9/24/2012

Weldon Spring!!! It's fantastic!! :)

Alright, I have no idea how to start this email...So many things to talk about, and my mind is just bubbling as I try to get it all in order. I'll do my very best to express the joy, and excitement that I have for this new area!

First, my companion's name is Elder Hoffman. He is from Provo, Utah and is absolutely excited to be out on a mission! You should be the big smile that is always sitting on his face as we work! :) Oh my goodness, it's so fun!! We've been both completely lost with absolutely no idea where to go, or what to do, and so the adventure has really included us both, as I do my best to help Elder Hoffman learn what is the right thing to do, and what is the wrong thing to do. It's extremely difficult being that example when you have no clue on what the next step should be haha, but we are doing really well. We get along extremely well bytheway. We have had just an amazing amount of fun in what should be an extremely stressful time.

Oh and also, just to add to the Whitewash Training, in an area that was closed, I found out during transfers that I'm also District Leader of 4 areas! Oh boy, as you can tell, I'm going to be really busy this transfer. In total, my district covers Weldon Spring, St Peters, St Charles(Sisters), and San Carlos(Spanish Elders who are also whitewash training). We all are very close to each other, which is new to me...I've never been in an area where missionaries were really close at all, but the Zone Leaders live in our apartments, and the rest of the district lives within 8 miles away. Luckily, Elder Eells in San Carlos and Elder Luke in St Peters have been out for a long time and have been super helpful to me as I've tried to get my feet firm on the ground here.

Our ward is awesome! It's pretty big, and I'm super excited to be able to work with them...many of the members are excited to do missionary work and just love having missionaries. They were really upset when the area was closed so when we showed up, they were all very happy to see us! We've had a member dinner every night, so far, and we have enjoyed their willingness to have us around! It's been so fun :)

Also, can I say, it was such a blessing to be given that GPS last week! I would be so lost, if we didn't have it haha. I've been tinkering around with it and now I have all the people we need to visit all layed out in it, and it's just super easy to use...I couldn't have asked for a better time to recieve it, when I was lost, wandering around town.

Ok, so for the most part, we have had some pretty fruitless days as we have tried to get on our feet. We have been visiting some of the potentials and the Formers, and the invesigators that were here prior to the close. Some have moved, some are not interested, and some have invited us in, but nothing too dramatic yet. We also have been tracting, which has been fun to teach Elder Hoffman, but of course, it's also very difficult work. We did have an interesting experience though, that I want to share. We were weekly planning at the library, and the zone leaders were just leaving, walking in the parking lot. A young man, named Julian, walked up to them and began talking to them...They pointed him to us, because he was in our area. He came up and told us a little bit about him. He is a less-active member, 17 years old, who left his home in California to live with a girl. Well simply put, that didn't work out very well, so he was asking us how he could come back and bring God back in, and take the evil out of his life. We gave him a blessing and invited him to join us for dinner later that night; he agreed and went about his day. He then joined us for dinner, and had a really good time, but after dinner when he returned home, he found out that he was kicked out of his living space and since he has no friends or family in this area, he had no where to go. We got a hold of one of the members of the Bishopric, and he offered to take him in, and now they are helping him work towards getting the money to go back home! Now, if we hadn't been at the library when we were, or if the zone leaders hadn't left when they did, he would have never found us, and he definitely would be on the street at this point. God knew Julian, and he knew what he was going to need and knew that he would ask for the help if it was given to him. He was so happy at church yesterday...I can tell that he just knows that God loves him so much, and it's true. I was happy to have  been in the right place at the right time.

Anyway, that was our crazy week! I'm sure there is things I forgot to share, but I will be sending pictures, so hopefully that helps get across all that is going on :)

I love you all! My new address is(for the apartment):

1614 Carnegie Dr

St Peters, MO 63376

Also, for future reference, if you send mail to the mission office, no matter where I am at in the mission, it will always be forwarded to the correct place, so transfers like this, wouldn't be too much of an issue, for anyone who is interested in that:

1850 Craigshire Dr. Ste. 205
Maryland Heights, MO 63146

Love you all! Have a wonderful week,
Elder Tyler Robinson

Elder Pack and I before we separated

Elder Hoffman, my greenie :)

The boundaries of this ward and surrounding wards

The most exciting thing about this apartment...a washer and dryer!!!!! 

 Second most exciting thing...A dish washer. Not included in the pictures, a garbage disposal! We are spoiled! :)

Our ward boundary map...It's totally weird shaped :S

A picture out our upper deck window...we have a porch btw 

Our fireplace :)

 My GPS with all the data points that I've added in for our area :) 

The Mod I made to my Microsoft backpack. The label is sewed on :) 

Here are the fun picures :) Pictures of me and my boy, Elder Hoffman :) It's so fun!!! :D 

9/17/2012 final week in Mexico

Soooooooo.....There is some remarkable news to share!!!!

Of course, as you see...I'm leaving Mexico. So is Elder Pack. :)
Confused yet? There was an incredibly inspired decision to put Sisters
here in Mexico this transfer, and based on all of our investigators,
I'm confident that it was the greatest choice that could have been
made at this point. A lot of our problems is that most of who we teach
is a female, would fly through the lessons if they had a better way to
relate to the experiences that are being shared. It's great! Plus I
think the ward sisters would love to be more involved in teaching, and
this is the way they can acheive that :)

As for Elder Pack, he is being sent to the same place my first
companion was, after our time together. Hillsboro, Missouri. He will
be with Elder Valois, and Elder Hacking. This will be his second area.

I, on the other hand, am whitewash training, opening an area in St.
Louis. The area is called Weldon Springs. It's just off of the main
freeway, and not too far from the mission office, mission home, etc.
I'm super excited! At the very least, the computers there will be much
nicer! :) I'm not sure why they closed the area...that kind of info is
hard to get, but I will find out on Wednesday.

This also means that I will start all over on the training program,
but this time I will teach it! :) I'm pretty excited about that. I
won't know who my companion is till Wednesday. I'm sure that P-Days
will be a lot more intersting :)

Anyway, that's the super exciting news. The bad news is that we have
to spend the next 2 days, preparing to be whitewashed!! Bleh! Lol.

On the side note, our week has been fantastic! I'm not sure what
happened...I guess we really had to be drug through the mud to start
seeing some great things happen. First, Valerie came to church and
loved it! She is definitely the ward's next baptism. Also, we have
several new investigators who could begin progressing next visit! We
had 12 Lessons with investigators this week, most were surprises that
were just handed to us! It was weird, because of all the work we have
been doing, but so great!

Another thing that happened, that was unexpected. I was given a free
GPS! We were helping a lady, and she offered it, saying it didn't have
the cords so if we could use it, just take it. I am now equiped with
all the accessories it needs to run, and will no longer get lost going
to St. Louis! :)

Anyway, I think I got all the news out that I can think of...If I
forgot something, you may have to wait till next week :)

Onward and upward!
Elder Tyler Robinson

9/10/2012

Hello again! Another week is done and over with. It's been a pretty tough
week, with hardly an level of success. We taught only 4 sort of
lessons this week. Most of the time, we were tracting, probably 17-20
hours of it, and didn't get a single potential. We aren't sure what's
going on, but I have suspicions that other churches have started doing
anti sermons, based on the response we have at doorsteps. This has
been a whole lot different than it has been for a while. We tracted
one of the longest residential streets, the most condemned street, the
richest street, the joe-shmo street, and many others with not any
success. Interestingly enough, I'm super proud of the work we did,
because I know there isn't any reason to feel bad about the lack of
success, because we got out there, we did the work, we had fun doing
it, we kept all the rules and commandments, there is no reason why we
shouldn't be proud of our hard work. It was a worthy effort and the
fault falls upon those who rejected the opportunity.

Anyway, on a happy note, we went to the temple on Saturday, before it
closes for cleaning. It was great! We also gave talks on Sunday...It
must have been really good because several of the members said that
they haven't heard such powerful talks given in Sacrament in a long
time. I did mine on a poem called "The Fellowship of the Unashamed"
relating that to our baptismal covenant and then relating that more
fully to an example of those who proved their commitment to the
covenant, that being the early church led by the apostles after the
death of Christ. They held firmly in their faith, knowing that it
would lead to their death and the death of their children, as well as
possibly losing the church completely, which is what happened. I
stressed that it's no different now. We are a part of that very same
cause, and the purposes of God will not come forth, if we are not
willing to build his Kingdom, and bring forth Zion, so we must shine
brightly with the light that we are given and be a beacon for all who
are willing to get out of the darkness. It was my first talk so far on
my mission. Hopefully it was good :)

Is there any other news? Well, I made a significant change in district meeting,
which I will be firm on keeping. For Stewardships, I have decided to
do a stand-up meeting which is what we use in the programming process
called scrum, to shorten the expressions of what has been done and
what will be done. It works well, and I will be tooling it to increase
it's capacity in keeping the meeting short. It's fun to actually get
to apply some of my previous experience in industry, to the missionary
work, and I think it was a much needed change.

Anyway, I think that is it for this week. Hopefully you are all having
a wonderful time, and that the weather is treating you well. We went
from being dry, yellow, and dead here, to having to mow the green lawn
that came up in less than a week. It was weird. Anyway, we have a lot
of cleaning to get to today, so until next week!

Love you all, thank you so much for your support,
Elder Tyler Stephen Robinson

9/4/2012

Whew! What an interesting week!! Full of exchanges, interviews, and
crazy P-Day activities lol!

I guess I will start where I left off last week. First, that Monday,
we went to the Capital building...It was amazing! We accidentally walked
into 2 different tours, so we just hopped in with them...It was very
interesting. We got an opportunity to see the House Lounge, as well as
the place where the House meet together and vote on certain things. It
was pretty cool. I took a lot of pictures, but as you know...that
pretty much means nothing until I can get to a computer that is
capable of uploading those up. We may try to use the Centralia library
next week...supposedly they have better computers, but it's about 20
miles out of our way to get there, so we just have to work out there
afterword :)

After the capitol, we went to lunch at a place called Zenos. It used
to be Quiznos, but the owner(who is a member) took down the Qui and
added an Z, E, and you can still see the old Quiznos markers on the sign.
It's pretty funny.

We then went to this awesome Ice Cream place, called Central Dairy.
They only take cash their, but the ice cream is really good. After we
went to some pawn shops and Goodwill...It actually was a lot of fun to
go shopping again lol

After we left, I took Elder Miles with me on Tuesday and Elder Payne
with me on Wednesday, and we had a lot of fun. They are both great
missionaries and I learned a lot from both of them when they were
here...hopefully they can say the same :)

On Thursday, I had interviews with President Clark. We talked about
the areas a bit...Mostly we talked about Mexico(Missouri...wouldn't
that be weird if we were talking about the actual Mexico lol). He has
a lot of confidence on me, so I hope I'm doing a good job. This week
has proven to be very rough, seeing any real success, but we are
slowly handling bigger challenges everyday, and I do think that with
some help from the ward, we can start to see some great progress here.

Friday, Hurricane Issac hit...My destroyed planner and sopping wet
shoes will attest that it was a nice storm, even this far inland. We
had rain jackets on but there was so much water that it dripped
through the rain jackets and we ended up coming back home completely
soaked. I haven't heard about how Louisiana is holding up post-storm,
but I heard they were out of power for a while. The storm wasn't
enough to do that here in Missouri, but we sure got a good taste of
what the storm was like.

Anyway, it's been raining on and off since, which I think means that
the prayers for more rain here, have been answered :)

Yesterday was Zone P-Day. We started it off with glow-in-the-dark
volleyball, which was way cool! It has been a really long time since
I've played volleyball(MTC I think) and I miss it. If there is any
sport that I can claim I'm any good at, it's volleyball, and I proved
that yesterday ;) We also played indoor soccer. It was fun...I don't
remember why I didn't like it much in High School, but I enjoyed it a
lot yesterday.

We then had DLZL Counsel. All the District Leaders in the Zone and the
Zone Leaders got together and talked about how we can be better
District Leaders, and I really feel like it helped a lot. It's felt
like I've been taking swings in the dark on how to be a District
Leader, but we really came to a very obvious but clear indication on
how I should be upholding the calling, and what changes I can observe
and make to be a better leader and servant to those I serve. It just
gave me a whole lot of perspective, so I hope to be able to spend time
looking at that and revising my decisions.

I guess lastly, we did teach some pretty interesting lessons this
week. We extended a baptismal invitation to Rosaline on Tuesday, which
she asked for time to pray about it; we also taught Chad, and learned
a little bit more about why he's stuck where he's at. Also, Helen has
been solidly attending church every week and has home-teachers and
visiting teachers; the members have gone out of their way to help here
with her current situation, and I think she has confidently found a
new family. :)

Anyway, we are going to really make some big efforts to find new
investigators. President wants us to do door knocking, 3 hours a day.
It's going to difficult, but hopefully we will start sifting to those
who are prepared to hear our message.

I Love you all! Have a wonderful week this week! :D
Elder Tyler Robinson