Week 23 1-5-15

Jamaica, Iowa.  He wishes it was the other one!

At the Nauvoo Temple

   Well first off I'll answer some of your questions. :) Sophie was a referral and we contacted her but then we ended up having to give her to the sisters because she was a single mom and it ended up being hectic trying to bring a male to every lesson sow e gave her to the sisters and they did an amazing job with Sophie. :) And unfortunately our ward has a little bit of a hard time with retention of converts. But on the plus side we are finally meeting with Bishop Dyer this week and talking about how we can best help him to help the ward! :D We are getting really close with a lot of the members which is good because almost all of last transfer, with the exception of a few people, we just felt so disconnected from the entire ward. But now we are getting to know them a lot better and it has been fantastic! But man! These last couple of weeks have been really hard for us! We've had to give away nearly every investigator and its been pretty disheartening and stressing for both of us, me especially, but things are finally picking up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

     We were able to meet with brother voss, the second counselor, and his family and that was awesome because he is hilarious! We did our little discussion thingamajig and they were able to give us some fantastic feedback on what we could try doing to help out the ward. :) I went on exhanges with elder Richens and we did a bunch of service! Hahaha we were moving this like 200 pound sheet rock and I dropped it on my fingers in 15 degree weather!! AAHHHH it hurt so bad!!! And then we both probably inhaled some kind of disease from all the junk in the air when we were cleaning up a member's basement that they had gutted. :) For lunch we went to this HUGE Chinese buffet and I was brave and tried a baby octopus! It actually tasted like chicken!! But I did NOT like the texture of the little suction cups on its tentacles it was just plain bizarre......Then we were able to finally contact a referral named Sam (he is always gone and we didn't have a phone number for him) and we taught him the Restoration! He accepted it and at the end of the lesson, he knelt down and gave the most sincere prayer! The church is true!!!! For New Year's Eve, we went to the Burgess' house and the Childress family from our ward was there too. We had a blast eating veggie burgers (the Burgess family is vegetarian) and playing the most intense, cutthroat game of Pictionary I've ever played in my life! We had to go back home at ten so when the clock struck midnight, we stuck a couple of candles in a Danish, blew them out after making a New Year's wish, then went to bed. :)

     We visited Madison and Curtis a couple of times this week as well and that was fun as always! Haha so we were checking up on Royal to see how he had been doing and apparently he had gotten an oral surgery for these little stones, kinda ish like kidney stones, which were stuck in his saliva gland. And he showed us them, he had them in a little can, and they were BIG! Blech! So, we had gotten previous permission from President Jensen to go to the Nauvoo temple because elder Curless hadn't been to the temple for almost 15 months. So on Saturday the Craypos drove us down and we got to go to a session. It was really an amazing experience being able to go to the temple again, it was such a blessing. I just listened intently to the covenants this time and was able to gain some new insights that I have never thought of before so that was quite an experience. Sunday we went to church, which is at 9:00 now, and there were some fantastic testimonies given there which was really cool to hear. We went to the Andelin's home for lunch and had breaded chicken! *drool* We just sat there and talked about how we can all best share the gospel and different ways to do it. At one point, brother Andelin brought up the concern that he was nervous to share at his work, he is a doctor, because he didn't know how his colleagues would react and if that was kosher. The Spirit was able to give us the words to say and it was amazing to see that it was just what he needed to hear to help him out. Then we went and contacted a referral named Lucy and were able to set up a church tour with her for Wednesday!!!!!!!!!!!! YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Hahahaha it was interesting because her grandson is a pastor at a Pentecostal church and he was trying to bash with us so that was................uhh..........interesting. Some of the things he brought up were a little weird. But it was still good. :)

Love,

Elder Logan Flake