4/30/2012

It's the week you have all been waiting for!! A week where I actually took quite a few pictures!! :) A lot of these happened this week, so I made sure I captured all the fun on camera :)

Picture 1, 2, 3:
The first part of the week, I was up in Jackson, Missouri. We went to a city called Marble Hill, and this is what we found in the yard of a member's house. Her dad made it for her out of metal. It was pretty awesome!

On Wednesday, we had interviews, where we went up to Cape to meet with the Mission President. On our way back, we stopped at a place called Bald Knob with the Steeleville elders. This is just outside Alto Pass, and has been a place that we have wanted to stop by since I got here in the area.

Picture 1: Entrance of Bald Knob. Sits by a church at the top of the hill(By the way, it's called bald knob because the hill has no trees. See last picture)

Picture 2, 3 & 6: The sun was setting, and standing in front of the cross with the light in the back looked awesome, so I took a couple pictures :)

Picture 4: Elder Valois doing a nice Nixon pose

Picture 5: Me doing a terrible Nixon pose

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Picture 8: From Alto Pass, Skyline road. You can see where it get's the Bald Knob name. As you can see...It's a huge cross :P

For anyone who doesn't believe how green it is here...here's some pictures!
It looks like this everywhere!!!

Picture 1: From Bald Knob

Picture 2 & 3: At Skyline Road in Alto Pass

Unrelated to the other pictures, on Saturday, there was a big Asian festival at SIU that we went to. On Friday, we actually helped make a bunch of Sushi for the festival(Yes, I made Sushi...And I was awesome at it!!! Jk :D) We were invited to the festival by a Less-Active 2 weeks ago, and it was just coincidence that we ended up helping with the preparations :)
Picture 4:
My plate at the festival. Unfortunately, I'm a wuss, and didn't get much farther then just trying the food haha. Some of it was really good, but some of it was really hard to eat.

Hurrah! Another week! :) This week was pretty different. I only spent 4 days in my actual area. As you hopefully saw in the pictures, I was in Jackson, Missouri Tuesday to Wednesday and interviews in Cape on Wednesday. We still got a lot of work done, even despite this...Just not as much as a normal week :)

First off, I must just be super lucky, because so far, the Jackson Elders are lucky to get meals from anyone even once a week. When I was there, we had a dinner provided for us, as well as a lunch, from 2 different members, both not planned until I got there. Anyway, it was pretty good!

Interviews went extremely well. Since I got here, we've been working really hard on meeting members that have not been to church since we have been in the area, and we presented a list of members who are married or have children that are not members...the list totaled to 39 families, with only 6 that we have not been able to get in contact with. President Clark was super impressed! Luckily he didn't ask for a Less-Active list. There are like 300 Less-Actives. Most of them we have met :)

We had quite a few planned lessons this week, but they all kind of fell to the dirt, unfortunately. When our appointment on Thursday fell through, we went up to try and catch Sh-la at home, which is someone me and Elder Bassett met our first week here. Lo and behold, she was home, and we talked with her for about an hour. We were on the verge of dropping her because we have had such a hard time contacting her. She was actually in the process of moving, and so we offered service to help her. Her father just died last week, so she is moving in to her Mom's house for the time being to help take care of her. She gave us the new address, which is in Cobden, so I hope we will see some future progression with her in the future.

Friday, we taught an awesome lesson to Shenika! We went into the library and grabbed a bunch of Temple pictures and we talked about the temples and what they mean to us. She really wants to go as soon as she can! We told her that she would be able to do baptisms for the dead pretty soon, once she is interviewed, and then we will make sure that she has an opportunity to go to the St. Louis temple before she moves to Chicago May 31st. We are also going to find the address of the Chicago temple, and her new ward for her. Oh and by the way; I confirmed her a member on Sunday!!!! :D She is officially official!!! :) I'm really excited for her, and she is walking towards a whole new road, with graduating at SIU and moving back to Chicago. We are currently doing everything we can to make sure that is an easy transition for her.

On Saturday, we met with the Tomas family again!!! Oh it was so good to see them :D We just read scriptures again because Francisco Sr. wasn't there, but they just loved it! I want to try and see them multiple times a week, because I know that they are earnestly searching for the truth, and having gaps between visits makes it hard to keep that search focused. We are visiting with the whole family on Tuesday! One interesting thing, Theresa, who is Francisco's girlfriend, and the one who was there on the very first visit with them, is being taught by the Steeleville elders right now. She loves the lessons as well! Francisco was on the phone with her when we showed up, and she had told him that she thinks something good is going to happen for him today, and that it's going to happen right after he gets off the phone. Right after he got off the phone, we showed up at their house...Awesome, huh! :)

Last little bit of news, Mona and Robert Dennis. As you remember, they are the ones who called to learn more and then spent the entire time preaching to us without really knowing anything about what we believe. Well, we visited them again yesterday, and it was absolutely amazing how different they were. When I stood up and told him that he needed to listen to what we have to say before he jumps on us with scriptures that honestly didn't contradict anything, it made him realize that we might have something that he needs to hear...and well, he listened this time and as we taught the first lesson, you could just tell that he was enlightened and that God was telling him these things were true. He was abandoning doctrine that he was claiming so strongly last week because what we taught made more sense and clearly had more evidence. He even claimed that he truly believes that Joseph Smith is a prophet, by the way he talks about Jesus Christ. I've never seen anyone change like that...especially in such a short amount of time. I went in, thinking we would be having a Bible bash of some sort, but no, they listened and honestly I could see them getting baptized, not to far in the future. How cool is that?

Anyway, that is about it for this week!! I love you all...I have not been very good at writing everyone back lately. Time has been pretty short on P-Days for the last couple weeks. I will try to get everyone written back this week and next.

Until next week; I love you all! Stay safe :)
Elder Tyler Robinson