm ever going to commit upon him self. He took the blame for all my wrongs. I know no matter how many times I mess up he will forgive me every time. Even if I make the same mistake over and over again. There is no limit to his love and his atonement. But the most comforting thing is that he descended below them all. He didn't just meet the requirement and go out with as little as He could get away with, but he went below them all. And I know that even if I was the one that made him suffer the most and take upon the most sins, He would love me enough to go below me and pay for everything I did. I'm so grateful for Jesus Christ and everything He has done for me but beyond all I'm grateful for the closeness of the relationship I've gained with him. 

The gift of having a family!

This week was pretty good. At the beginning of the week we got a add on to our area. Young! It's about an hour and a half away and the hour of it is on a dirt road. The area is a super small town. Lots of people who ranch and raise cows and just kind of keep to themselves. We went down this week and met our Branch President. He took us around town and we met with a few different branch members. The only thing they have down there is one gas station and everything else they have come out to Payson for. I'm pretty excited though. It's should be pretty good getting in the and starting things up. 

We had a pretty good lesson with one of our investigators this week. His name is Terry. We met him a little bit ago tracting and he said he would be interested in having us come over again. Well this Sunday we went over and had a lesson with him. It went pretty well. It's started off kind of weird because he didn't know what we do so he thought we were just coming over to talk instead of teach a lesson. We asked if we could come in and maybe talk little bit more about The Book of Mormon and then started the lesson from there. We got about half of the lesson in because he kept talking about how he has seen God in his life the the role God played in his life. His only set back is coming to church. He said he used to go to a church and stopped going because he didn't see he importance of it and doesn't see the importance of coming to church now. I guess he just needs a lesson on the Sabbath day. He is a really good guy though and has some potential. If he just feels the Spirit I think he will want to change

I hope all of you have a really good week this week and eat lots of turkey. Spend time with your family and appreciate them and the gift of having a family. No family is perfect and no family is meant to be perfect. But we are met to learn and grow with them. I love the talk President Uchtdorf gave in April 2016. He talks about the importance of saving our relationships with our families and cherishing them. Families are a huge blessing and never take them for granted, Heavenly Father put you in your family for a reason! Love yours while I'm out here for a short while helping others bring theirs together :)

Celebrating Elder Hamptoms Birthday!  

Good ol Payson

This week has been a pretty good week. We found this investigator that had come to church on Sunday and said she just got in her car and was led by the Spirit to the church and felt like she needed to go in. Well she really liked it and wanted to meet with us. Her name is Laurie. We met with her twice this week. The first lesson was really good and we invited her to baptism. She said she was willing to do anything that we told her she needed to do. Well our next lesson she had read from the Book of Mormon and had already prayed to know if it was true. Both the lessons went pretty well and she was making some good progress. Well later that week we were walking around the park and saw her and decided to talk to her. She has struggled with drugs in the past and wasn't living in the best house. She ask to see if we could find a place for her to move into and so we had been looking that week trying to find things. Come to find out while talking to her at the park she found a place and is moving out of our area. A pretty solid investigator just picked up and left. But the good thing is that she had a friend that was with her. While we were talking to her we set up a lesson to see her on Tuesday. Before we left we asked if he wanted to join us too. He was pretty excited to come. He said that he needs to find a church to go to. He hasn't been to church since he was a little kid and was excited to come to ours. So hopefully he turns out just as good. He lives in our area and his name is Brian. He has a strong belief in God and Jesus Christ and "wouldn't be anywhere close to where he is today without them". Other than that just slowly trying to pick up our number out here in good ol Payson.

Knockin on doors!

Well this week has been so good. So awhile back at the beginning of the transfer we made a goal as a district to try and talk to 5 new people a day. We don't have very many people in Payson so we decided to do 5. There was a General Authority that gave a promise that if you talk to 10 new people a day and try and teach them the gospel, our numbers will quadruple. Well elder Hampton and I have been trying to get 5 a day and this week we just hit the ground running. We were going to try and talk to everyone we see. We got 70 TTIs this week (teach, testify, invite). We had so many miracles doing this. We stayed out till we got at least 10 a day. We passed out over 12 Book of Mormons throughout the week and picked up about 5 pretty solid people that are interested in learning more. It was so awesome to see the miracle that happened this week. Some of the missionaries in the valley think its hard to get 60 TTIs in a week and there are people everywhere down there. 

One miracle that was super awesome was a 16 year old kid named Doug. We were out knocking doors in an apartment complex and we hit most of the doors and there wasn't a lot of success that happened so we were walking to our truck to drive to the new area we were going to go tracting. Well before we hopped in we both decided to hit 4 more doors. Well we got to our last door and we had knocked 3 times and was about to leave when Doug came walking around the corner. I was like "Hey whats up? Do you live here?" He said yes and we started to explain what we were doing and what missionaries are. We asked if he would be interested in learning more about what we talked about. To our surprise he said he had some time so we taught the Restoration on his door step and he was super interested. He accepted a Book of Mormon and said he would pray to know if what we had taught him was true. It was so crazy to think that if we didn't decide to knock on just 4 more doors we would of missed the opportunity to bless this kids life forever. 

There are people waiting to hear the message we have to share they just don't know where to find it and if we dont listen to the spirit on where to find them they are going to miss the opportunity of a life time D&C 123: 12 For there are many yet on the earth among all sects, parties, and denominations, who are blinded by the subtle craftiness of men, whereby they lie in wait to deceive, and who are only kept from the truth because they know not where to find it-

Love Elder Lange